Monkey-Fighting Snakes!: Tuesday Open Thread

Congratulations, Canada. You managed to spend roughly $468 million to kick three Quebecois folks out of their legislative seats. California spent $275 million to make absolutely no changes, so…value?

NFL NEWS:

Relatively little of interest. The NFL PR Auxiliary is kind of starved for #kontent, so mostly they’re just doing wild overcorrections of their team evaluations now that they have a second data point. That’s right: Mr. National Sports Reporter has breaking news that perhaps the Jameis Saints are NOT world-shattering juggernauts.

-Other A-A-RON (Jones) had to pause his pimp-slapping of the Lions Monday night because he lost his necklace. This was a Thing because it was actually a Reliquary containing the ashes of his dead father. Yes, I know it’s not so much a reliquary as it is a tiny portable cremation urn, but it’s such a great word…

Anyway, the groundspeople and ESPN crew searched in vain for two hours after the game. But apparently it has since turned up, so…cool story, bro. I’m already working on a Ghost Dad knockoff for the Halloween Spooktacular.

-Speaking of horrors, the Thursday Night game promises a Festival of Frights. The Texans, in addition to being The Team That Wasn’t, will start rookie Davis Mills at quarterback. The third-round pick out of Stanford has relatively little experience, having played only 14 games in college. He also looks like this:

Seriously, it looks like Mike Glennon and Trent Edwards had a baby, then shipped him off to Fort Benning for Basic.  Add to that a name that sounds like the non-threatening focus-grouped title for Union Carbide’s food preservatives division and he has all the hallmarks of a White Texans QB- physically talented, doomed to failure.

On the other side Thursday are the Carolina Panthers, who are haunted themselves. Not only is Sam “Ghost Hunters” Darnold leading them onto the field, they remain haunted by the spirit of Jerry Richardson. Or maybe he’s just running around the stadium in his white hood and robe.

-Ben Roethlisberger has sustained a pectoral injury, with Mike Tomlin making “I’m not saying he won’t play, but…” noises. It’s unclear how he sustained the injury, so I will assume it was overenthusiastically ripping the wrapping off a ChocoTaco. Or maybe a co-ed. Steeler defenders TJ Watt, Alex Highsmith, Joe Haden and Devin Bush are all dealing with groin injuries. Defensive coordinator Keith Butler denies that the spate of injuries is in any way linked to Mason Rudolph getting more practice reps.

-Jarvis Landry is ded for three weeks. Maybe Baker is not due for a bounce this year…

Other Sports:

Baseball is winding down, finally, and the much-derided Second Wild Card Spot is proving its worth. Toronto/Buffalo is clinging to life in their battle with The Fuggin’ Yankees in the AL, while the Most Glorious El Beisbol Cardinals riding a 2011-like hot streak toward their inevitable World Series victory.

Finally: another installment of Obscure Movie Hot Tip. This week: Snakes on a Plane!

It was going to be EuroTrip, but then I remembered that Balls of Steel and the late Wee Baby Seamus (God rest his smutty soul) had already done that one.

So SoaP (as it’s known among the cognosenti) is not exactly obscure among the scum who frequent our site, but 1. I missed its 15th anniversary last month, and 2. it passed out of the collective consciousness far faster than it should have.  I love it because watching the movie was far less entertaining than the circus that led up to it.

Written by a guy who is now Vice Chancellor at Pitt and originally directed by Formula 51’s Ronny Yu, “Snakes on a Plane” was originally just a working title. It received great internet attention based on its beautifully straightforward premise and the attachment of Samuel L. Jackson to star.

It wasn’t until they gave it the deeply banal official title of Pacific Air Flight 121 that things got Weird. The second-stage Internet (remember, this is pre-Twitter, when Facebook was still restricted to college students) got angry. Like Angry angry. They liked Snakes on a Plane. It did what it said on the tin, as the Brits might say. And Samuel L. Jackson agreed, stating “We’re totally changing that back. The only reason I took the job: I read the title.”

So began what I will refer to as the first interactive moviemaking process, a true conversation between filmmaker and audience. The Internet (and SLJ) wanted the title back, so the title went back. A writer who had done some work on the script made a blog post about it. Jeff Rowland does the following brilliant webcomic that is actually integrated INTO THE MOVIE’S RESHOOTS!

Said reshoots were specifically geared toward raising the movie’s rating from a dumbfuck PG-13 to a hard R, because that’s what the Teeming Masses told them they wanted. The resulting film would be hard-pressed to live up to the hype.

And it didn’t. Not entirely. The reshoots helped, but it was largely a traditional horror/plane-disaster movie that played itself seriously. SLJ was good. Julianna Margulies made it impossible to watch The Good Wife without thinking of this movie. Sunny Mabrey reentered my consciousness after The New Guy.

But it was too normal. It needed the age of creative freedom that allowed for Deadpool and the later Fast and Furious movies. Compare it to the manic, self-aware stupidity of Crank. You can literally see the inflection point in the two weeks between SoaP’s release and Crank’s premiere, with Snakes stuck on the wrong side of the hill. Like Moses, it brought us to the edge of the Promised Land but could never enter.

Until the TV edit. “I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Moday to Friday plane!” I would watch that movie…

Unfortunately, the experiment in internet audience give-and-take reached it predictable nadir with The Dark Knight Rises.  You may recall that the primary villain wears a mask over his mouth and nose.  In early screenings and trailers, people complained that they couldn’t understand him, this being a pre-Covid world where we didn’t all have lots of practice. Director Christopher Nolan took these (valid) concerns and chose to engage in what I will refer to as the first instance of Spite Editing. Nolan, who famously eschews technology (including e-mail) apparently thought “Is that what you want, Internet? You want to be able to heeeear the dialogue? Reap the fruits of your hubris!” So he redubbed all of Tom Hardy’s lines at about twice the volume of the surrounding scene, but still in such an odd modulation and accent that the lines were still largely unintelligible.  Thus ended the Grand Experiment.