Dear Ikea, This is Why I Hate You

Dear Ikea,

This is why I hate you.

Walking into Ikea is walking into despair. Everything is fake: the rooms, the wood, the fabrics, the people. It’s an Eden of bad taste and sad suburban life. It’s migraine inducing.

As I come up the escalator straight from the sliding doors, I’m immediately immersed in a world of polyurethane and melamine bathed in a stark fluorescent white light of I’ll have mine with a side of stroke, please. As I watch those who are already making their way down the stairs to the storage room, or whatever the fuck you call that concrete enclosed chamber of vapid distress, their faces reflect the bleak experience I too am about to endure. If it’s a couple, they’ve had a fight; if it’s a family, the kids have been spanked; if it’s a person alone, better look for a body. I want to turn and run at this point, but oh wait, I’ve just come up the escalator of no-return. No going back now.

Once I’ve reached the second floor, I enter a sea of primary colors, synthetic textures, and overwhelming emptiness. The little yellow stripe centered within the narrow laminate walkway at my feet instructs me to follow it. Alright, Ikea. Do I really need an arrow on the floor and signs with directions hanging from the ceiling in order to navigate your store? Perhaps it’s time to consider a more intelligently designed layout. Just a thought. As I pass the chairs that remind me of my time spent in kindergarten and some tables that look like something out of The Jetsons, I start hating myself for this self-inflicted torment. Why is there no fast lane? I’m forced to pass through miles of chairs and tables and desks and beds and screaming children and confused foreigners and years of my life and all I wanted to do was look at some fucking TV stands. Here’s a suggestion, Ikea: sell single-use guns.

Oh, good. I make it to the TV stands. And even better, I didn’t have to maim anyone on my way here. Wait. The hell. I’m sorry, what? $179 for a two foot long, single-shelf, particle board, 25lb-maximum–weight TV stand? One hundred and seventy-nine US Dollars? Did you misplace the decimal by a digit or two? No? Oh. So you’re intentionally screwing me over. Well, that’s one more reason I hate you. Want another? I can’t even pick up the box of the TV stand I want to purchase now and proceed directly to checkout. I have to begrudgingly coerce my own two feet into continuing on through this hellish maze and pick it up somewhere else later. Rather than simply pick up the box, I instead have to write down its model number and what aisle and shelf it is located on downstairs and find it all over again. This is a joke, right, Ikea? Not only do we have to put all your shit together using multi-step instructions, but you make us purchase it this way too. This is insanity. Wow, I really hate you.

However, what I hate most about you is your so-called designs. Your single-cast chairs, your retro low couches, and your ergonomiceverything. It’s cancer of the eyes. What is it about this look that you think is so appealing? Oh, right, you call it Scandinavian design, minimalism, art. Well, here are some terms I use to describe it: Basic. Ugly. Shitty. Overpriced. Why would anyone want to pay $89 for a bar stool that is fire-engine red and made out of the same plastic used by Little Tykes to make their children’s toy cars? That’s bull shit. The bastards you employ as designers are out there making bets to see how cheaply they can make the ugliest piece and flip it for the highest dollar. I’ve watched the documentaries and How It’s Made. They brag about that shit. Assholes. And you encourage them, thus I hate you.

So, Ikea. While I hate you for everything that you are, I have to also hate myself just a little bit because I help sustain you by my own free will. I purchase your overpriced items and showcase them in my home. I am a consumer to your provision, and I have bought into the culture you project, which makes me hate you more, which makes me hate me more.  I am doomed to continue this circle of hatred for the foreseeable future until I can afford to buy into the consumer culture offered by Restoration Hardware and Crate&Barrel. Maybe someone will read this and make my dream come true (hint hint, nudge nudge), but that’s an empty delusion, not unlike the support ability of most of your pine-composite, hollow-legged, it’s like I’m leaning back into a rocky chasm dining chairs.

Pretty much sums it up.

Dear Harmony Korine, This is Why I Hate You

“How can an artist be expected not to be self-indulgent? That’s the whole thing that’s wrong with filmmaking today… To me, art is one man’s voice, one idea, one point-of-view, coming from one person.”

Dear Harmony Korine,

This is why I hate you.

Dude. I know you think you’re so cool because you went to NYU for a semester and then dropped out and still made it big. Woop-dee-doo. Your dad was in the business while you were growing up and taught you how to use a camera. Neat. Capturing a scene on film is not the same as creating a scene on paper. The mediocre screenplays you shovel out would receive an F and an obligatory re-write in any creative writing class in any university. No wonder you couldn’t cut it at NYU.

Note, I haven’t seen Gummo all the way through. I couldn’t make it to the end. So godawfulIcan’tevenfindthespacebarmakesmewannavomitinmymouth I just couldn’t do it, it was so bad. Now. Spring Breakers, your latest and greatest. I’ve got some things to discuss with you from one writer to one who’s walking around telling people he’s a writer.

One: you’re not a writer.

A writer doesn’t just let any old crap make it all the way to publication, or in your case, the theater. A writer goes through multiple edits, making the most finite alterations in tempo, diction, and even seemingly insignificant character details like that Carl takes his scotch neat rather than on the rocks. A writer hides metaphors now and again, but makes them so ambiguously clandestine that there are entire dissertations and college courses solely devoted to the discussion of their true meaning. What you are is anything but a writer.

Let’s take apart Spring Breakers.

Alright, Harmony, what’s the deal with the shift in perspective fifty minutes in? Faith, played by Selena Gomez, is the first person POV for most of the movie. Then you kick her out in a shameless act of symbolism, i.e. Faith leaves and everything goes to hell; without faith there is no good; without good there is evil. Disgustingly obvious, Harmony. But beside the point. The POV swings from first person Faith to third person omniscient—well except for anyone who has left the remaining group…I guess no one, including you, gives a shit about what happens to them at that point. My bone here is that this not only doesn’t follow formal writing style, but doesn’t even work in a method of defying style. A talented writer might choose to alter POV to prove a point or to incorporate it into a theme. You’re not that writer. This complete lack of forethought is the result of laziness, lack of talent, and an overgrown ego. There’s no reason for this switch and it reveals to me that clearly your self-bolstered, conceited view of Harmony Korine is such that either no one is willing to tell you when you suck, or they’re screaming it at you and you’re too vainglorious to listen. Both expose a talentless, egotistical, I’m too good for edits or opposing opinions arrogant human being.

Two: Okay, it’s pretty, but…

Alright, you made a pretty movie. Well, not pretty cinematographically. But it certainly captures high-school and frat/sorority trends right this second of 2013 in a way similar to what St. Elmo’s Fire did in the eighties. You did good. I still hate you, but you did good. (Not well. I intentionally did not say “well”.)

The neon everywhere, oversized Nikes, and colorful Ray Bans are a snapshot of today’s trends. Guaranteed, everyone will be wearing bikinis with ski masks for Halloween this year. However. While you stayed true to the grunge of the lifestyle in those spring breaking and of those associated with Alien, James Franco’s character, you failed to recreate the realities of the rest of society. Case in point: these four girls are pulled from a hotel room, cuffed, and thrown in jail. In their bikinis. They’re not given towels, blankets, or clothes, even for a court hearing? Really? Real talk, Harm, it ruined the illusion. It completely obliterated the fourth wall and I found myself scoffing in an Alamo Draft House and getting shushed. Bad things. So, then, they’re released from jail, still wearing nothing but bikinis and a fresh coat of Tickle Me Pink lip gloss, after some random guy, Alien, posts their bail. But, no police officers escort them out, and no one cares that these three dudes with tear-drop tats are sitting outside with guns in the car awaiting four little out-of-town girls? No one calls their parents? Naw man. Naw.

Three: you’re still not a fucking writer.

The end…what happened? You clearly gave up on plot and wanted to recreate a Tarantino-esque shootout ending. Well. You ruined it. *SPOILERS* James Franco gets one deadpan and the two blonde bitches go on a killing spree with no blood splatters, no wounds, and not even a scratch on them. Totally real life, bra.

Harmony, go back to college, finish your degree, let some experienced and talented writers inform you of your over-inflated, self-determined skill level, and THEN come back and try another swing at moviemaking. You’re welcome to continue directing movies because you do a nice job with a camera. But leave the writing and editing to those who give a shit what people see.

Dear Judd Apatow, This is Why I Hate You

Dear Judd Apatow,

This is why I hate you.

Judd, what the fuck is wrong with just making a ninety minute movie about a clan of characters who have a life, then some bad shit happens, they regroup and find a way to overcome their obstacles, and hooray they live happily ever after? Come on. You put your characters and audiences through more shit than anyone could possibly endure for more than 60 minutes, yet you always manage to drag the torture out for at least 120. After enjoying movies you produced (Anchorman, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Pineapple Express) I thought surely I would like movies you directed. Fuck was I wrong. Knocked Up. WTF. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY but a doctor needs to see a baby’s head crowning through a woman’s vagina. Vom. It. When I watched This is 40 and reached the point at which the characters are at the hotel and have a great time getting high and remembering what life is, I knew it would be the last shred of happiness these two characters and I would share. And I was totally right. The remainder is a supersized suck fest.

Though, what I hate most about you, Judd Apatow, is that everyone is imitating your poorly set precedential style and, further, masquerading their creations as rom-com!

Latest example: Admission.

Admission presents itself as a situational rom-com full of charm and wit. Unfortunately, the best thing about this movie is anyone who might be reading this article’s privilege not to have to sit through it. While it’s got two likable actors, Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, playing two appealing characters, Portia Nathan and John Pressman, it fails to make anyone like either of them. Fey is a type A, all-business all-the-time admissions officer with her sights set on a promotion, while Rudd is an easy-going, intelligent, self-starter bent on helping everyone but himself. The movie has a relevant enough subject matter: a high school student from Rudd’s school is applying to Princeton with only a single gatekeeper, Fey, barring his way to the future. We all went through it at the close of high school. Okay. But what Admission’s previews manage to hide from unsuspecting audiences behind its humor-emanating façade is a world of bad decisions, hopelessness, and a bleak future for its protagonist. Oh, and zero laughs throughout.

Spoiler alert no one will want to miss, everything for Fey sucks all the way through. Watching this movie is like being beaten unrelentingly with a meat tenderizer until the viewer is absolutely submissive to cynicism.

Admission is a meandering blind man trapped in a mine field that’s been rigged to blow no matter what. The characters never stood a chance. Fey’s character faces disaster after disaster in both her professional and personal life. She’s dumped, told she has a kid, treated like an imposing acquaintance by her mother, crashes into her ex-live-in-boyfriend’s new wife’s car as they exit the chapel at their wedding, puts her job on the line for her kid, cheats to get him into Princeton, loses her job for it, then is told he’s not her kid, is then told by her mom that she was an accident, and when she finally manages to choke up the courage to contact her actual offspring at the end, he doesn’t want to be contacted by her. Womp. Womp. What an absolute clusterfuck of unhappiness! This should have been called Admission to Hate Yourself and Everything, Congratulations on Your Acceptance!

I attribute failures like Admission solely to your work, Judd Apatow. When you make movies that are mildly comedic but which have losing plotlines for loser characters, you’re not making good movies. A movie like Revolutionary Road can be 100% depression all the way through, but it’s deeper than sadness. It’s about the absolute darkness some people experience. Sam Mendez has the courage to take a movie to that hopeless abyss and not try to sellout theaters by selling out and pandering to mass appeal by cropping in traditionally comedic actors and actresses. Judd, grow a pair. Either go all the way into darkness or get the fuck back in the producer’s chair where you belong. Movies like Anchorman and Superbad don’t try to be anything more than they are. Neither should you.