J2K = AOK (JK!)

Written by: Rob Van Winkle, CC2K Staff Writer

Now I think it’s obvious to anyone who saw even a moment of this film that this was going to be a perfect BMFCP (Bad Movie For Comedic Purposes). However, what makes this movie doubly fascinating is the phenomenon that inspired it. We live in an era of reality television, where people confess their innermost secrets on national television, looking for fame, and becoming a passing joke. Every once in a while, a reality show star gets a breakout role as the chick in a Rob Schnieder movie, or the guy schilling razor blades, but this is the exception, not the rule. Enter American Idol. This show was created by Simon Fuller, the man who made his fortune putting together fake non-bands like the Spice Girls. (The script writer for J2K is Simon Fuller’s brother Kim, whose only other writing credit, surprisingly, is Spice World). American Idol’s entire premise is that, through weekly contests and phone-based judging, the country gets to decide who will then become our next inorganic studio-created star. The country, in other words, now gets to have a hand in creating the same stars we used to deride.

The premise backfires through the inherent weakness of the whole reality genre. By its very nature, we are only supposed to care about contestants on reality shows for the duration of the show itself. Afterward, they are supposed to fade into the sunset, only to resurface on reunion shows and The Surreal Life. If and when they try to maintain their fame beyond that, the results are more often than not grating. This is all well and good when we’re dealing with Big Brother or any other cash-prize-based show, but when the end result is supposed to be fame, it never seems to work. And it shouldn’t. We don’t need any more celebrities; our whole societal structure is based on celebrity, and we tend to resent people who are more fortunate than us. What we do need, and always will, is more human punchlines; those people who can be derided for comedic purposes at any given moment in time. Think about it – would you rather have another Colin Farrell in the world, or another Kato Kaelin? Answer seems obvious to me. When the latter attempts to become the former – when people stop becoming our reality show monkeys and start trying to become actual famous people – the results are products like From Justing to Kelly. Be honest with yourselves here – even if you really really like Clay Aiken’s voice, does he really deserve to be earning millions of dollars and insisting that his doggie fly first class with him? Or is he really just a really ugly gay southern boy who can sing?

Surprisingly, this phenomenon happens in reverse too, as actual celebrities attempt to become punchlines, ostensibly to increase their own cache. These results are just as disastrous, a fact that Ms. Janet Jackson will certainly agree with.

The thing that makes American Idol the most egregious example of this, is that it knows no bounds in its blatant attempt to create the next faux-lebrity. Not only do we create a new “idol” with every installment of this series, but we also have the losers in our pop-culture crosshairs. Justing was the runner-up. So was Clay Aiken. Some chick named Kimberly was not even in the top two. Some military guy named Josh was somewhere in the top ten, and he’s making records. And that’s just the contestants. This show has also thrust a completely washed up 90s recording star, and two music producers into the spotlight. And don’t even get me started on the host! The clearest example of the relative success of my theory rests with this talent-free fuckwad. When American Idol is on television, the nation apparently can not get enough of this guy. He is on commercials and billboards, and early this year he was even given his own daytime talk show. However, as soon as the season ended … I mean within days, his second show was off the air due to what the syndicate described as “anemic ratings.” Gone were the ads and exposure, leaving a vacuum in our society which depressed no one. I guess, without this show to tell our naïve youth who they should love and worship as celebrity, they actually begin to think for themselves.

Which brings me back to J2K. This movie is perfect, in that it was begun in the afterglow of the first American Idol season, when ratings were high, and America seemed to care about our newest stars Justing and Kelly. However, by the time it was released, the nation had had time to shake out the cobwebs in its collective brain, and it realized that not only did it not want these two kids to be stars, it actually wanted them to return to their high school productions of The Sound of Music as quickly as possible. This discrepancy created the perfect cultural vacuum, in which a high-profile, big budget movie was released to no fanfare and pathetic box office receipts. Only one other movie to my mind accomplished this zeitgeist coup, and it is one that will be discussed, at length, at a later time.

Despite all of this, or perhaps because of it, J2K becomes, for my money, one of the greatest pieces of entertainment out there collecting dust in your local Blockbuster (or, for those of you more savvy, in the Netflix warehouse). Not only does it feature a terrible script, terrible acting, terrible directing, and a terrible soundtrack, but it is fronted by two of the biggest jokes ever to have their character names the same as their real ones. Not only will you not care about their awkward attempts to pretend they are falling in love, but you will actually find yourself rooting for awkward failure. Which, in cinematic terms, is accomplished admirably. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION.