Over the past week, Dr. Uwe Boll has gotten quite a bit of attention on the 'net, including a number of pieces right here on Screengrab. It seems all of this attention started with a little petition, one which read:
To: Dr. Uwe Boll
We, the undersigned, respectfully ask that Uwe Boll give proper weight to the wishes of the video game community, the horror community, and the film going community in general and stop directing, producing, or taking any part in the creation of feature films. His distasteful handling of the subject matter and lack of acknowledgement of his failures simply cannot be abided any longer.
Mr. Boll has repeatedly shown a complete lack of comprehension regarding the videogames he has dragged, kicking and screaming, to the silver screen and his ham-fisted approach to horror has soiled future possibilities for anyone else who may attempt to bring videogames to film.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
At this writing, the petition has gotten more than 150,000 signatures, and that total grows by the minute. But while I agree with some of the objections "The Undersigned" have to Dr. Boll's filmography, I have to take some issue with the aims of the petition.
Now, I wouldn't exactly consider myself a fan of his work- I was pretty mixed on his "best" film to date, this year's In the Name of the King, and the others I've seen aren't even that good. But I like the idea of Uwe Boll.
To be fair, I must concede his movies are, by and large, quite bad. Yet he's far from the only director who consistently churns out junk. So where are the online petitions calling for Stephen Sommers or the team of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer (the genuises behind Date Movie and its ilk) to be put out to pasture? Truth be told, I'd rather watch a Boll film than one of their movies, for the simple reason that Boll's movies, for better or worse, have real personality. To my mind, they're like mangy old dogs- they've got almost nothing going for them, but you can't help but like them a little.
Right now, there's a shortage of spectacularly bad movies out there, the kind of movies like Manos: the Hands of Fate or Robot Monster whose jaw-dropping ineptitude gives them a kind of charm. Most bad movies today (such as those by the aforementioned Messrs. Sommers, Friedberg, and Seltzer) are made with a certain level of polish and competence that gives them a glossy Hollywood veneer. Yet the professionalism of the films doesn't disguise their badness- it merely makes them boring and flavorless.
Boll's films could never be mistaken for their bland big-budget counterparts. For all their myriad faults, they carry within them the convinctions of their crazed auteur. Yes, he's a loudmouthed hack with a yen for self-promotion, but his enthusiasm for the films he's making bleeds through in every frame (also, his movies are usually full of hot chicks, which can't be ignored). You get the feeling that he geniunely believes that his movies are awesome, and that like the guy in Patton Oswalt's Death Bed routine, he's so jazzed about his brilliance that he's ready to reach up and high-five God.
For my money, I'll take that kind of enthusiasm over the workmanlike filmmaking of the studio toadies any day of the week. Like him or not, the good doctor is living the dream, and even if you hate his films, I'm not sure that calling for his retirement is the proper reaction. You don't have to see them, and if you do, you can always complain about them on the Internet. It's your right as a moviegoer. But making them is Boll's right, and as long as people pay him to do so, who are we to get in his way?
