The title of this article is a real plea for understanding. I need to know what the fuck is wrong with Box Office Mojo’s Scott Holleran, because if it turns out that someone once stuck their dick so far into his ear that he suffered massive brain damage, I’ll lay off him. But if the guy is not suffering from any medically recognized disorders or deficiencies, I’m going to call it like I see it, and I see it like he is a total fucking douchebag.
Holleran’s always been a weiner, and that weenie attitude has been part of the fun of reading his delusional column at BO Mojo (a truly indispensable site, by the way). His rants read like a cranky revival tent preacher circa 1820 – you’re shocked that he isn’t decrying that women’s skirts are above their knees. He’s a backassward motherfucker, which is great – the internet is big and there’s always room for another guy with a totally ignorant opinion at which I can laugh and laugh and laugh.
Holleran’s not dangerous – for one thing, he is, to the best of my knowledge, an Objectivist, which means he suckles on the spiky cock of Ayn Rand and subscribes to a philosophy that any 12 year old can see through as evil and selfish. Objectivists are, by definition, loonie cranks.
But despite being a harmless crackpot with deeply suspect personal philosophies, Holleran has royally pissed me off this week. He has taken Hot Fuzz to task… for the Virginia Tech massacre. Holleran says that the modern comedy classic Hot Fuzz is “another of those rapid-fire pictures that sneers at values with nihilistic abandon, firing off bullets and one-liners, usually in the same instant, as heads pop off and blood goes spurting and it’s all supposedly hilarious. The Virginia Tech massacre is a reminder that it isn’t funny.”
What would Holleran know about funny? Not much, obviously, since the guy names The Holiday and She’s The Man as some of the best films of 2006 (while calling Pan’s Labyrinth “unbearable” and “depraved”), and his columns are distressingly humorless. Assuming that Holleran has seen the movie (and it seems to me completely plausible that he has), he’s in the vast minority when it comes to finding the film unfunny, as Hot Fuzz has a very nice 88% rating at Rotten Tomatoes (he is joined in his dislike of Hot Fuzz by the widely ignored Josh Tyler, a guy whose knowledge and understanding of movies is breathtaking in its shallowness). But hey, different strokes for different folks, right? I mean, not everyone has the same sense of humor, and I know at least one really smart guy with really good taste who didn’t like Hot Fuzz as much as he would have liked.
But then Holleran goes nuts. It isn’t that the comedy doesn’t work – he thinks the movie has ‘contempt for life’ (seriously, how stupid an assertion is that? Does he think the film is made by people from the anti-matter universe or something?). “Hot Fuzz, which applies dry humor to the death-premise genre, is one of countless examples in this type of thing, from Saturday Night Live and Monty Python skits to South Park and Beavis and Butthead.” It’s like Holleran is laying down the gauntlet, declaring himself the motherfucker with the most underfed sense of humor since the first cop who arrested Lenny Bruce.
Look, Holleran, Virginia Tech was a tragedy, but to point the finger at Hot Fucking Fuzz, or Kill Bill, or any movie that just doesn’t line up with your Paleolithic cultural values is despicable. I hope that Krazy Korean had a copy of The Fountainhead in his dorm room, so that we can all point our fingers at that ugly cunt Ayn Rand and her followers. Hell, I think that saying Objectivism is the cause of misery in the world today is more reasonable than saying movies are somehow linked to our ‘cultural decay’ – it isn’t like Hot Fuzz is a philosophy based completely on self-gratification (I don’t mean that as a code word for masturbation – I wouldn’t want to upset your values by insinuating that you might sometimes rub one out).
What’s interesting is how much Holleran seems to hate movies. Why run a box office web site when you hate movies so much [note: I was under the wrong impression that Holleran runs the site, which is not the case. He still writes for it, so the basic premise here remains]? It’s like if some pussy in a DARE program started a website that tracked coke’s street value, week by week (PS, someone should do this). There’s something about Holleran’s adherence to this facet of entertainment that strikes me as hypocritical.
Scott, I love your site. I go there all the time to get valuable box office data, and I hope that my page views help you pay for that “I <3 John Galt” tattoo across your stomach. But stick with the numbers, since your opinions are ignorant and laughable.