A few years ago, I wrote about how much it hurt to lose the ability to go to movie theaters and how it felt like it isolated me from both a social experience that I really enjoyed and a solitary one that felt like stolen time. For me, going to the movies alone was like taking time back from everyone and everything else that demanded it from me. It was two hours or so where I could turn my ringer off, put my phone in my pocket, and train my eyes on something other than the crushing weight of endless connectivity. I praised trash TV like Tiger King for its ability to help us cope with the outside world that kept us on edge and, at the time, in fear of spreading a deadly disease to our friends and loved ones. In times like that (and times like these), I still find merit in watching something with no real artistic value, something that doesn’t make you feel…anything, really.
And now I’ve found something else to replace that Tiger King feeling at a time when reality no longer makes sense to me. If you’re a regular reader here, you’ll know that I am a gamer. I hesitate to call myself that because it’s become a loaded term these days, but I enjoy TTRPGs, board games, chess, and, especially, video games. Video game media kind of sucks, though. Until Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog, game-based media was pretty poor. What tends to be worse than video game-based movies are movies about gaming and gamers. Sure, Grandma’s Boy had its moments here and there and was generally watchable, and Max Reload and the Nether Blasters had its own sort of low budget charm, but a lot of is very bad. Leave aside films like Wreck-It Ralph and WarGames, which are quite good; that’s a different feel altogether than the kinds of films I’m talking about. Record stores and movie rental places certainly drew the longer straw in that particular game.
So that brings me to the trash I’m talking about today: Pixels, a rightly forgotten film from 2015 with a robust 18% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 46% audience score. Now, mind you, I’m not here to defend this movie as a misunderstood film that should actually be well regarded, like Be Kind Rewind or 2 Fast 2 Furious, because Pixels is truly, truly bad. From the uninspired Suicide Squad-esque soundtrack (substituting 80s pop for the schizophrenic classic rock radio station that scored that film) to the by the numbers plot, pretty much everything about Pixels is bad storytelling. And I knew this going in, after all, it is an Adam Sandler movie, which has been a hallmark for really terrible films for the past couple of decades now. Sandler on the movie poster generally equals a bad movie.
And yet, somehow, this movie made an impression on me. A world in which Kevin James is the President and Adam Sandler and Josh Gad are the only hopes for humanity against an alien invasion that modeled itself after an arcade tournament from 1982 that NASA sent to space for some reason manages to make more sense than the one we live in now. And for that reason alone, it became some comforting piece of fast food that leaves you feeling a little sick afterwards, but still, satisfied, in a strange and inexplicable way. The amount of talent in this film that doesn’t show is truly stupefying. Josh Gad, we know is a multitalented individual who can act, sing, and voice almost unbearably sweet cartoon characters; yet here, he’s a one dimensional stereotype that makes the characters in The Big Bang Theory seem deep. Michelle Monaghan plays the obligatory romantic interest for Sandler, with the predictable lack of chemistry not keeping them from getting together for no reason at all other than the fact they’re both there, and I believe I’ve made it clear that I hold her in the highest regard. She’s one of my favorite actresses of all time and one of the most talented, in my opinion. But, that doesn’t really matter in a movie like this. Peter Dinklage, at the time still riding high on the success of Game of Thrones, comes in with a fairly bog standard jerk character that really doesn’t strain his acting abilities. Brian Cox, years before he dominated the screen in Succession, plays one of the Joint Chiefs whose main role is to insult Adam Sandler (which, well, I’d take that job too). Sean Bean, Boromir himself, has a small part, but I guess after Fellowship, he has nothing left to prove, so why not get the paycheck? Even Dan Akroyd, comedy royalty, has a neat little cameo. But none of that really matters, by design. It’s a bad movie and was always meant to be.
There is some novelty to seeing Pac-Man marauding down the streets like some giant yellow menace and I’m sure if I ever actually played Caterpillar, I would have had an opinion on how faithfully it was rendered on screen as an alien attack, but that was before even my time. The production value of the film is quite good, certainly befitting of its $88 million budget. But other than the fact that it looks good in HD there isn’t a whole lot to praise here. I mean, I guess I enjoyed it more than Ready Player One, which is a bar set so low an actual caterpillar could hurdle it.
However, it did something for me that I sorely needed at the time; it allowed me to turn my brain off. And I mean all the way off. Everything about it that was stupid, for some reason, didn’t bother me and its failure to engage my emotions in any way was a welcome reprieve from the world at large. So now, in a way that I cannot possibly explain, I have a strange level of affection for a movie that is bad, that I know is bad, and that I couldn’t defend in just about any way. I could say that I got three genuine laughs during its rather unnecessarily long 1 hour, 46 minute run time (the first 40 minutes or so really drag, with way too much setup), which is a better hit rate than some sitcoms. It’s three more laughs than I got in the entire 16 episode first season of the Night Court reboot, but that’s not what matters to me when it comes to Pixels (also, don’t watch the Night Court reboot, it’s bad in a way that’s not good at all; I suffered through that so you don’t have to).
This isn’t really a review of Pixels, I couldn’t in good conscience tell you to watch it just because I found some comfort in it. It’s more of a song of praise for finding the right kind of trash in the moment you need it. And, dear readers, you know I try to be honest with you; I tell you when things make me cry, I tell you when they make me laugh, when they make me question my own existence, and when a guilty pleasure shouldn’t be guilty at all. Because we are all so hard on ourselves in a world that’s really hard on us too, so if you like something that’s bad, or even if you don’t like it and it makes you feel good or even just feel nothing at all, that deserves to celebrated and you don’t deserve to feel bad about it. So, I leave you with this final thought: remember to be kind to yourself, be kind to others, and if you can, watch Be Kind Rewind; it’s really a hidden gem.