"The Chair" TV show (two movies)

[Totenkindly]

This apparently aired on Starz last year (?); it was a reality show about various tasks involved in developing/producing a movie, and there had been voting by viewers on which of two movies should be selected as winner. Both movies actually started from the same script, although I suspect each movie only cannibalized some lines of dialogue (possibly) + certain general events and broad plot of the original script.

The most notorious thing about the show is that Zachary Quinto (an executive producer for the show) felt that the voting was unbalanced (the director who won has a 12-million-subscriber base on YouTube and the other director had nothing even close to that) and also that, from a technical perspective, the non-winning movie was actually better. He also did not happen to appreciate the humor of Shane Dawson (the director of the winner, "Not Cool") and that it wasn't funny at all.

Both movies are still available on streaming sites. I'll include the links here that I am using, in case anyone is interested in watching them. i think it's worthwhile to watch both, to see how each director took the script and made it their own. If you do watch them, what do you think? Is Quinto right? Have a preference for either? Etc.

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"Not Cool" (Shane Dawson)

my thoughts:

This movie to me is like the twisted love child of "Sixteen Candles 2014 Redux" + "The Most Popular Girls in School" Youtube show.

- The humor is pretty coarse and totally NSFW, but I actually laughed through much of it due to the unexpected lines and the manic pacing. (My sense of humor ranges across a number of different categories.) Maybe that's just my Ne talking. But I found the bulk of it really amusing -- it's just that, about two-thirds of the way through, it started to get a little old.

- I'm not really fond of the "hypersexual obsessed stalker guy is just lonely and needs a friend" meme, which this movie plays into. It's not positive to teach young girls that if they are just nice and reasonable and firm, stalker guys will treat them with respect and back off and suddenly be their friend.

- Why is just about every girl in the movie (except for the ones being played for laughs due to their fat or crazy appearance) a total knockout? Especially the lead Cherami Leigh, who did do an amazing job as the sardonic Tori, yet has perfect eyes, perfect face, perfect hair, great voice, nice body, etc? Basically, my issue is that it's not that much of a reach for ex-Mr. Popular Scott to fall for her, since he typically goes for knockouts. Again, she did the role perfectly, but I would have felt like Scott's change would have been more substantial if she would have been one of those girls who becomes beautiful as you get to know her, like Shailene Woodley in "The Spectacular now," for example.

Anyway, my overall thought is that it was one of the funniest entries within its genre that I've seen, but the genre itself can often be very limited. I think a movie like Easy-A (for example) managed to describe a similar culture and setup, while managing to be funny as well as deep and thus have more staying power.

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"Hollidaysburg" (Anna Martemucci)

<still watching>