I had to throw “the Movie” in that title so as to not confuse it with Ichabod‘s recently reviewed album.

Now, I’m hardly a movie critic, and usually I like to keep this site as on-topic as possible, but I just finished watching the John Cusack-ified film 2012, and I feel compelled to comment on it. No, this isn’t going to be a rail against it in the sense of some long-winded diatribe about how such an ever-lowering common denominator orgy of destruction ultimately devalues our culture as a whole, satisfying only on the level of our basest masochism in a “safe,” “fantasy” context. No, having sat through the entirety of its two and a half hours, I’ll go as far as to praise 2012 for this and this alone: structurally, it is a perfectly written pop song.

If the verses are the love story between Cusack and female lead Amanda Peet (whose on-screen chemistry together was slim-to-nil) and the choruses are the CG end-of-the-world scenes, with flourishes of tertiary characters and government conspiracies to serve as bridges and increase an alleged universal appeal, then right up to the ending, which was so ridiculous as to be insulting — not to mention the imperialist overtones — it had the exact structural soundness of some of the biggest pop hits of all time. No wonder it made $225,000,000 (that’s about 3.75 Euros) its opening weekend.

Only trouble is a pop song says all it has to say in about three minutes and this was 150. C’est la vie. Most pop songs are garbage too. Can’t hold it against them, though. As long as people keep watching, they’ll keep making it, and I by no means exempt myself. Hell, I saw it. Commerce speaks loudest.

Tags: Sad shit, Stuff that isn't stoner rock

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Whathaveyou. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.