April Fool's Day is traditionally a day for pranks and other oddball behavior, but to Benjamin Lim and his readers, it's all about criticism. Ben, who writes for the site Lucid Screening, is hosting the White Elephant Blogathon for the second time this year. Starting tomorrow morning and continuing throughout the day, writers from all over the blogosphere- including yours truly- will be contributing reviews to the cause.
And not just any reviews, either. The blogathon was inspired by the idea of a white elephant gift exchange, in which the participants exchange crappy gifts for fun. Ben's incarnation is like that, but with movies. In Ben's words, "the intention of the blogathon is that people will suggest really horrible movies which will then be given an overly serious reading by the person it was assigned to."
The impetus behind Ben's brainchild came from his friendship with Andrew Hedden, another of Lucid Screening's writers. Having worked together since high school, they've written a lot of reviews of films both serious and goofy, and according to Ben, "in March of 2006 he and I thought it would be fun to do serious review of silly movies again and we ended up writing about The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and a little known classic called No Retreat, No Surrender. The GPKM review went on to get published in Bright Lights Film Journal and my NRNS review is a popular search result when Googling 'Jean Claude Van Damme' and 'Vagina' together. A year later we decided to do something fun for April fools day again except we wanted to get more people involved. Over the previous winter, I had participated in a white elephant gift exchange while at work and it just hit me one day that the two would work brilliantly together." And like that, the White Elephant Blogathon was born.
So the goal here is basically to write pompously about really terrible movies, right? In Ben's experience, it's not that simple. "The submissions range from movies that most people will agree are pretty awful to some that are generally well respected films that the submitter just hated. It's a pretty fun mixture of films and it might even yield some previously unknown treasures for people that are always on the lookout for a good bad film."
Ben's keeping mum about most of this year's entries except to say that "there are multiple Hulk Hogan films and a Turkish remake of an American classic." But if you'd like to get an idea of what we participants are up against, check out the selection of last year's films. Quite an esoteric mix, if I do say so myself. Ben is especially high on his colleague Andrew's piece on Troll 2, which he says "cemented his place in the pantheon of pretentious criticism of bad films."
Ben's right about the Google thing, by the way. Try it and see!
So what cinematic gift was bestowed upon me by the White Elephant? Tune in tomorrow morning and find out!