I am beginning to be afraid of hipsters taking over the world. It's not the big issues that concern me but the little details that sneak in. Why are clothes at the store moving towards muddy prints and tight pants? Why are so many advertisements featuring bearded awkward-looking models? And why is my Ella Fitzgerald Pandora station playing Vampire Weekend??
I know there are a lot of folks who aren't hipsters, and many many more who have never even heard of them, but the signs and symptoms of hipsters are sneaking into popular culture and it troubles me. (The hipsters also shouldn't like this since they will be far less cool if their lifestyle is being marketed to the good people who shop at Wal-Mart.)
I only bring it up because I saw the film HOP yesterday. We had gone to see MARS NEEDS MOMS but that movie was no longer in the theater so we picked the next available children's film and went in. HOP has some lovely people in it. It has beautiful CGI. It even has the pointless plot inconsistencies which are apparently required of children's films. But it also has feet-on-the-ground unglamorous shots of Hollywood neighborhoods which wait breathlessly for someone on a fixed-gear bike to ride through. E.B., the bunny who poos jelly beans and wants to become a drummer, voiced
by the charmingly androgynous Russell Brand, wears plaid flannel for no reason at all. And the story is centered around a charmless 30+ slacker who lives at home and who, pointlessly, decides that he wants to become the Easter Bunny.All of this would have been okay if the leading actor were James Franco. The guy can host the Oscars, do trashy daytime soaps, write, perform, and basically sneer at anyone who questions his impeccable Indy cred. He can pull off slacker-with-a-twinkle-in-his-eye better than anyone and this
movie was written for him. Unfortunately, he's not in it. James Marsden is. Yeah. This guy:James Marsden has no soul. He may or may not be able to act. He's theoretically attractive and has the requisite hipster hair but he rolls a zero on charm. He can't be smugly ironic or whimsically awful or even very interesting. You may recognize him from the X-Men movies where he played the biggest prick in comics, Cyclops. He was adequate in HAIRSPRAY where he was required to look really white when he danced (check!), smile broadly while saying vapid things (check!), and portray a character who has absolutely no soul (check and CHECK!) In HOP, he was terrible.
PAUL, however, was delightful. There was no hipster and a ton of geek! And, let me say that from the beginning I was thrilled because the first stop o
n their geek tour of all things UFO was the Little A'Le'Inn located conveniently in the middle of nowhere Nevada where my sisters and I have been!! Jane Lynch plays the weird old lady who runs the place and looks just like the lady who ACTUALLY runs the place! We were there for only 15 min or so and she (the real lady not Jane Lynch) treated us to a lecture on how we really needed to invest in long fake nails because "men look at your hands first and they gotta be lady like." We looked at her square nicotine-stained man-hands gesturing around her leathery wrinkled face and teased-out bleach blond hair and agreed that her 2" long fake nails did indeed add something to her look.Anyway, I bring it up as an example of how tight this movie with with the nerd details. I didn't even get them all and I used to go to Star Trek conventions. (Seriously. I did.) Every detail is so thought out that even the license plates in each scene are different and say different things each time. The writing is tight (Best Worst-Thing-To-Say-To-A-Girl Line: "Remember when you kissed me and I was thinking Ah! get away from me you crazy rapist? Ha ha... eh... oh....) the gags are tight (Ewok fetishes are funny!), and the actors are brilliant.( Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman.. must I go on?)
Basically it is so funny that I'm going to have to get a new job where I can actually repeat some of the things I heard in this film. Preschool is no place for a potty mouth. =)
ADDENDUM:
For those of you interested in getting more information about hipsters, please see this excellent article:
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html
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