Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Faint

Imagine that you are a privileged, intelligent 18 year old boy in your final year of high school. Due to a misunderstanding, late one night you are run over and beaten almost to death by the school bully... who is played by this person:





What would your reaction be?


A: Sweet merciful crap! Did I just get beaten up by a little girl? How am I ever going to live this down?

B: OMG nobody recognises my genius and life is so unfair!


If you chose A, you are a normal person. If you chose B, then you are the title character from 2007's 'The Invisible'.


It's an awful film about a whiny, self-obesessed, oh-so-sensitive teenager who, after the bitch slapping mentioned above, discovers that while his body lies dying in the forest his soul is still able to walk around. His friends can't see him. His mother acts as if he's not even there. At several points in the movie, as Emo Boy frets and rages about being invisible and ignored by friends and family, I noted, "You know, it's almost as if this is a metaphor for something."


It'd be a big dumb crass metaphor if the writers and director were painful adolescents, hopped up on My Chemical Romance downloads and getting an A- in their most recent Creative Writing assignment. But they're not: they're all in their mid- to late-40s, so it's a big dumb crass cynical exploitative market-driven metaphor. Which is worse. It's as if the writers said to themselves, "What would it be like if our characters said out loud and in public all of the stupid, pretentious, drama-queeny things we wrote in our super secret journals at 1am one rainy night in 1985 while listening to The Smiths and reflecting that if we could travel back in time and meet Emily Dickinson we'd totally be best friends?"


Yep, it's that bad. Admit it, you're cringing even at the thought of it, aren't you.


Still, readers who are used to my exaggerated complaints about bad movies may think that it can't be that bad, and might be tempted to watch it and form their own opinions. Trust me, having your own opinion isn't worth it. To illustrate this, I reluctantly reprint the poem that Emo Boy reads, with great conviction and apparently without comic intention, to his English class:


Day burns down to night,
Burns the edge of my soul.
In the night I break into sparks of suns
And become fires in a dust of bones
Night knifes
My breath swallows whole my tongue
Turn back
Reverse
return
In the night I see the real
Concealed in the day's bright lie
Eyes stitched shut
White teeth smile
Sleep walks and talks
And feet mark time of day



If only someone could have strangled him with his own iPod headphones.

2 Comments:

Blogger 2BarRiff said...

I remember hating Goths in 1986.

How did they survive this long?

9:22 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

some of them actually managed to work out which ones were the opposite sex, and procreated!

8:31 PM  

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