The Cinema Snob Movie (2012)

Trash, Art and the Movies

The Cinema Snob Movie (2012)

I am going to ask for your kind indulgence as I take a little of your time to discuss The Cinema Snob Movie (2012). I understand that this is beneath both you and me. The Cinema Snob Movie is the vanity project of a minor YouTube personality, produced on a nonexistent budget with an all-amateur cast and crew, and which was self-distributed on the internet and DVD. Today it is accessible only on archive.org, its official purchase links having long ago been scrubbed by its makers. I’m digging up a corpse to bury it again. All that being said, I’d like to talk about this movie because I found it an evocative document of a particular time in internet culture, as well as a gruesomely vivid articulation of a certain way of thinking about art. I also think this will be a subject of interest for at least a palpable minority of you, because if you are a millennial or older zoomer, it is possible – perhaps even likely – that you have a working knowledge of a 2010s internet phenomenon called Channel Awesome and the personalities who comprised it.

This will require a lot of table-setting. Channel Awesome was (and, technically, still is) an online network of content creators who specialized in humorous video reviews of pop culture detritus. At its centre was Doug Walker (b. 1981), an aspiring comedian from the suburbs of Chicago who had a good idea at exactly the right time: snarky reviews of “nostalgic” movies (typically but not exclusively family films of the ‘80s and ‘90s), sprinkled generously with clips and uploaded to the emerging democratic forum of YouTube. Walker posted his first video in 2007, and I think I became aware of him within a few months of that, because if you were an older millennial who searched for, say, Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, you inevitably found him. So I knew who Doug Walker was, but even as a pop culture-savvy millennial I mostly avoided him. I was a little too old and, frankly, sophisticated for his shtick. This is not boasting – based on anecdotal evidence, Walker’s most appreciative audience tends to be in the 12-15 age range. Walker’s style of humour – a lot of mugging, loud voices, and catchphrases – was not ready for primetime, and his critical insights were mostly bootleg Ebert, but in those early days of YouTube, his videos were still a notch or two higher than the norm.

If you were in the mood to massage the nostalgic zones of your brain, and you didn’t have the time to rent and watch a DVD of Jungle 2 Jungle or Jack Frost, Walker’s videos were effective substitutes for the movies. In fact, this quickly became a sore legal point, as his videos were loaded with so many long clips that by any reasonable metric they crossed the porous border between “fair use” and copyright infringement. After a few too many copyright strikes, Walker partnered with several business associates to launch That Guy With the Glasses, a website for content creators that hosted its videos on a YouTube rival called Blip TV. That name, a reference to the bespectacled Walker, was eventually identified as a little too centering of one personality, and changed to Channel Awesome.

Kickassia (2010)

At its peak, Channel Awesome hosted dozens of contributors. Most of the major personalities made annual trips to Illinois to take part in three Walker-directed “anniversary movies”: Kickassia (2010), Suburban Knights (2011), and To Boldly Flee (2012). It would take a whole other article to give such rich texts their due, but suffice it to say, these movies are shameless ego trips for Walker and his Nostalgia Critic character, technically inept and exhaustingly overlong. Their only possible defense is of the “Well at least a bunch of friends got together and had fun” variety… but as it turns out, nobody was having much fun on these unpaid and dangerously unprofessional sets. Years of mismanagement finally led to the company’s Waterloo in 2018, when former contributors outlined their grievances in a crowdsourced Google Doc titled “Not so Awesome.” It was at this point that I, a natural born rubbernecker, fell down a Channel Awesome rabbit hole from which I’ve never fully emerged.

When the document became public, most of the company’s few remaining contributors swiftly cut ties. One of the very few who remained was Brad Jones. His show The Cinema Snob debuted in 2007, and applied the Walker formula to exploitation films. Jones affected the persona of a pretentious cinephile forced to discuss the likes of Blood Freak, Zombi 4: After Death, and The Taming of Rebecca – violent, pornographic subjects that must have stood out on a website full of videos about, I dunno, Full House. Jones is the only other Channel Awesome contributor I’ve had any exposure to – again, if you were on the internet back then and interested in the sorts of movies he covered, there he was – and from what I’ve seen, the “snob” conceit was fairly thin. His videos were obviously the work of someone who loved these old exploitation films and wanted to communicate that enthusiasm, which is perfectly good and nice. Jones himself wrote and directed several low-budget films prior to becoming a micro-celebrity, and these wear their cult-film influences proudly. Cheap (2005), for example, has a snuff-film plot reminiscent of Roger Watkins’ Last House on Dead End Street, while Midnight Heat (2007) cribs its title from one of Watkin’s downbeat porn films. I share Jones’s admiration for Watkins, so I sampled a few minutes of each film before giving them a pat on the head and sending them on their way. Hey, it’s nice when people have a hobby.

This finally brings us to The Cinema Snob Movie (2012), Jones’s contribution (he wrote the screenplay, with Ryan Mitchelle credited as director) to a 2010s wave of self- or crowd-funded movies derived from niche online review shows. Like James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie (2014), the Nash “Linkara” Bozard vehicle Atop the Fourth Wall: The Movie (2015), and Walker’s trilogy, The Cinema Snob Movie abandons the review format and plugs its character into a high-concept three-act story, à la the Saturday Night Live spin-off films. Jones and Mitchelle take the opportunity to expand the Cinema Snob’s lore and backstory, which unfortunately means taking the character seriously, and even, god help us, using him as a vehicle to Say Something. Again, this is forsaken movie that I picked out of the garbage, so I hope I hope I can strike a tone that is proportionate. But I think The Cinema Snob Movie is worth discussing because of how sharply it articulates a certain strain of reactionary faux-populism that really grinds my gears.

The Cinema Snob Movie (2012)

The Snob, it turns out, is actually Craig Golightly, an aspiring exploitation filmmaker from Springfield, Illinois. Craig and his friends dream of making a neo-Blaxploitation/roller derby movie (I’m thinking that Jones is thinking of something like Disco Godfather), but their lowbrow taste runs afoul of the local Film Society, which rules over the local permitting system with an iron fist. The exact nature of the Film Society is sketchy: somehow it is both a bureaucratic organization that controls all local production, as well as a social club for highbrow cinephiles that hosts screenings and discussions of canon classics. It is these screenings that Craig plans to infiltrate, affecting the persona of “Vincent Dawn,” pretentious cinephile. Once inside, he intends to position his movie as being about poverty among African Americans in the 1970s, which will dazzle the highbrows who “won’t want to seem racist.” Undergirding the movie’s worldview is the presumption that any step outside one’s frame of reference, either in art or politics, is performative until proven otherwise.

The sub-Kevin Smith dialogue is dense with movie references. “Vincent Dawn” is one of the many pseudonyms used by Italian schlock merchant Bruno Mattei, a fact that Jones wields like a secret handshake. Signifiers of elitist film culture include Robert Altman, Ingmar Bergman, Roger Ebert, Spartacus, and Gone with the Wind. One character offhandedly suggests Jerry Lewis as a snob bogeyman, and I was surprised that Jones and Mitchelle were unaware of the decades of highbrow film criticism Lewis has inspired on both sides of the Atlantic (you’d think they’d reach for some low-hanging “The French love Jerry Lewis” fruit). The emotional climax comes when Craig leads the Film Society’s president in a righteous exclamation of “Fuck Pauline Kael!” – as if Kael’s influence hasn’t been contentious since she first put pen to paper. It’s worth remembering that Kael herself was very interested in interrogating hierarchies of taste, having written a famous and influential essay called “Trash, Art and the Movies” that evidently escaped Jones and Mitchelle’s attention. In short, this movie doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

Because this is an amateur production with a star whose micro-celebrity brought it an audience larger than many professional ones, it can be hard to decide how much slack to cut it. Plus, it has a built-in defense mechanism: prod at any shortcomings and you risk sounding like a Cinema Snob. But I would feel more forgiving of the poor lighting, inconsistent sound, mistimed editing, and atrocious mise-en-scène if Jones and Mitchelle didn’t explicitly position technical shoddiness as a sign of authenticity. At one point, Craig proudly reminds his friends that “we’re point-and-shoot filmmakers,” but I’m confident whichever technically-challenged exploitation pioneers Jones is drawing inspiration from – Herschell Gordon Lewis, Doris Wishman, Ed Wood, Andy Milligan, whoever – gave at least a little more thought to the cinematic frame than this. The technical limitations are symbiotic with its sense of intellectual malnutrition. To think too much about any aspect of the art and craft of film is to be a Cinema Snob.

One of Jones and Mitchelle’s chief antagonists is Terrence Malick, whose The Thin Red Line is a frequent punching bag. Only poseurs would pretend to like such a boring movie, is the implication. I happen to love The Thing Red Line for all the reasons it refuses to “work” in the terms dictated by the dominant cinema: it has no single protagonist, moves at a stately pace, and prioritizes mood, atmosphere, and imagery over a propulsive A-B-C story. A synecdoche of everything I love about the movie is the small moment when Malick’s camera homes in on a bird covered with soot from a nearby military operation, injured and struggling to move. How many filmmakers would care about a wounded bird? What other movies have taken such a holistic view of the price of war, giving equal love to the landscape and its animal inhabitants? Jones and Mitchelle are not obliged to agree with me on Malick, but I do feel sorry that their response to his challenges is knee-jerk resistance. The Cinema Snob Movie has several didactic scenes in which Craig says you should “like what you like,” and not be blinded by elite consensus. But taste is not a static thing. It’s worth examining and challenging. One can learn a lot from trying to meet art on its own terms, and examining other tastes and perspectives in good faith.

The other key target is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom – a certified Canon Classic with as much sadism and brutality as any Ruggero Deodato movie. Here, Jones and Mitchelle are shadowboxing any Criterion customer foolish enough to think that Pasolini’s fake snuff scenes are somehow different than, say, Emanuelle in America’s. The emperor has no clothes, argue Jones and Mitchelle. It’s all shock value for the sake of shock value. Sometimes a shit-eating scene is just a shit-eating scene, and you’re being hypnotized by the name “Pasolini.” Craig, in his “Vincent Dawn” guise, shows Salò at the Film Society, and relishes watching the pretentious audience squirm. Then he is forced to lead a post-screening discussion, and launches into a long, rambling monologue about how the shit-eating scene represents society’s dependence on processed food, etcetera. The cinephiles all nod along, because these pseudo-intellectuals will read symbolic meaning into anything. But Salò is an odd choice to illustrate this point, because it is, very famously, a left-wing filmmaker’s critique of fascism, made in Italy just a generation removed from Mussolini. Go a step further and you’ll find a critique of capitalism, for Pasolini was, famously, a Communist. Pasolini is asking: People pursue power for its privileges, and what happens when we follow that urge to its logical conclusion? This subtext is widely known and understood, even among the film’s detractors. Like it or not, Salò is not meaningless. Have Jones and Mitchelle heard of Wikipedia?

I think Jones and Mitchelle are suffering from an intellectual insecurity that has locked them into a dichotomous high/low view of art. It’s more useful to think of “art” and “trash” as a spectrum, or perhaps interlocking forces, which is why I think their forgotten amateur movie is worth dusting off and thinking about before being tossed back in the dumpster. Jone and Mitchelle are correct, I think, to suggest Pasolini is gleefully wallowing in his obscenities as much as any so-called “trash” filmmaker. I also think they’re right, on some highly qualified level, to chafe at the solemnity of so much of the discourse this film has generated. Something I admire in Salò is how directly Pasolini taps into the spirit of his source, the Marquis de Sade – a merciless social critic who also really did get off on what he wrote. I think this sense of attraction-repulsion is why Salò still feels so dangerous. Jones and Mitchelle are battling strawmen who look for symbolic meaning in Salò’s shit-eating scene, but Pasolini might even agree with them that sometimes a turd really is just a turd. There’s no secret key to unlocking Salò that only the Film Society gets to access. Art is for everyone.