1. "Grown Ups 2.... is not actually.... a movie...." - Tim Batt
2. The Frozen Abyssal Chasm of the The Worst Idea of All Time
The Worst Idea of All Time is a podcast wherein two comedians—Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt—watch the critically-panned but still remarkably profitable 2013 film Grown Ups 2, 52 times over the course of one year. The film is viewed once per week with minor scheduling variations. At no point is the time punctuating two consecutive viewings longer than 11 or 12 days. Criteria for selecting the film were multivariate.( 1 ) At the end of each episode, Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt advise their listeners: "Do not watch this movie."
Recurring episodic features from the first season include: Patty Schwartz Party Time (2) , The Steve Buscemi Mystery Tour (3), The Pitch (4), Today's Shining Light (5).
These two brave young men, having subjected themselves to 52 consecutive viewings of Grown Ups 2 over the past year—a feat roughly comparable with Ernest Shackleton's 1914-1917 transantarctic expedition; Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt now propose….. to watch & review Sex & the City 2, on 52 separate consecutive occasions between today, March 2015 & March of the year 2016—a feat roughly comparable to the Royal Navy's 1829-33 expedition to find a Northwest passage, leading to the discovery of the North Pole.
This is a portrait of courage in our times.
3. Acaster: "Life is a tapestry of disconnected scenes."
*From Episode 12-Acaster
4. Starring...
From Episode 1-"Difficulties"
5.Grown Ups 2=The Heineken of Cinema
From Episode 14-"Fitzhigham"
6. In 2013, Grown Ups 2 was to Hollywood in 2013 what Toxic Mortgage Paper had been to Wall St. a few years before.
7. The Worst Idea of All Time is also The Best Idea of All Time. (6)
8."If EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE…then NOTHING IS." (7)
9.Adam Sandler is repugnant.( 8 )
10.There is no God.
11. Tim takes time to reflect on his birthday.
12. Looking at Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt, my overwhelming impression is: Wow they really look Australian, y'know? Like: They just have that…Australian look to them. A thought which is followed by a number of questions: In what sense do Guy Montgomery & Tim Bratt look like Australians? What does an Australian look like? I don't know the answers to these questions.
13. Apparently they're actually from New Zealand.
14. “Something happens…for no reason.”
Acausality follows due to the dominance of the dynamics by almost time-independent modes.
15. Shock & Awe
There is a certain analogy between the density of attempted jokes in Grown Ups 2 and the Shock & Awe strategy deployed by the armed forces of the United States during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
16. Happy Madison Productions as SNL pension scheme
17. KMART as the archetypal landscape of the American cultural unconsciousness.
18. KMART as cinematic figuration of the womb/the mother (of America etc.) (9)
19. In 2013, Adam Sandler was the 86th most bankable star in Hollywood. His movies reliably delivered a mean average of $3.50 of ROI for every dollar he was paid.
In the same year, the SuperValu grocery store chain ranked 86th in the Fortune 500.
Net profits from Sandler's films exceeded the total net profits of SuperValu grocery. Supervalu's CEO, Sam Duncan was freshly incoming from his tenure at OfficeMax—a period during which the company collapsed and was acquired at an estimated $13B loss by it's competitor Office Depot. Duncan's compensation during the year that OfficeMax folded was roughly $13M: more than 650 times greater than the average OfficeMax (soon to be laid-off without severance) retail employee. Many of whom, we may assume, went to see Grown Ups 2. (10)
20. Close to 30% of the film's 101 minutes depicts a bunch of adult men wandering around inside of K-Mart. 10% of the film depicts a moose which has inexplicably wandered into a suburban bedroom pissing on Adam Sandler. 10% of the film depicts Selma Hayek's breasts, sprinkled with fractional percentages of her somehow-not-quite-convincing-latiná accent.
Given that Selma Hayek is a native citizen of Mexico who lived in her country of origin until the age of 25, how is it possible that her latiná accent in Grown Ups 2 sounds fake?
Why is Selma Hayek married to Adam Sandler?
We find that these questions--after several hundred repetitions—begin to reveal hidden depths. Like a Zen koan, they have no answer.
Not like, "these questions have no answer" in the sense of, like, "We don't know the answers to these yet."
But like, literally: "These questions…HAVE….NO….ANSWER."
After thousands of repetitions, intoned quietly, in solitude—this lack, these holes pricked in the fabric of the universe where the answers to these questions should be—acquire an awesome, burning radiance. This lack--this absence of all determinate content—becomes it's own kind of answer.
21. In 1933, Leni Riefenstahl made a movie called Triumph of the Will, depicting nearly a million Nazis marching in rigid formation, and various other spectacles requiring the cooperation of thousands. The film was considered a projection of the will of the German people. Triumph of the Will was shot with a budget of roughly $1.5M USD in today's dollars.(11) There were roughly 70M people living in Germany at the time, a small percentage of whom—perhaps 10 or 15%--actually attended the Nuremberg rally that year.
In 2013, it cost $80M to get Adam Sandler, Selena Gomez, Chris Rock, Maya Rudolph, Wood, Colin Quinn, Jon Lovitz, Tim Meadows, Shaquille O'Neal, Patrick Schwarenegger, Taylor Launter and some other people to get together for a few weekends and create an artifact which was not technically "a movie" or "a story" but had the appearance of being something like one of those things. 20M Americans showed up to see the film. Millions bought it on DVD.
That year the average disposable income after necessaries were paid for, for the average American worker in a 2.85 person household worked out to about $14 per person per week. The average ticket price was $8. In other words, 20M Americans made the decision, in the summer of 2013, to spend 60% of their disposable income on the week of July the 4th buying tickets to see Grown Ups 2.( 10.1 )
Effecting regime change in a presidential election in the United States requires the coordinated "showing up somwhere" of roughly 50M people. In other words, in a year when the political article publicly referred to as "jobs" was pretty much the only item up for debate, policy-wise, the collective will of the American people affirmed that Grown Ups 2 was worth roughly 60% of their weekly disposable income (frequently referred to in political rhetoric as their "freedom"). The American people affirmed their desire for and identification with Grown Ups 2 at a level of magnitude cresting at roughly 40% of the magnitude required to affect regime change.
In other words, given control of the swollen budget of one of America's political parties during a campaign year, the marketing team at Happy Madison and Sony Pictures could very easily have secured the presidency of the United States of America for the critically-maligned, but nevertheless net-revenue engorged 2013 Adam-Sandler-vehicle Grown Ups 2.
The implications of the political math, and the psychometric impact of democratic elections vs. the theatrical release of Grown Ups 2--what does it all add up to?The equivalence and the disproportion between the two films(Triumph of the Will/Grown Ups 2)—what does it mean?
Nothing. It doesn't mean anything.
22. "I like boring things… But that doesn't mean I'm not bored by them. Of course what I think is boring must not be the same as what other people think is, since I could never stand to watch all the most popular action shows on TV, because they're essentially the same plots and the same shorts and the same cuts over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I'm just the opposite: If I'm going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don't want to be essentially the same—I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes and the better and emptier you feel." -A. Warhol
23. Considering the reckless abandon with which Guy Montgomery & Timothy Batt have pursued their researches into Grown Ups 2, and the outcomes we have observed as result of their self-experimentation, we are reminded of various insights recorded in some of the literature that came out of MK Ultra Subproject 68—particulary Ewen's papers on sensory deprivation,depatterning and psychic driving.
24. The existential resonance of anxiety is much more than a mere methodological side-effect of systematically engaging in 52 rigidly scheduled consecutive viewings & podcast formatted re-viewings of Grown Ups 2, which received a PG-13 rating from the MPAA .
The first thing to grasp is that anxiety does not mean ceaselessly fretting or fitfully worrying about something or other in particular.
Anxiety is not fear. Fear has an object. It could be traced—for example—to a large spider, or to Adam Sandler. Remove the spider from the house, remove Adam Sandler: voilá! No more fear.
But anxiety has no fixed object.
Before all this—before The Worst Idea of All Time—the world was a homely place. We had our little interests and our little jobs and we just sort of puttered around, and fucked off and got pished and did shows and what not.
After The Worst Idea of All Time we find ourselves in anxiety. And in anxiety, all of this changes. Suddenly Guy Montgomery & Tim Bratt are overtaken by the mood of anxiety that renders the world meaningless. It appears to Guy Montgomery & Tim Bratt as an inauthentic spectacle. A kind of tranquilised and pointless bustle of activity. In anxiety the everyday world slips away and my home becomes uncanny (unheimlich) and strange to me. From being players in the game of life that they loved, they become observers of a game that they no longer see the point in playing.
What is first glimpsed in anxiety is the authentic self. As the world slips away, we obtrude. I like to think about this in maritime terms. Inauthentic life in the world is completely bound up with things and other people in a kind of "groundless floating". Everyday life in the world is like being immersed in the sea and drowned by the world's suffocating banality. Anxiety is the experience of the tide going out, the seawater draining away, revealing a self stranded on the strand, as it were.(14)
26. There are distinct affinities between The Worst Idea of All Time, Maguire Watch, and the World Speed Project.
27. The World Speed Project
29.1 We Buy White Albums
29.2 We Buy White Albums
30. Chang, in his We Buy White Albums project, seems to be interested in how mass-produced objects are indented with traces of individuality as a result of wear and tear, different owners, the detritus of decades. He is sincerely interested and engaged with the contents of the White Album.
We Buy White Album's medium is the first pressing of The Beatles' White Album.
The World Speed Project seems to be interested in 1994 blockbuster Speed solely as an object instantiating the trash of culture, a complex object which took millions of dollars to produce but is now worth nothing.
The World Speed Project's medium is VHS copies of Speed.
Maguire Watch is a theater-piece. Or not. These guys never break character: they stick to their narrative that they actually want to save as many copies of Jerry Maguire(1996) as they can. Or they actually really do want to save as many copies of Jerry Maguire as they can.
There's hardly any difference at this point.
Maguire Watch's medium is any physical format of Jerry Maguire.
The Worst Idea of All Time is singular among these projects, insofar as—once they've chosen it-- Grown Ups 2 has at least as much agency or power over the project as Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt.
The minds of the podcast's authors are deconstructed quite as much as Grown Ups 2 itself in the process of repetitively reviewing the film over 52 sessions. They are as plastic & malleable—much more plastic & malleable really—as the material they are working with.
Other affinities include:
32. Andy Kaufamn's Midnight Special rendition of "I Trusted You"
34. Etc. etc.: Andy Warhol, Jean Tinguely, AndrewAndrew in earlier days, Deleuze and Guattari, undead twins from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining etc.
35. In his 'movie' Grown Ups 2, Adam Sandler, speaking to his Doctor (the film's director, Dennis Dugan) who is shitfaced and has been awake for three days, as the 'movie's' protagonist, Lenny Feder, asks:
"Doctor, wouldn't it be nice if there was a cure for anger?"
"There is," the Doctor (film director Denis Dugan) retorts, "It's called Jack Daniels."
Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story's hero, Lenny Feder? Is it the man Adam Sandler? Is it Denis Dugan (who supposedly helped to 'write the script'). Is it the embodied voice of universal ignorance? Just some asshole? It will always be impossible to know, for the good reason that all screenplays are themselves this special voice, consisting of several indiscernible voices & that the movies are precisely the invention of this voice, to which we cannot assign a specific origin: "the movie" is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that acts out the part. (15)
36. Part of the beauty of the project is that—very obviously—the creators of Grown Ups 2 did not spend as much time thinking about it as Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt. No one—not even the editors—ever consumed the film as a whole product as many times, or thought about it from as many angles as Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt, not even the editors, much less Adam Sandler or Dennis Dugan.
What is operating behind the film's surface is not a human psyche—it is the gunked-up polluted matrix of Hollywood capital itself, pin connectors searching for the socket contacts to plug in to America's collective consciousness.
37. “Isn’t life a series of images that change as they repeat themselves?”-A. Warhol
38. Walter Benjamin // “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
39. Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt:
"Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it's nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it's only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied." (16)
40. Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt:
"The body is the Character, or rather the material of the Character. The material of the Character must not be confused with the spatializing material structure, which is positioned in opposition to it. The body is the Character, not the structure. Conversely, the Character, being a body, is not the face, and does not even have a face. It does have a head, because the head is an integral part of the body. It can even be reduced to the head. As a screenwriter, Adam Sandler is a painter of heads, not faces—of heads without faces. There's face painters. And there's head painters. And there is a great difference between the two." (17)
41. There is some kind of resonance between "The Shining Moment" and Heidigger's concept of "the clearing" or "Das Lichtung."
42. The reader, the writer; the writer, the director, the actor, the movie-goer; the artist, the viewer; the podcast, the listener—we collaborate to co-create the meaning of the text. So say-eth the English Professor at University. And isn't the university the Toxic Mortgage Paper of the future, the Grown Ups 2—so to speak—of today?
43. I was gonna' go for 52 but I've run out of time.
44. Matafeo projects meaning onto the infinite blank screen of The Worst Idea of All Time.
FOOTNOTES
( 1 ) "Multivariate considerations" EG. The Room (Wisseau, 2003) was considered too "artistic" and therefore eliminated from consideration.
( 2 )Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and occasional lover of Miley Cyrus appears in several scenes in the movie as a supporting actor. Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt spend a small segment of each episode deconstructing his foibles, cultural significance etc.
( 3 ) Steve Buscemi has a walk-on part in the film in a cast encasing his entire upper torso, freezing him in a touchdown pose. The implication is that he was seriously injured during the first film of the franchsise. Guy Montgomery & Tim Batt spend a bit of time each episode hypothesizing about what the nature & circumstances of Steve Buscemi's injury were.
( 4 )All guests on the show must pitch the Grown Ups 2 to Tim & Guy, as if the two were skeptical producers.
( 5 ) The Shining Light of the day is whatever they found funny, or something which became illuminated for them for the first time despite their repeated viewings etc.
( 6 ) If we acknowledge that the signifier is divorced from the signified, meaning is contextual and performative, that in this in this context 'The Worst Idea of All Time"=Watching Grown Ups 2, once a week for 52 consecutive weeks.
( 8 ) And yet Sandler projects such as The Comedian, Punch Drunk Love etc. would tend to imply that his repugnance is not a function of ignorance or lack of depth. Furthermore, we have to admit that—while not exactly ingenious—Sandler had a few admittedly funny moments during his first few years under the limelight (RE: "Memory Lane"—the only scrap of his old material that stands the test of time upon review.
( 9 ) A la Carol Clover et al. "darkness/basement=womb/mother"/final girl/slasher films in Her Body, Himself.
( 10 ) Sources for this information include but are not exclusive to:
*IMDB
( 11 ) Warhol
( 12 ) We wonder what rating it would have received if it had been submitted to the FDA for inspection, or to the APA, or the Department of Defense.
( 13 ) This entirely cribbed from Simon Critchley's 5th essay on Heidegger for the Guardian "Being and Time, part 5: Anxiety."
( 14 ) Barthes, Death of the Author.
( 15 ) Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
( 16 ) Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation.
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