ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL NO STARS
Starring Thomas Mann, RJ Cyler, Olivia Cooke, Nick Offerman and Molly Shannon. Screenplay by Jesse Andrews. Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.
Oh, why didn’t they just call it Me?
This is the most disgusting, epic ode to White People Problems I’ve seen since The Blind Side, overweening with entitlement and privilege – so much that at one point I looked to my right and a distinguished colleague was actually holding up his middle finger at the screen. Me And Earl And The Dying Girl is foul – the most rancid, filthy racist movie I’ve seen in years.
And I’m here today to tell you why.
Young actor Thomas Mann (not the Death In Venice guy) stars as Greg Gaines, a self-obsessed teenage twat who spends most of his time with his nose buried in the Criterion Collection. He and his “co-worker” Earl (RJ Cutler) waste way too many days coming up with one-liner parody films, a la “A Sockwork Orange” (Kubrick’s movie done with sock puppets) or “4:32 PM Cowboy” – as they’re seventeen year old cineastes with the tastes of the forty-year-old men making this picture, and that goes double for all the old Brian Eno songs on the soundtrack.
None of this is convincing for a second, but crotchety middle-aged critics seem to be raving, so what do we know?
We only see five-second glimpses of Greg & Earl’s movies, but why didn’t they just make them Vines instead of asking us to believe these kids shot entire DVDs out of their one-joke gags?
One day Greg’s horrible mom (Connie Britton, who is much better than this) forces him to hang out with a neighbor chick suffering from leukemia. Olivia Cooke’s Rachel is a tough broad who can see right through him, then she spends the rest of the movie telling Greg how wonderful he is –despite all evidence to the contrary.
Greg struts around with his total fucking imbecile friend Earl nodding inanely behind him, the idiot colored-fellow folding his arms and nodding: “Hell yeah, dem dying girl titties. Have you sucked on dem titties yet?”
“DEM TITTIES, DEM TITTIES, DEM TITTIES. (How the Christ did this movie even get made in the year 2015?) DEM TITTIES, DEM TITTIES, DEM TITTIES.”
Earl sure likes Dem Titties.
As for the Dying Girl, she’s basically an afterthought – a prop spending the last weeks of her life making sure that Greg gets into college. Glad she finally found a noble cause.
I hate this movie for so many reasons. I want to set every copy of it on fire and piss on the ashes. I hate how it is designed to enoble the solipsistic psychopathy of teenage know-it-alls. I am reminded of Roger Ebert’s line about how fans of Transformers movies are “not sufficiently evolved yet.”
I look at people raving about this despicable film from Sundance where I saw at least half a dozen movies that opened my eyes and made me feel how another world moved. But instead those folks give awards to this racist, twee (500) Days Of Juno horseshit. Viewers went nuts for this hunk of crapola because of “all the feels” or whatever zinger millennials now use to completely abdicate themselves from responsibility for what they watch.
I don’t normally like to cast aspersions on people over differences of opinion, but this one’s engineered to suck up so hard at easy-lay critics that I swear you little boys can do better. Try harder. Please. The dying girl deserves more than you.
SPLICED PERSONALITY 