So, um, right. Where was I? Oh, yes. ‘John Dies At the End’.
Simply put, this is great. It’s great in that weird, quirky, cult way that ‘Army of Darkness’ or ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ is great…well, in that way that ‘The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ should be great but isn’t in any kind of practical sense, because the screenwriter is so in love with the concept that they never actually bother doing anything with it and the only real difference between it and ‘Leonard Part Six’ is Bill Cosby’s incessant mugging and everyone says it’s full of quotable lines but they all only ever quote the same two damn jokes…
…sorry. That sort of went to a weird place. The point is, ‘John Dies At the End’ is an intensely personal movie. It is someone writing a story that they know is probably only going to appeal to them, but they don’t care because it’s an idea that is flowing so deeply from their soul that they can’t not write it. And if they ever find a second person who enjoys it, then so much the better, but they don’t have a whole a whole lot of interest in changing it for mass appeal.
Which isn’t to say that they didn’t change the movie to making it a little more audience-friendly. There are changes from the book, primarily because a) the book is really long and needs to be condensed a bit to fit it into movie length, and b) the ending is a bit of a downer, and even though the tone is all over the place between Lovecraftian horror and splatstick comedy, it still works a bit better with a happier ending. Oh, and c) when you get Clancy Freaking Brown in your movie, you beef up his role a bit. But it’s amazing how much of the weird, discursive, digressive, occasionally perverse if not outright perverted spirit of the story survives the transition to film entirely intact.
For those of you unfamiliar with the novel or film, it follows the adventures of David Wong and his best friend John, who stumble onto a consciousness-expanding drug called “soy sauce” that makes you aware of the greater, stranger, scarier hidden world beyond normal human perception. It also makes that hidden world aware of you, which is why David is now having to deal with demons made out of frozen meat and ghosts and parallel universes and the kind of weird shit that makes people go find a little rubber room somewhere to be voluntarily committed to, just on the grounds that it makes it harder for THEM to get to you. On that score, it’s a cool and creepy horror movie with some wonderful scare moments.
On the other level, though, it’s a hilarious comedy, because the response of real people to crazy shit isn’t necessarily to go crazy in that classic Lovecraftian “rant and rave and wind up in a rubber room” way. We have coping mechanisms, and sometimes those take the form of laughing at the strangeness of it all and sometimes they take the form of blowing off saving the universe in order to play pick-up basketball with your best friend and sometimes they take the form of combining a nuclear bomb with industrial-grade hallucinogens because it may not kill the Lovecraftian horror-god, but “it will sure fuck his shit up”. And on that level, it’s absolutely hilarious.
So I can’t guarantee that you will love ‘John Dies At the End’ the way I did, because it’s a deeply personal movie and deeply personal movies always have a love-it-or-hate-it aspect to them. But that’s what makes them worth watching even if you wind up hating them, because it’s worth encouraging people who pour their souls out like that and make the world a more wonderful and strange place by giving us their artistic visions instead of mass-produced soulless tripe. Movies like this cannot leave you unaffected, even if that effect is to hate them.
In other words, you may not love it…but it will sure fuck your shit up.
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I was a tiny bit annoyed they left out my favorite line from the book…
John asked, “Are you one of those priests who can shoot lasers out of their eyes? Because that would be really helpful right now.”
I’d watch it, but David Wong banned me from Cracked after calling me and people like me a shit-smearing infant cockroach, so I’m not especially interested in his artistic vision.
Were you behaving like a shit-smearing infant cockroach at the time?
LEONARD PART 6 is fucking brilliant and I will brook no opposition on this point.
BUCKAROO BONZAI is also quite overrated for exactly the reasons you mention. Watched it again recently for the first time in a long time and was amazed by how slow and uneventful it actually is.
Buckaroo Bonzai is great, you anyone who doesn’t like it is, objectively, a bad person. It’s just science.
“That’s the axe that slayed me.”
“Is it, now?”
@Edgar Allen Poe: You didn’t hear about it? Basically, what happened was that John Cheese wrote a really bad article, most of the regular commentators said, “This article is really bad,” John Cheese started insulting them on Twitter, they started insulting him back, David Wong joined in and started insulting anybody in the comments section regardless of opinion, and by the end, a good number of people had their comments deleted and their accounts permanently banned. I think at one point, something like one in five comments on that article got removed. I initially got off with a warning when a mini-essay I posted that asked for Cheese to apologize got deleted, but then I made a comment asking why the essay had been deleted (and when that failed to go through, I made another asking why the last comment wasn’t going up), and I couldn’t sign in the next day.
Keep in mind that, between the upvote/downvote system and a userbase of a site centering on geek humor, the Cracked comments section is normally a pretty civil one. The only times they get mad is when an article says something blatantly untrue.
@Tenekn347: Oh yes! Thank you for reminding me. The other thing I don’t like about ‘Buckaroo Banzai’ is the way that it makes otherwise-reasonable people into smug, self-righteous hipsters who insist that the film is somehow provably good and the flaws lie with people unable to appreciate its qualities, not with the film itself.
I’m not saying there’s a one-to-one correlation here, but the smug hipster “it’s a great film that the sheeple didn’t understand and only one of the elite, like me, can appreciate its objectively provable perfection” defense comes out more with ‘BB’ than with any other movie I’ve ever seen debated online, including ‘Blade Runner’.
The problem with superlatives is they’re so easily overturned, especially when applied to pop culture.
This movie, to borrow from Scripture, was neither hot nor cold. I didn’t love it; I didn’t hate it. It was cute. It passed an evening. I likely won’t ever see it again.
It was definitely TRYING to replicate the vibe of a cult film. But, like “Buckaroo,” it was just a bit weak.
Readers of past and present weird fiction, both in pure prose and sequentially-artistic form, will probably be so familiar with ideas similar to this film’s premise and gimmicks that the rehash which is “John Dies at the End” will either be generally boring or delightful because of its rehashing.
But good on the writer! I’m excited for him that his serialized material became a fixture at RedBox. He should genuinely be proud, because for newcomers to weird fiction, this film may be a great gateway.
Sorry John. It’s good, and you’re a bad person. It’s just provable, factual science.
I still think the movie would have been better if they’d just stuck to the first half of the book, with the climax being the showdown in Vegas. that would have translated so well to film.
The clues about a person being eliminated from time would’ve also worked in this “first half” version.
I hated the casting on the two leads. Not that they were bad actors, but they were just such bland interchangeable generic white stubbly guys. They were like video game protagonists. Other than that, highly agree.
Without having read the book, I found the “John Dies at the End” movie a bit baffling. It felt a bit like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, where all kinds of wacky shit was crammed in there because it’s cinematic, but the underlying (silly) logic, which is crucial to the humour, wasn’t developed properly. So you get a montage of bizarre stuff, some of which is entertaining, but very little of which hangs together coherently or expounds on any particular theme.
JDATE (heh) feels very similar to that. It made me want to read the book so I could understand what was going on, which means that as a movie I have to count it as a failure. You can’t just throw “awesome” stuff at the wall and call it a movie. Who knows, maybe the book was equally incoherent, but I doubt it. In fact, I suspect reading the book will make me angry at how badly the filmmakers botched the movie, because it seems like exactly the kind of thing I would like.
I mean, (SPOILERS), when you call a movie “John Dies at the End”, you think maybe, I don’t know, John should die at the end?
No offense intended, but if it bothers you that the title is a meta-joke rather than a description of the movie’s events, you may not be the intended audience.
Full disclosure: I still haven’t gotten around to seeing the movie, though I have read the book several times.
SPOILERS
He doesn’t die in that book, though the title could refer to the events of however long the series is (or be a misdirect regarding a twist you find out at the end).
I’m fine with him not dying if it’s a joke, or metacommentary, or a profound metaphor for mankind’s perpetually deflated expectations, or SOMETHING, but it wasn’t any of these things in the movie. I’m sure it meant something in the novel, but in the movie it seems to be meaningless.
The watermelon in the vice in Buckaroo Banzai is one of my favorite gags of all time.
It may not be a great movie, but I do and will always love it dearly for being a fun and weird one.
Spoiler Alert:
I assumed it was called “John Dies At the End” because at the end of the film, you find out that the soy sauce drug gives David the ability to manifest the dead as physical entities, based on his memory (and imagination) of them. And it’s about then that it occurs to you that hello, unreliable narrator, there’s nothing that definitively proves one way or another that John ever actually survived the overdose of soy sauce that killed him about a third of the way into the movie, because his appearances after that could just be manifestations of his ghost. So in that sense, “John Dies At the End” is a very appropriate title. Moreso in fact than for the book, where…um, but I’ve already given away one huge chunk of spoilers. Better quit while I’m ahead. 🙂
I’m withholding judgement on this movie until we get the Planck data on cosmic inflation. Did any of you listen to Robert Marley?