To your point about Sideways being a strange cipher with which to lampoon the toxic masculinity of early 2000s comedies on account of Sideways already lampooning it, Dave: Could it not be said that part of the joke with using the overbloated franchise framework here is that these franchises so often miss the point of what makes the original so great? One could easily picture Napa Boys 2 and 3 endorsing the very behaviours that the original made to indict, maintained here in Napa Boys 4 and only subverted by the audience's understanding that this movie exists to us as satire.
Quick geekery over the wine barrel gag too, which is also my favourite scene: The moment Jack shits/cums in the wine barrel, you know that someone's going to drink it. That creates the tension, and we think the release is going to come (ha!) when Miles drinks the wine. He does, of course, and we react to it, but because of his delayed reaction to drinking the wine, the film doesn't actually acknowledge any resolution of the established tension, and so we're sitting there with the tension only half-released, which is a state that creates its own tension. Mind-numbingly brilliant comedy beat; had me and the rest of the TIFF audience in a vice grip.
For sure - Decarceration makes that same argument, that it’s a non-obvious choice because of what an odd fit it is and (in his mind) that’s part of what makes it work. But for me, I need the filmmakers to somehow acknowledge that this is what they’re doing, that they’re aware of this being part of the conceptual makeup of the movie. That’s distinct from “spelling it out” for the audience, but it is something that has to go beyond an unspoken thing in the filmmaker's mind..
To your point, even the original American Pie is vastly more nuanced than the sequels probably ever gave it credit for. While it’s told from the male characters’ POV, the female characters are presented as more sexually prepared and centered, the boys being the butt of every joke while the girls run circles around them. With the most mature couple - Natasha Lyonne and Thomas Ian Nichols - having their first intimate time together, soberly realizing they’re going to part ways and move on with their lives, that the sex wasn’t that great, but still happy that they experienced it with each other. You don’t see that kind of thing in the sequels I have no doubt. But I wonder if we remember how mature the original was underneath the comedy.
And this is what Napa Boys failed to capitalize on: this discrepency between the originals and the sequels. It simply plays like a bawdy mindless sequel to…what end? It’s not hard to mimic something. There has to be both comedic layering as well as critical layering on top of the mimicry, and I failed to see anything of the sort in Napa Boys, though I desperately wanted it to deliver. The comedy was largely one-note (minus that barrel scene) and the critique was similarly one-note. I needed more to credit it with all that it was trying to achieve. And it didn’t give me more.
Right, but that's precisely what I mean. Given what we inherently recognize about the Spinoff Sequel™, we can infer that Napa Boys 4 misunderstands the point of Sideways as an indictment of toxic masculinity in the same way that most of the Jurassic Park sequels misunderstand the original as more than just a blunt monster movie. The difference with Napa Boys is that it's intentional.
I personally think the acknowledgement is made the moment you -- i.e. the filmmakers -- land on Napa Boys' satirical premise, and I also think that the scene with Jack sleazily telling Miles to "fuck her" knowingly piles onto the sendup of these discrepancies. I can understand the desire for a sturdier critique, to be sure. I suppose my question is: What would it look like?
Ha ha, well, first off, we disagree on the Jurassic Park sequels - the only good one was the 3rd one, precisely because it took the premise and made it a pure, streamlined monster movie. What all the other sequels failed at doing was trying to recapture the grandeur, the awe-inspiring epic wonder of the original, which simply can't be done. That cultural moment happened. It can't happen again. So what's left for a sequel is to approach it differently. The 3rd sequel achieves this. All the others flail about, going through the motions, pretending to be epic in a specific way which they cannot be.
Which brings us to sequels like the Napa Boys - to be fair, I've never seen any American Pie sequels. I did not "know inherently" what I was seeing. It was only talking to Decarceration and reading up on what the filmmakers claimed that I came to understand their intent. But while I was watching it? I was simply left cold, not comprehendding why it wasn't more funny.
As for "what would it look like", I have to return to MacGruber. There a scene near the beginning, when our hero is tryingt to get the A-Team style of team back together, and he gets to one burly male member who is happily married to another, openly together and kissing in front of him the way it would never be shown in the original MacGuyver style American braodcast TV shows. Our hero immediately shows how homophobic he is and quietly just...doesn't bring those two back in for the adventure for the sole fact that they're gay. That right there both sends up a genre in a specific way that isn't just mimicking the genre, while commenting on what it both contains and doesn't contain, in a way that is part broad comedy, part subtle inference.
Even if you take something like Stephen Colbert's alt-Right character he puts on, he doesn't just repeat what the alt-Right of America says, he repurposes it and takes their mindsets and arguments to their logical conclusions, which are absurd on their face. This is what makes the wine barrel scene work, taking the gross-out and horny humor of sex comeedies to their logical extereme. But this is largely absent from the rest of the film, that seems to simply hit hallmarks of the source materials and/or genre without commenting on them beyond its obvious wink-wink contempt. I see no worthwhile critique in that. Nor humor. Which leaves me with nothing to take from it at all.
-- When I say "know inherently" I mean Spinoff Sequels as a phenomenon rather than anything to do with American Pie specifically, even though it's probably the best example of the tradition. The Jaws sequels are another example. Also, isn't a familiarity with Sideways, rather than AP, the key ingredient in the case of Napa Boys?
-- Haha, well, re: JP3, it sounds like anyone partial to the other sequels could say the same thing. I don't even think the JP sequels are necessarily unenjoyable; it's nevertheless very clear that they aren't in the same frame of mind as the original.
To your point about Sideways being a strange cipher with which to lampoon the toxic masculinity of early 2000s comedies on account of Sideways already lampooning it, Dave: Could it not be said that part of the joke with using the overbloated franchise framework here is that these franchises so often miss the point of what makes the original so great? One could easily picture Napa Boys 2 and 3 endorsing the very behaviours that the original made to indict, maintained here in Napa Boys 4 and only subverted by the audience's understanding that this movie exists to us as satire.
Quick geekery over the wine barrel gag too, which is also my favourite scene: The moment Jack shits/cums in the wine barrel, you know that someone's going to drink it. That creates the tension, and we think the release is going to come (ha!) when Miles drinks the wine. He does, of course, and we react to it, but because of his delayed reaction to drinking the wine, the film doesn't actually acknowledge any resolution of the established tension, and so we're sitting there with the tension only half-released, which is a state that creates its own tension. Mind-numbingly brilliant comedy beat; had me and the rest of the TIFF audience in a vice grip.
For sure - Decarceration makes that same argument, that it’s a non-obvious choice because of what an odd fit it is and (in his mind) that’s part of what makes it work. But for me, I need the filmmakers to somehow acknowledge that this is what they’re doing, that they’re aware of this being part of the conceptual makeup of the movie. That’s distinct from “spelling it out” for the audience, but it is something that has to go beyond an unspoken thing in the filmmaker's mind..
To your point, even the original American Pie is vastly more nuanced than the sequels probably ever gave it credit for. While it’s told from the male characters’ POV, the female characters are presented as more sexually prepared and centered, the boys being the butt of every joke while the girls run circles around them. With the most mature couple - Natasha Lyonne and Thomas Ian Nichols - having their first intimate time together, soberly realizing they’re going to part ways and move on with their lives, that the sex wasn’t that great, but still happy that they experienced it with each other. You don’t see that kind of thing in the sequels I have no doubt. But I wonder if we remember how mature the original was underneath the comedy.
And this is what Napa Boys failed to capitalize on: this discrepency between the originals and the sequels. It simply plays like a bawdy mindless sequel to…what end? It’s not hard to mimic something. There has to be both comedic layering as well as critical layering on top of the mimicry, and I failed to see anything of the sort in Napa Boys, though I desperately wanted it to deliver. The comedy was largely one-note (minus that barrel scene) and the critique was similarly one-note. I needed more to credit it with all that it was trying to achieve. And it didn’t give me more.
Right, but that's precisely what I mean. Given what we inherently recognize about the Spinoff Sequel™, we can infer that Napa Boys 4 misunderstands the point of Sideways as an indictment of toxic masculinity in the same way that most of the Jurassic Park sequels misunderstand the original as more than just a blunt monster movie. The difference with Napa Boys is that it's intentional.
I personally think the acknowledgement is made the moment you -- i.e. the filmmakers -- land on Napa Boys' satirical premise, and I also think that the scene with Jack sleazily telling Miles to "fuck her" knowingly piles onto the sendup of these discrepancies. I can understand the desire for a sturdier critique, to be sure. I suppose my question is: What would it look like?
Ha ha, well, first off, we disagree on the Jurassic Park sequels - the only good one was the 3rd one, precisely because it took the premise and made it a pure, streamlined monster movie. What all the other sequels failed at doing was trying to recapture the grandeur, the awe-inspiring epic wonder of the original, which simply can't be done. That cultural moment happened. It can't happen again. So what's left for a sequel is to approach it differently. The 3rd sequel achieves this. All the others flail about, going through the motions, pretending to be epic in a specific way which they cannot be.
Which brings us to sequels like the Napa Boys - to be fair, I've never seen any American Pie sequels. I did not "know inherently" what I was seeing. It was only talking to Decarceration and reading up on what the filmmakers claimed that I came to understand their intent. But while I was watching it? I was simply left cold, not comprehendding why it wasn't more funny.
As for "what would it look like", I have to return to MacGruber. There a scene near the beginning, when our hero is tryingt to get the A-Team style of team back together, and he gets to one burly male member who is happily married to another, openly together and kissing in front of him the way it would never be shown in the original MacGuyver style American braodcast TV shows. Our hero immediately shows how homophobic he is and quietly just...doesn't bring those two back in for the adventure for the sole fact that they're gay. That right there both sends up a genre in a specific way that isn't just mimicking the genre, while commenting on what it both contains and doesn't contain, in a way that is part broad comedy, part subtle inference.
Even if you take something like Stephen Colbert's alt-Right character he puts on, he doesn't just repeat what the alt-Right of America says, he repurposes it and takes their mindsets and arguments to their logical conclusions, which are absurd on their face. This is what makes the wine barrel scene work, taking the gross-out and horny humor of sex comeedies to their logical extereme. But this is largely absent from the rest of the film, that seems to simply hit hallmarks of the source materials and/or genre without commenting on them beyond its obvious wink-wink contempt. I see no worthwhile critique in that. Nor humor. Which leaves me with nothing to take from it at all.
Hmmm...
Fair enough, though I'll quibble just a bit:
-- When I say "know inherently" I mean Spinoff Sequels as a phenomenon rather than anything to do with American Pie specifically, even though it's probably the best example of the tradition. The Jaws sequels are another example. Also, isn't a familiarity with Sideways, rather than AP, the key ingredient in the case of Napa Boys?
-- Haha, well, re: JP3, it sounds like anyone partial to the other sequels could say the same thing. I don't even think the JP sequels are necessarily unenjoyable; it's nevertheless very clear that they aren't in the same frame of mind as the original.