Mr. TWIT gives advice

A reader wrote:

Mr. Twit,

Planet Terror, one of my current favorites......yet I am concerned. While discussing with an acquaintance, I was accused of supporting gratuitous violence and cinema of no value or redeeming social quality. Mr. Twit, please reassure me that movies can still be enjoyable just because they are enjoyable....I mean heck.....it was a ZOMBIE movie, not a treatise on some social more or a documentary on some obscure psychological phenomena. Say it ain't so Mr. Twit!!!

Signed,
Overweight, Past Middle Aged, White Woman


Dear OPMAWW,

Your friend is not only a whiny bore, he or she is probably very sexually repressed, plain and simple. Plus your friend has a really messed up sense of scale. Consider the seven bucks you spent on renting Planet Terror versus the millions of dollars spent to blow up the World Trade Center, or the billions spent on the Iraq War. When it comes to supporting gratuitous violence I think those latter examples bother me way more than a friggin movie.

There's nothing wrong with you enjoying a trashy, ultra-violent, utterly charming piece of crapola like Planet Terror. (Speaking of charming, how friggin cool was that faux-trailer for Machete?)



Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if your friend just can't see the beauty of a one-legged woman shooting a zombie-rapist in the crotch with a M-60 machine gun modified to fit on her semi-healed amputation stump, you really can't fault your friend for that. You can only pity him/her. (I have a five dollar bet with my wife that your friend was a "her". Please confirm in the comments section.)

Could you imagine if every movie had to contain Redeeming Social Value? How sucky would that be? I mean I can fully enjoy Munich, but after a while a steady diet of that crap gives me a friggin headache. I need palette cleanser movies like Big Trouble in Little China.



It requires very little thought or contemplation. It helps ease the mind and makes the world a little bit less sucky. I love existential dread as much as Ingmar Bergman, but a little bit of John Carpenter shoot-'em-up ain't so bad.

Plus, your friend is absolutely wrong in claiming that Planet Terror has no Redeeming Social Value. The movie was made by Robert Rodriguez's Troublemaker Studios, a company that provides employment opportunities by many Latino-American's, who are a generally under-represented in the movie industry. Name me another studio that would feature a great actor like Freddy Rodriquez as a bad-ass action hero? Plus the sheer logistics of producing Planet Terror is worthy of study. Many bloated, over-produced, big-budget, "socially redeemable" films would do well to emulate the efficient planning required to put together Planet Terror given it's relatively low-budget. Every bit of cash budgeted to make that film was put directly on the screen (The production could not afford hiring Bruce Willis for an extended period of time, thus they filmed all his shots in one day. That way the money usually required to rent a honey-wagon trailer for Mr. Willis was used to directly produce the movie.) I guess you can present such facts to refute your friend's claims that Planet Terror has no value, but why bother? Save yourself all that trouble, ditch your "friend" and make a new, much cooler, way more fun friend, sans the stick-up-the-ass.

Yours truly,

Mr. TWIT