Monday, August 1, 2011

Smurf a Smurf On It

I'm a little ahead of the game this morning with box office figures, but the news for the past 24 hours is that Cowboys and Aliens was losing the number one spot this weekend to The Smurfs. This was distressing to me because by rights, C&A was said to be a solid bit of genre filmmaking while Smurfs looked like another dreary post-modern "updating" of the property by having characters remark on how stupid the premise has always been.



Ridiculing the tropes of this property is really low-hanging fruit.

But you know what they're doing there? They're HANGING A LANTERN on the Smurfs. Maybe our little blue friends can no longer survive in our sophisticated media landscape without addressing the glaring weirdnesses of the premise.

So this movie is, in fact, an epic lantern-hanging. It's like maybe the movie is all lanterns. It's lit up like a Christmas tree! I'm almost inclined to see it on that basis!

But of course, you'd still have to drug me to get me into an auditorium with those teutonic Schlumpfen. I mean come on. Research is one thing, but I can't waste two hours on a load of smurf.

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