Chip Flick - My contribution to the English language

There are a wide variety of terms used to group and classify movies. There’s “Sci-Fi” for science fiction, action-adventure, romance, comedies, romantic comedies, documentaries, fantasy, westerns, and the odd running series that makes a genre of their own (James Bond, Star Wars, etc.). Some are quite good (Carl Sagan’s Contact, High Noon), some bad (Glitter), and some so wretched awful they prove space, time, and good taste are all circular by turning into movies you cannot miss (Plan Nine from Outer Space). And there are the cult classics for which there is no explanation (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Buckaroo Banzai, and so on).

Each appeals to different people and different audiences, and film critics who fail to understand this, or somehow think this is irrelevant, just end up looking clueless. I particuarly loved it when a recent Washington Post reviewer slammed a James Bond movie for being vacuous. Hello? Intellectual stimulation and 007 don’t have much common ground. Check out your sense at the theatre door: no one ever pretended James Bond was cutting edge film.

Because of these audience tendancies, some films get subgrouped by the audience they appeal to rather than the film type itself. “Guy flicks” are aimed at teenaged boys and men wishing to stay in touch with their innner teenaged boy: lots of action and adventure, fast moving plot (fast enough, perhaps, for you to not notice that there is not much in the way of plot), and probably a few very hot women here and there for eye candy dressed in just enough clothing to avoid the dreaded M rating (for immature audiences only). “Chick flicks” are aimed at women wishing to send aside reality for Prince Charming fantasies in which Guy Meets Girls, some non-sensectial thing seperates them, then because the Universe has fated them to be together, Love Wins The Day, and after years of seperation (or about 90 minutes of wasted celluiod), are magically reunited (often dumping at the last minute whomever they were just about to marry). The common element to both is that they are geared to their audience rather than the film itself, so all sorts of logical contradictions and foolishness are completely tolerable. Occasionally you get a red herring crossover that tries to be both (Jerry Maguire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), but they are rare. And often make more sense than prototypical guy flicks like Shanghai Noon or chick flicks like Serendipity, Fifty First Dates, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.

However, some years ago, I coined a phrase for a then-emerging new genre, which I coined the “Chip Flick”: a movie that attempts to compensate for its shortcomings in acting skill, plot logic, pacing, and so by the excessive use of computer animation in an attempt to distract the viewer with stunning visuals to the fact that, stripped of such visuals, there ain’t much there at all. In this day and age of copyright, patent law suits, and all, I just wish to be clear on the record: I am the responsible party for creating this term, and the Oxford English Dictionary should cite me me me me as the source for this term since I first used it roughly five years ago.

Keep in mind that at the time I made fun of this approach, I was actually working in a computer generated animation position (albeit not one in the commercial film industry), and this is not a blanket condemnation of CG animation at all. Some films make careful and thoughtful use of CG effects, or have such strong sustaining plots to which these elements, and my coworkers, are the sort of people who will pause Monsters Inc. to replay scenes where the monster Sully’s fur gets blown around in the wind because it is such a visually stunning piece of graphics animation which is both eye candy to animators and makes perfect sense in the plot, which is well sustained and logical and would work perfect well if they just used little cardboard cutouts instead (and I would like add a note of thanks to the makers of South Park for lowering the standards of CG animation low enough that anyone can play in the field). It’s not the animation per sey that I am objecting to, it is that it is being used to compensate for the absence of all the critical elements of good story telling through film.

Where I get in really hot water, alas, is that my prototype for this is a movie with terrible acting, a series of gaping idiotic and obvious holes in its fundamental premise that are laughable... and some of the most stunning and compelling computer generated special effects seen to date. In fact several new techniques and innovatative approaches to animation were created in the making of this film that they have spread far and wide into advertising, or in frequent homage references in films since.

I speak, of course, of The Matrix. I was stunned. I thought it a remarkably smooth and well polished film, but fundamentally pretty stupid. While my colleagues were raving about the effects, or talking about the deep philosophical questions of how we know the reality we see is real, or whether there was a second or third layer to the matrix, and so on, I’m sitting there going “Humans as batteries? Just how stupid are you?” Why do the digital avatars have the capabilities and limitations they have: there is no reason for them at all. It makes no sense. But, as I said, I seem to be in the minority indeed on this. Perhaps there is something to this: the effects in this case were so stunning that the forebrain activity is totally surpressed, like horny men staring at a Playboy centerfold.

So I have a new prototype that won’t get me lynched. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Stunning all digital computer generated animation with an almost realistic visual feel... and no plot. At least no one is going to harange me for making fun of a film based on a video game.