Stephen Gaghan is a Pretentious, Talentless, Cocksmoker

On Sunday night, a friend invited me to share his pass to go see the test screening of the new movie by writer/director Stephen Gaghan (academy-award winner for screenwriting of Traffic). I was pleased to learn that the director would be there, answering questions at the end of the movie. The flick is called Syriana. You might have seen a preview for it--It's the one with Matt Damon and George Clooney--the one that looks pretty good.

This movie sucks.

It royally sucks.

There is no excuse for how jarringly bad this movie is, how effortlessly condescending, how purposefully one-sided, how depressingly themed, and how painfully executed. Even from a brainstorming stage, the utter pretention needed to convince oneself that this was a good idea for a film conceptually is mind-boggling.

Let's start at the beginning, shall we?

Rather than trying his hand at stretching as a writer, Stephen Gaghan (from here out referred to as The Magic Dipshit) bastardizes his own award-winning narrative format, structuring his film in the same exact way as Traffic. There are multiple plotlines, all having some vague connection to one another. Generally, by the time you figure out exactly how these stories are interrelated, you either don't care anymore, or the relationship is so minor that the only reason to include both stories in the same film appears to be that neither was good enough to sustain itself for its own movie. The tagline on the posters claims "Everything is connected." A better tagline might be, "Everything is connected in the same way that my dick resembles the MIR space station." Granted, there are resemblances in terms of size, but otherwise, the comparisons fall short. This movie is so retardedly derivative of Traffic that if one could describe the major theme of that movie as "the gradual downfall of multiple character's lives as a result of their relationship with the sale and use of drugs," one could replace the word "drugs" in that description with the word "oil" and have more than a fair assessment of every single fucking thing that happens in this picture. Not only is The Magic Dipshit a bad writer, he's not even creatively bad. He just rehashes his own framework with new, topical issues, in this case America's relationship with Middle Eastern oil. It takes skill to weave a cohesive story out of multiple plotlines. It takes self-masturbatory malevolence to erode what little creativity once existed in one's own previously barely enjoyable storytelling. Guess which one we get from the Magic Dipshit.

Don't get me wrong; it's been years since I've seen it, but I seem to remember liking Traffic. God knows if I still would recognizing that it was birthed from the cavernous skull of Satan's greatest element of douchebaggery. Traffic was easy to follow despite its multiple plotlines, because both characters and stories were relatively simplistic. Any twists or turns were only surprising because of the breaks and intercutting between plotlines. There was never any real question as to what was happening or what a character's motivation was. Unfortunately for the Magic Dipshit, the issue he's tackling in Syriana is ten times more complex than American drug politics. The Dipshit basically rips apart the actions of everyone involved in the oil business, villifying both the American and Middle Eastern governments as well as big business and individual agents of the CIA. While a hard-hitting expose could rise from such tactics, The Dipshit's method of making everyone at least slightly evil (if not irrefutably) leaves the film with absolutely no empathetic characters. The Dipshit attempts to draw empathy towards the characters played by Matt Damon and George Clooney, but both of them are characterized as such unlikable assholes at about halfway through the movie, you barely care anymore. You're never sure why a character makes a decision in the movie. The Magic Dipshit's way of gilding his film and making it seem more complex is to purposefully withhold story and character information for the entirety of the film, leaving you with only vague semblances of what happened and who did what or why. Theoretically, The Dipshit did this to keep the audience talking as they left the theatre, but from the deadened silence that followed the film in our test screening (as most of the audience, half press, shuffled out before the Q&A started), methinks he thought a bit too much of himself and his own hackneyed storytelling.

If you'd like to hear some of the more specifically grievous errors The Magic Dipshit makes, read this section: SPOILERS AHEAD---

- At one point early on, a character's small child is electrocuted because of a faulty light in a swimming pool. Attempting to subtly show the child's death without actually picturing it onscreen, The Magic Dipshit shows the child's father rushing toward the pool as the patio lights flicker slightly nearby, emphasizing the power surge at the exact moment of the boy's demise. There is something absolutely sickening about this shot. It is as if he wants the audience to jerk him off for his skillful visual manipulation in the murder of a child. The flicker itself is small, trivializing the boy's death, yet it is featured on the entire left side of the frame, as if he wanted to make sure that people noticed how clever he was. All hail Stephen Gags-on-cock.

- The audience gets the joy of watching a man's fingernails get pulled off on-screen. Ooh, edgy!

- By the movie's end, so many of the main characters are exploded violently that it's easier to put things in terms of who doesn't explode. Who lives? The boring ones!

END OF SPOILERS;;;;;

I wouldn't be so pissed off if I hadn't had to see the twat responsible for all this. As the movie faded to black, one person started to clap, but no one joined in. We sat in silence and he ran up and began to complain that it was sad that the credits weren't finished because he didn't get to see his name. Then he complained that the person who was going to host things wasn't there, so he began to do a female voice and ask himself questions about how hard it was to do all the research for this important movie. I am not joking. This was after the movie started an hour and a half late because The Magic Dipshit showed up late to his own screening.

I stood up and left midway through his schpiel. I was going to ask him a question, but I didn't know how to verbally phrase my fist in his throat.

Do not see this movie. Do not support pretentious douchebaggery. Do not be lured in by the pretty celebrities. This movie is the type of convoluted trash that Hollywood outputs in lieu of thought-provoking drama, gilding itself with stars to avoid people questioning things.

Wherever you are, Stephen Gaghan, I hope you choke to death on your own spit.