Revenge of the Jocks, Bad Teacher, and anti-intellectualism propaganda

Revenge of the Jocks is an actual film coming out, with a plotline featuring a bunch of former high school jocks far beyond their glory days incensed that the people they beat up all through high school are now their bosses and rich and successful. It’s directed by Jeff Tremaine (the Jackass trilogy) and originally scripted by Etan and Rami Cohen (Etan Cohen worked on Tropic Thunder and Idiocracy) but getting rewritten by I heart Huckabees’s Jeff Baena. Though Etan Cohen and Jeff Baena are a bright ray of hope, Revenge of the Jocks being directed by Tremaine makes it seem that the film will showcase a whole pack of awful people as heroes, who bully and shove their way through life, and set out to destroy people freed from their tyranny. I can hope this will be set up as a nice homage to Revenge of the Nerds, but with the track record of Hollywood, this will probably turn out a colossal train wreck celebrating the dumb and mean.

To further elaborate my point, there is currently a film out there that celebrates the awful, Bad Teacher starring Cameron Diaz. As illustrated in this review, Diaz’s character is an awful teacher who doesn’t care about her students and is motivated entirely by money. The characters who do care about their students are presented and weird and warped, and painted as the villains. In the end, Diaz’s character learns nothing and fails to grow as a person.

This miniwave of anti-intellectualism films is disappointing to say the least, but is probably a natural offshoot of summer blockbuster films designed by committee to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Even Transformers 3 is getting faint praise for being not as awful as Transformers 2, but despite the critical drubbing Transformers 3 will get, it will also be extremely profitable, and not inspire filmmakers to go above and beyond the limited box they’re placed in. There is no incentive to be better, studios are focused on trying to get people to go pay more to see awful films in 3D, and the consumer loses again. Sometimes, the winning move is to stay home and read a book.