The Wrath of Con

There are almost as many different ways of finding a movie to watch as there are movies.  Every major critic is now online, and every movie fan has become an online critic.  Such a vast output of raw sewage burbles out that competing aggregates offer to manage the flow.  So many words, so many mouths, and all the while, Madison Avenue flushes its 200 trillion cents down your throat.  Make a decision at your peril:  Buy a DVD from Amazon, rent one from Netflix, and pages full of we-also-thought-you-might-likes spring up like Hydra heads.  I can’t pick a metaphor, never mind a movie.  I want it all.  I have 446 titles in my Netflix queue.

Help came a couple months ago in the form of a banner ad.  Now, whenever I want something to entertain me I have but to ask a single question:

What Would Shatner Watch?

The William Shatner DVD Club promised “exceptional movies for the Sci-Fi fan!,” said I could “own the underground hits no one else has.”  “With the help of my team of expert film critics,” sez Mr. S, “I will fill your library with the titles movie lovers need to own.”

“Each month,” they said, “you’ll receive unique titles with original stories, well-written and acted scripts, and the intangible qualities that make each film memorable.”  A year-long helping of those intangible qualities will run you a one-time fee of $49.95; you’ll receive “12 great DVDs plus 2 Bonus Disks & Free Shipping!”  That works out to a very reasonable $3.57/disc.

A quick Google showed the club’s press release had made the rounds earlier this year, the concept joshed everywhere from Defamer to The Washington Post; at the very least, it was treated as a novelty piece.  But no one seemed to have taken the story past Warp Factor One.  The words FREE TRIAL OFFER cemented it:  I was going where no man had gone before.  I was going to “start experiencing home entertainment the William Shatner way,” no matter how unpleasant that sounded.

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The important thing about the William Shatner DVD Club is that it’s WILLIAM SHATNER’S DVD CLUB.  The way all these books are WILLIAM SHATNER NOVELS.  I like the idea of the actor/recording artist tossing and turning in bed at night, wondering if his newest paying member really, really enjoyed The Butterfly Effect – and everything about the Shat-club’s set-up is designed to make you think he’s more hands-on than his Boston Legal character.

The pages of the site are personalized – it’s all “I”, “me” and “my” – and  adorned (“sincerely”) with Shatner’s signature and smug photo (credited to williamshatner.com).  William Shatner hopes I “enjoy adding this month’s DVD to my growing collection of Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy Entertainment” (caps theirs his).  William Shatner “thoroughly enjoyed Ginger Snaps based on its eloquent combination of cunning intelligence, wry satire, and terrifying suspense.”  Sign-Up today, so that William Shatner “can send you your first move [sic] absolutely FREE.”

Hey, that’s William Shatner’s typo, right there.

Should you choose to become a part of the club, you’re assured “William Shatner respects your privacy.”

Whether or not you join, you can subscribe to the club’s free newsletter, in which you’ll “get William Shatner’s opinion before you go to the theatre or watch it on DVD!”  I subscribed, naturally, and to my dismay found that William Shatner is well-acquainted with the works of the Marquis de Sade... or at least John Bartlett.  Here’s the beginning of William Shatner’s wordy review of Keira Knightley-Adrien Brody thriller The Jacket (which got splattered with a 44% rating on Rotten Tomatoes):

“To know virtue,” the Marquis de Sade once said, “we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.” While the controversial writer was not referring to The Jacket when he said that many years ago, it fits well with my assessment of the film, nonetheless. The Jacket’s hostility will make stomachs churn and faces cringe, but a noble cause justifies the means in the end; because of the film’s hostility, when tenderness ultimately appears, it’s all the more poignant. But will thin-skinned viewers be able to endure the disturbing imagery until the affectionate, optimistic persona reveals itself?

Thanks, William Shatner!  I thought de Sade might have been referring to a movie made almost two hundred years after his death!

But The Jacket won’t be one of the movies William Shatner sends you.  Nor will Spielberg’s Minority Report or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, other features that appear in his newsletter; these are just the movies he’s reviewing for you.  I’m sure they didn’t mean to imply anything further, just as they – or he, William Shatner – didn’t mean to imply one of the Star Trek films might be a monthly selection just because there was a list of them (as part of a “weekly poll” only recently replaced by an X-Men contest) on the site’s front page.  “Representative examples” of the movies he’s going to send you are summarized on the club’s site, and just because you’ve never heard of most of them doesn’t mean they suck.  They are “underground hits, genre classics, and even some gems pulled from the far reaches of independent cinema.”  Though you can get all snooty and cynical, I will say that the first movie William Shatner sent to me, Ginger Snaps, was one of the better horror films I’d seen in some time.  No lie.

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But before we discuss the actual product, there’s one more thing William Shatner does for The William Shatner DVD Club:  He endorses it by quoting other people who’ve quoted him.

When the fold-out cardboard envelope containing my first two Shatner-chosen discs came, three blurbs lined the interior:

I read David Poland’s Movie City News – a valuable filmbiz news aggregator that features regular columns and a handful of blogs – with some frequency and this just didn’t sound like something they’d review, or something they’d say.  It’s the sort of thing they’d link to, laugh at.  And the quote sounded like something from a PR release.

A quick Google took me here:

Not only did Shatner’s club quote one of its own press releases and attribute it to someone else, the quote they pulled from the release was one supposedly from Shatner himself.

No one loves William Shatner like William Shatner does.

Not the Sci Fi Channel...

...nor StarTrek.com, whose “quote” is not only from Shatner, but embarrassingly similar to a line used on the club’s site.

Those endorsement blurbs were not online when I signed up; they were only in the cardboard mailer that goes out to new subscribers during their free trial period, subscribers who have yet to commit fifty bucks to the enterprise.  But today, when I went back to the site, they’d added the graphic below to their features page.

They boldly linked to MCN, Sci-Fi and StarTrek.com – but didn’t, of course, link to the pages from which those quotes are “taken.”  They also didn’t link to the “As Seen in” sources cited:  Not the derisive Washington Post article in which Shatner’s playfully compared to “a virus,” nor to Wired,  Movies.com (which calls the club “a pretty cool idea”) or Yahoo! Movies (the only mention I could find on their site was this Shatner-oriented links page).

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We’ll push integrity issues aside, for the moment, because with a DVD club it’s the movies, stupid.  And I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been expecting some pretty stupid movies.  I enjoy a good bad flick, and a year of playing Joel and the Bots to Shatner’s Dr. Forrester had a certain appeal.

As mentioned, though, Ginger Snaps turned out to be pretty darned good.  The circa-2000 Canadian horror film must have been at least a minor success in its homeland – there have been two sequels – and has received some critical notice (scoring an impressive (especially for its genre) 89% on the Tomatometer).

It’s mostly a good horror film because, for a good while, it refuses to be a horror film.

Gothy sisters Ginger and Brigitte insulate themselves from their high school peers, being aggressively antisocial, staging outrageous death scenes that’d make Harold Chasen swoon.  What really separates G & B from other girls their age, though, is their bodies:  Though 15 and 16, neither has started menstruating.

Meanwhile, a creature of some sort has been eviscerating neighborhood pets...

Yes, Ginger Snaps is about menstruation.  I can think of two precedents – Carrie, of course, and an old, controversial Allan Moore Swamp Thing story called “The Curse” – and there are surely others.  After all, blood is involved.  Though there are hints of Cronenbergian body horror, Snaps draws on the same theme that fueled the best episodes of Buffy and every I Was a Teenage ______ film of the fifties:  Adolescence is monstrous.

The heart of the film is the relationship between the two sisters and how it changes when one begins to grow up.  When Ginger “goes hormonal,” her younger sibling feels betrayed, abandoned.  And starts looking for a cure.  “Something’s wrong,” Brig says, “More than you just being female.”

The movie hits some rough patches in the middle – having avoided genre structure, its unpredictability gets it lost from time to time – and ultimately has trouble resolving both its metaphor and its plot.  Budget limitations show in the special effects.  But it’s smart stuff, emotionally involving, and the two lead actresses are strong.  I’m glad I saw it, and stuck the supposedly-almost-as-good sequels in my Netflix queue.

It is a bit creepy that Big Bill’s introductory recommendation concerned a teenage girl getting her first period.

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But Ginger wasn’t the only disc Uncle Shat slapped into a cardboard envelope for my viewing pleasure.  One of my two annual “bonus” DVDs came with this initial shipment, and it turned out to be a doozy.

Wolves of Wall Street features Eric Roberts in a supporting role.  You don’t really need to know more than that, do you?

Oh, okay:  Jeff Allen (William Gregory Lee, who looks like a himboish Matt Damon... a more himboish Matt Damon) has come to the big city to make his dream of being a Wall Street broker come true.  He’s been dreaming about it all his life.  We know this because he says it about a dozen times throughout the movie.

Bartender-with-heart-of-gold Annabella (!), played by actress-with-bills-to-pay Elisa Donovan, points Jeff towards Roberts’ “Wolfe Brothers” law firm.  There – and what a “there” it is, a brokerage house without computers, everyone working by candlelight – our dreamy lad realizes those dreams of which he’s been dreaming all his life, and becomes a high-powered broker.  And a werewolf.  Maybe.

At one point he buys a really dumb-looking hat.

The brilliance of Wolves lies in what doesn’t happen.  At least it must, because not much happens at all.  There’s a very bold approach to the werewolf effects in that there aren’t any:  There are animal snarls on the soundtrack while Jeffy seems to grapple with tendonitis.  The same attitude’s taken towards the exploitive elements:  There are these fantastic blood orgies that don’t feature any sex, or any blood; a bunch of male models undress to their boxer briefs and... sniff some captive women.  So, there’s some heavy sniffing.  (“You can... smell things,” Roberts says, explaining the nature of his firms wolves. “Tiny, obscure things.”)

A more subtle, performance-based lycanthrope pic?  The pun-heavy dialogue begs to differ:  Brokerage is “a predatory business,” a “dog-eat-dog” world in which you have to “claw, bite, and scratch your way to the top.”  “We are animals,” Roberts says.  “We mark territory and protect it.”  He licks his balls, because he can, and occasionally drinks from the toilet.

There’s nothing subtle about how the movie apes the Al Pacino/Whoa! Reeves flick Devil’s Advocate – and I can tell this without having seen Advocate – or about how it starts consuming itself:  The movie is 81 minutes long and probably contains 70 minutes of footage.  Every opportunity is taken to flashback to earlier scenes, and shots are echoed endlessly (the giant digital moon is always full, and looks to be tethered to the Empire State Building).

Michael Bergin, as Roberts’ right-hand man, is given hilariously large chunks of dialogue.  They don’t fit in his mouth.  There’s a Wall Street-style motivational speech that feels cut-and-pasted from How to Influence People and Move Their Cheese.  He repeats the line “‘Can’t’ isn’t in your vocabulary!” like it’s some sort of mantra; riotously, Bergin is unable to pronounce “vocabulary.”

There aren’t enough unintentional laughs, though; mostly it’s just dull.  It would have been more interesting had director David DeCoteau made the Big Gay Werewolf Movie he obviously wanted to make (Jeff, after a particularly severe bout of tendonitis, sneaks away from his girlfriend to murder a leatherboy).

“As a special thank you for joining the club,” Shatner’s envelope said, “We’ve included a bonus title absolutely free.  Periodically, the Shatner DVD Club will reward subscribers with a bonus disc like this one...”  Thanks, but no thanks.

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Wolves was meant to be “kind of a joke,” the customer service rep said when I called.  “We didn’t explain it that well.”

Cap’n Kirk, of course, is not stuffing envelopes.  The business is “powered” by Brooklyn-based Fullturn Entertainment (though the disc itself was shipped from Lenoxdale, Mass.).  “Fullturn is facilitating efficient consumer access to niche entertainment genres by harnessing the combined power of the internet and digital video and building partnerships with leaders in the entertainment industry.”  Well!

The customer service rep with whom I spoke was more than understanding when I called to cancel my membership.  I didn’t badger him with questions, just got an assurance I wouldn’t be charged.  Despite the title of this entry, I don’t know there’s any real con – just some promotional dishonesty.  It’s wrong to claim false endorsements; just ask Sony.  Better yet, ask Movie City News, the Sci-Fi Channel and StarTrek.com.  The extent to which Mr. Shatner is believed to be involved?  Probably only important to Mr. Shatner.

The claim you’ll “own the underground hits no one else has” demands clarity – Ginger Snaps is widely available for sale, though perhaps not from any other mail-order DVD clubs insisting they’re run by hammy veterans of beloved science fiction franchises; and the club’s generous duplicate policy – if you already own a selection they send, notify them and they’ll send you another without demanding any kind of return – seems to contradict notions of exclusive product.  (The only movie currently listed on the club’s site as “exclusive” – Robert Llewellyn’s it2i2 – does seem to be... to the extent it’s not even included on the imdb.)

Bottom line:  You can – according to William Shatner, who quotes himself to endorse his own club and attributes those quotes to reputable third parties – own whatever movies William Shatner sends you for less than four bucks per disc.  Which doesn’t sound like such a bad deal.  Unless the movie’s “a joke.”  Or something starring Ashton Kutcher.  Or something in which you’re simply not interested.  I’m not saying that the William Shatner DVD Club is a bad idea, really, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t join should the urge strike you to do so.

After all, I’m pretty sure William Shatner would.

tags: movie city news  star trek  william shatner dvd club  ginger snaps  sci fi channel  washington post  

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