Complex Numbers

Whipshrek

This one's about a movie, but not one I've seen recently. No, earlier this year I was treated to the Guardian's brutal takedown of a 20-year-old movie. And it's just now come up for me to review the review.

Shrek at 20: an unfunny and overrated low for blockbuster animation  
The fairytale comedy was a hit with critics and audiences but its toilet humour, glibness and shoddy animation mark it out as a misfire

So... audiences liked it, critics liked it... but some elitist asshole is here to tell us all that we're wrong and we should be ashamed of ourselves by calling it a "misfire."

Hopefully y'all know by now that I like different kinds of movies. Highbrow, lowbrow, unibrow, whatever... I won't be browbeaten into joining the consensus or rebelling against it. And I'm certainly not above laughing at juvenile humor, though I can also appreciate fancy French art flicks.

Hating on Shrek is just plain snobbery.

I'm not saying it's a great movie, mind you. But it certainly doesn't suck.

Shrek has an outhouse with a working toilet.

Oh yeah, let's open up by pointing out the bathroom humor. It's a kids' movie for shit's sake; there's going to be bathroom humor.

Twenty years later, that flushing sound seems to signify the moment when blockbuster animation circled the drain.

Right, because no animated movie has succeeded since then.

Shrek is a terrible movie.

No it's not.

It’s not funny.

Yes it is.

It looks awful.

No it doesn't. Okay, yeah, animation has come a long way in 20 years, along with the computers that generate it, but it's perfectly fine for the time.

And yet Shrek was a sensation with critics and audiences in 2001.

So, this guy is positioning himself as the ultimate arbiter of how good a movie is, and not other critics or, you know, the people who actually pay money to see them. Look, I get it; I have opinions, too, and not all of them align with the consensus. I disliked The Matrix. I liked Cats. I never saw Titanic and don't plan to. Whatever. We all like what we like and hate what we hate. I'm waiting for an objective argument to support the author's hate.

Even the stuffed shirts at the Cannes film festival, who usually separated Hollywood summer fare from its official selections, brought it into the competition slate, where it premiered alongside new work from world masters like David Lynch, Jean-Luc Godard, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Jacques Rivette.

You do not get to look down your nose at a lowbrow children's comedy (that also has adult appeal) and then call the Cannes judges "stuffed shirts." Pot, meet kettle.

Worse yet, it encouraged a destructive, know-it-all attitude toward the classics that made any earnest engagement with them seem like a waste of time. Those once-upon-a-times were now rendered stodgy and lame, literally toilet paper.

Yes. That's how storytelling evolves. Shakespeare was sop for the working classes of London; his works only gathered a patina of respectability with time, and people continue to riff off of the plays. As I noted in an entry a while back, it's likely that the works we know as "fairy tales" changed multiple times, with new audiences and new context, before they were written down in their "final" form. Playing with those ideas, updating them for the times, is what storytellers do.

But the balance in Shrek is off on both ends: there’s an excess of anachronisms and buddy-movie riffs from Myers and Murphy that have little relation to the backdrop and a woe-is-me soppiness to the love story between two lonely, misunderstood freaks. (Nothing screams “unearned gravitas” like slipping in a cover of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.)

YOU SHUT YOUR PUDDINGHOLE RIGHT NOW.

But once Shrek and Donkey cross the kingdom on a quest to bring Fiona to Farquaad, the storybook references are all but abandoned. Even when Robin Hood and his Merry Men appear in the woods, the film blows past that boring old mythos in order to pay homage to The Matrix and Riverdance.

Yes. That's a feature, not a bug.

Last year, the National Film Registry added Shrek to the Library of Congress, which seals its canonization, but it’s remarkable how much of an early aughts relic it’s become, an amber-preserved monument to phenomena (Mike Myers, Smash Mouth, Michael Flatley) that hasn’t stood the test of time.

"Noughties," not "aughts." Come on, even the BBC has adopted my word for that decade. Probably not on purpose, though.

Even the film’s referential style looks resolutely slow and unhip next to the whirring pop Cuisinarts of Lord and Miller productions like The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or even IP-heavy Disney fare like Wreck-it Ralph and its sequel.

Yes, because those movies came out later and had the benefit of better technology. This is like comparing the original Godzilla to this year's Godzilla vs. Kong.

Don't get me wrong; I like the Guardian in general (their harsh review of Hudson Yards sticks out in my mind as the greatest piece of architectural criticism in the history of ever, though to be fair, it's an opinion I already shared), but this would be something like the British equivalent of a small-town newspaper from Alabama reviewing Broadway plays. They're entitled to their opinion, but they're not the target audience. And the UK is hardly innocent in producing lowbrow humor. (I should note that for all I know, the reviewer is from the US, but he's still writing for a British journal.)

So, okay, I get it; he didn't like the movie. Fine. A lot of the reasons he hated it are the same reasons I liked it. I hope I never see his opinion of Despicable Me. Or, actually, I hope I do so I can rag on that review, too.