I don't care if no one reads this or if it gets buried I just need to vent.
My friend is a fucking idiot. I've mentioned him before on another thread, TPM is his favorite Star Wars movie, followed by AOTC. But that's surprisingly little of what pisses me off about him, the others which shall now be laid out for your reading discomfort.
1. He has an unwavering acceptance of all secondary material to any franchise (SW, Indy, JAWS for fuck's sake.) His ultimate wet dream is that every movie gets at least two sequels. I can't have a simple conversation with him about any movie without him bringing in every sequel and spin-off and novelization of it. For example: Aladdin. It's a classic kid's movie from the early 90s, right? Nope, apparently there were two shitty direct to video sequels and a whole fucking cartoon tv show, and I'm supposed to incorporate all of those into discussion of a goddamn kid's movie? It's not Star Trek for crying out loud! And what about Jaws, one of the greatest movies ever? It's got three dreadful sequels and it's based on a book or some shit. Who cares? I mentioned that the prequels give him a ghost wank but you know the reason? He liked the video game versions of them. What a shitty, shitty, shitty criteria to like a movie, example: E.T. (The video game adaptation for the Atari was so tragic they literally built a mass grave for all the returned copies.)
2. Movies must obey blindly all rules set forth by their original source material. This is often a moderately understandable point, usually revolving around small details of a book he liked that were slightly changed for their film adaptations (Harry Potter.) However, one thing just pisses me off beyond understanding. We were watching one of the Dark Knight films and he proclaimed at one point: "Ah, no. That's not what happened." I turned to him, utterly confused. "What? I know it didn't happen, it's fucking fictional." "Yeah, but in the comics..." I ignored the rest of the sentence. He's so dense about the notion of film adaptations and the essence of fiction being fictional that he has to point out anytime anything changed at all. I get the notion of die-hard comic book fans, but seriously? It's not exactly the same story as you're used to, so it's dumb and shit. He despised Iron Man 3 because of the whole Mandarin thing, and his delicious fanboy aneurysm made me enjoy the movie even more because of how much he hated the idea that a movie did something different in an interesting way. An interesting thing about this is that he doesn't just view original source material as superior, it's that he views ALL print material as superior. This was most evident when we watched Revenge of the Sith a few months ago. (I know it's controversial, but until watching it with him, I didn't mind it all that much.) Guess how long it took for him to mention a Star Wars novel? About 15 minutes. As soon as Dooku and Anakin trade words, guess what? Apparently they fought very recently in some book-prequel of ROTS. I let that one go, as I though it would be the only mention of the Expanded Universe. How wrong I was. At the point when Grievous talks to Sidious, he said, as he does: "Haha, no, that's not how it happened." I literally had to pause the freaking movie so as not to be overwhelmed with bullshit from both angles. "What now?" "He's not supposed to look at Palpatine in the eyes, it says in the book." "Book? You know we're watching a movie right? And that the movie isn't based on the book?" "I know, I just think it's funny that he does it even though he's not supposed to." "Maybe in the book, but that doesn't matter to the movie at all because the movie is the authority." He didn't speak for the rest of the evening. I practically jumped for joy at the prospect of seeing his face when he found out the EU was eliminated, even though I could care less if it was there or not, I'd ignore it anyway.
3. He thinks movies should be measured by the amount of money they made, otherwise known as the ever idiotic "vote with your wallet" mantra. We were discussing movies because he doesn't know anything about anything else, and he decided it pertinent to run down a list of the 50 highest grossing movies on his phone to see how many I'd seen. I'd seen 38, a higher number than I'd be proud of, noting how many shitty movies were on that list. He'd seen every single damn one of them, and was proud of it. He loved Spiderman 3. Enough said.
4. He thinks critics aren't worth shit, or are worth literal shit and the opposite of everything they say should be obeyed. This is a mockup of what I think his top 5 movies would consist of based on how many times he's mentioned every one of them.
1. Jumper
2. Spiderman 2
3. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
4. Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones
5. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
I guess in conclusion, what pisses me off about him is that he both knows too much about the wrong kind of movies (Prince of Persia, Transformers, Bad Boys II, etc.) and nothing about any classic movies (Gone With the Wind, Citizen Kane, The Deer Hunter, etc.) yet decides he is highly qualified to speak on the topic of movies and as if he is actually very knowledgeable about film as an art form.