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the boondock skeins On Sunday we watched Boondock Saints. We did this because on Monday, we were joining a gaggle of knitters — Felicia’s crew — to watch the sequel at the Palm Theatre. This first viewing of Saints was, for me, unremarkable. Felicia has a history with the movie, and laughed and took the movie’s general badness in stride, enjoying it perhaps more because of its quality of badness. I had to consciously struggle against my urge to criticize the movie, to pick apart its derivative scenes and pin them down on the table and point and say Look, this is nothing more than a very, very poor copy of a much better scene from a much better movie. And while I think I’ve become a less critical moviegoer in recent years, I wasn’t able to swallow those urges for a movie so blatantly and irresponsibly awful. I had a theory about the first movie: that the filmmaker — if you can call him this — was trying to make a legitimately dark crime film, and that he simply wasn’t up to the task. He was far too influenced by too many incompatible movies. Here was a writer and director who loved the detached swagger of Reservoir Dogs and the stylish angst of The Basketball Diaries — but whose favorite movie was Weekend at Bernie’s. The end product of his efforts was unintentionally awful — blatantly, unavoidably terrible. He didn’t meant to make a movie so incompetent that it would become a college drinking-game cult favorite, but that’s what happened. I suspect that, when faced with the prospect of making a sequel, the director had two options: He could apply all of the things that he learned from his previous experience, ten years ago, and create a movie that achieved all of the goals he had failed to realize then — and risk alienating the crowd that made his previous movie a strange, accidental success — or he could suck up his low-rent pride and intentionally repeat the error of his ways — now with budget! — and make a slightly larger dent in the box office. Of course, it’s also possible that he intended to make these laughable crime dramas from the start, but that would indicate some foresight, which I’m just not convinced he exercised. Anyway, here’s what it’s like seeing a movie like Boondock Saints 2: All Saint’s Day with a bunch of feisty knitters. You know how after a movie people like to stand around and talk about this scene and that scene, and what did that guy mean when he said blah blah blah, and did anybody else think that the bad guy should’ve done this instead of that? After a movie, knitters all rush into a circle and say things like OMG did you see the sweater Billy Connolly was wearing? SO AWESOME. Nobody talked about Peter Fonda’s atrocious performance as an Italian mafioso — about how he overpronounced every word (’kill’ became ‘keeeeel’) and overgesticulated like a Swedish chef. The worst part was that Fonda was devoid of humor. You can see in his mannerisms that he really believes he’s doing something great here. Also, the movie featured sheep for about .00243 seconds, so that was a topic of discussion for about fifteen minutes. What kind of sheep were they? Were they shorn? Yes, yes, they were shorn. Recently, too, it appeared. In other words, it was just ridiculously fun. Even though the movie was perhaps the worst I’ve seen in years. I think I’m going to start a CNDB or MrSkin site for knitters who love movies, and they can view slow-motion, hi-def clips of every sweater ever shown on the silver screen. And it’ll only cost $2.95/month. I’ll make a fortune.
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