09 January 2010

Exploitation movie

Looking at movie listings, I just discovered Bitch Slap playing today. Now I love exploitation movies, so it's not like I don't see what they're going for in the trailer for this picture. I can respect the honesty of pure exploitation that just is what it is, and I can respect good ironic pleasure-alloyed-with-critique, as exemplified by how the violence in Inglorous Basterds very deliberately offers us both pleasure and discomfort with your own enjoyment of it. But there's a school of dishonest exploitation—“it's not really offensive, it's okay because it's ironic”—and I smell it all over the trailer. Paying a visit to the website, I see that it promises ...

a mysterious Female Narrator who comments periodically on the folly of humanity, the plight of the human condition, and the vagaries of life and love through quoting the likes of Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Sun Tzu, and even Buddha
... which seems like Trying A Little Too Hard. Rotten Tomatoes seems to confirm my suspicion.

I write all of this not because I have a real opinion (having not seen the film) but to set up my disappointment that Roger Ebert hasn't reviewed the movie so he can say to the filmmakers, “I knew Russ Meyer, and you guys ... are no Russ Meyer.”

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