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| Left to right: D.J. Qualls, Seann William Scott, Breckin Meyer, and Paolo Costanzo |
Welcome to Alternative to What: a weekly column that tries to find a great alternative to driving to the multiplexes. Based on releases of that week, the selections will either be thematically related or feature recurring cast and crew. The goal is to help you better understand the diversity of cinema and hopefully find you some favorites while saving a few bucks. At worse, this column will save you money. Expect each installment to come out on Fridays, unless specified.
THIS WEEK:
Road Trip (2000)
- Alternative To -
Sex Tape (2014)
When compiling a list of potential titles for this week's Alternative to What, there was one that was adamantly clear. For weeks now, I have been seeing advertisements for the latest comedy Sex Tape. There was only one film that I would have recommended this week anyways. It is the exact same thing, but has the benefit of being from a bygone era. Both feature a tape of sexual infidelities being improperly mailed to unwanted recipients. In fact, it is so blatant that had Sex Tape not used modern technology as a deus ex machina, it would be the exact same thing. It is distractingly so to the point that I just had to dedicate this week's column to...
Road Trip. Before director Todd Phillips made it big with The Hangover franchise, he was a young anarchic director who made the G.G. Allin documentary Hated and had yet to be embraced by the frat boy audience. In 2000, around the peak of Tom Green's popularity, he released Road Trip and it turned out to be the strangest, most creative experiment in the man-child phenomena that wouldn't begin evolving until 2007 with Judd Apatow's production department. With this film, he captured something ingenious that couldn't be done today. He made a film about a road trip based around keeping a significant other from seeing a sex tape involving another woman. What follows is bizarre, juvenile inspiration that may suffer from being too crass, but delivers in other places.
Sex Tape feels like the exact same film, but with all of the trappings that make it seem illogical. Where Road Trip had a basis in logical "beat the mailman" logic, Sex Tape is more based int he fact that everyone immediately has access to it. No matter how hard they try, someone will have seen it and their reputation is altered forever. There is no real momentum to the story other than two characters being insecure about their sex lives being shown to the public. Based on trailers, the choices for it to appear in public forums is even dumber. Road Trip solely wins because it has the ability to change the course of a singular tape. Also, is Sex Tape even a tape? If nothing else, Sex Tape is a reflection of how dumb humanity is and cannot control their technology, and not in the insightful ways that The Terminator could do.
To say the least, Road Trip is also an intriguing sex comedy because it has ingenious techniques in its narrative. There's the unreliable narrator Barry (Green), who essentially tells the tale while guiding a tour around a college campus and splicing in his thoughts on women's locker rooms. He is as crass as Green at the top of his crass career (only Freddy Got Fingered outdid it), but is only a plot device compared to the central four characters, who almost are written as folklore and this whole story being a lazy interpretation of Homer's "Odyssey." The cast is solid and they are game for anything. It also effectively plays into the road trip dynamics by hitting ribald destinations along the way.
Most of all it works because it is in the final years where these type of stories could work. Basically, if there's any detractor to film, it is the convenience of technology. It suddenly doesn't benefit, but kills entire story beats. Imagine how many stories could have been resolved with a cell phone or Googling answers. Those type of films stopped being relevant as soon as Yahoo! Instant Messenger became a thing and even less-so when wifi became universally ingrained. In fact, Road Trip seems archaic solely because the sex tape is on a VHS tape. As seen in the clip above, Blockbuster rentals had yet to embrace DVD technology. That is how different our social morals have gotten.
If nothing else, Sex Tape has no right to exist because it breaks a lot of commandments. Where one could foolishly mail a VHS tape, trying to withhold a computer file from reaching a broad audience is just plain stupid. You actually have to dumb down the characters to not understand technology in ways that usually are reserved for geriatrics. It is meant to alter reality too much. Yes, Green's character may be unrealistically crass at points, but he feels more authentic than people doing broadly stupid things to keep a video from being shown.
If nothing else, Road Trip is a great example of how to do the American sex comedy. Yes, there are a lot of better options, but none that feel like a more relevant remark to Sex Tape. You can do dumb things, but don't make your characters the epitome of dumb. Give them some intelligence or quirky characteristics. There is nothing in Sex Tape's trailers that feel authentic and it is because it feels like it is pandering on its premise. In a week where Rotten Tomatoes has rated all of its new releases rotten, Sex Tape seems oddly repulsive among them.
Most of all it works because it is in the final years where these type of stories could work. Basically, if there's any detractor to film, it is the convenience of technology. It suddenly doesn't benefit, but kills entire story beats. Imagine how many stories could have been resolved with a cell phone or Googling answers. Those type of films stopped being relevant as soon as Yahoo! Instant Messenger became a thing and even less-so when wifi became universally ingrained. In fact, Road Trip seems archaic solely because the sex tape is on a VHS tape. As seen in the clip above, Blockbuster rentals had yet to embrace DVD technology. That is how different our social morals have gotten.
If nothing else, Sex Tape has no right to exist because it breaks a lot of commandments. Where one could foolishly mail a VHS tape, trying to withhold a computer file from reaching a broad audience is just plain stupid. You actually have to dumb down the characters to not understand technology in ways that usually are reserved for geriatrics. It is meant to alter reality too much. Yes, Green's character may be unrealistically crass at points, but he feels more authentic than people doing broadly stupid things to keep a video from being shown.
If nothing else, Road Trip is a great example of how to do the American sex comedy. Yes, there are a lot of better options, but none that feel like a more relevant remark to Sex Tape. You can do dumb things, but don't make your characters the epitome of dumb. Give them some intelligence or quirky characteristics. There is nothing in Sex Tape's trailers that feel authentic and it is because it feels like it is pandering on its premise. In a week where Rotten Tomatoes has rated all of its new releases rotten, Sex Tape seems oddly repulsive among them.
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