People might leave that theater looking like they just pulled their hands out of a blender
Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson — I like to include “The Rock” so you don’t get him mixed up with any other A-list Dwayne Johnsons — makes a lot of movies. However, not too many of those are the kind that are going to get a thumbs-up from stuffy film festival types.
However, Johnson’s upcoming flick, The Smashing Machine, appears to be an exception. According to Variety, it brought down the house at the Venice Film Festival, with the crowd giving it a 15-minute standing ovation.
Which is waaaaaay too long, but we’ll get to that in a second.
The film is a biopic about MMA fighter Mark Kerr, with Johnson taking on the lead role. It will get its US release on October 3, but premiered at the Venice International Film Festival on Monday, and people went — to quote Principal Skinner — “ape-poopy” over it.
It was nominated for the fest’s top prize, the Golden Lion, and received that 15-minute ovation that had The Rock in tears.
Good for him… but 15 minutes of clapping? What is with these film festivals?
You hear about this a lot. Movies are getting these crazy long standing ovations. I really don’t know how they do it without people getting stretchered out of the theater with hands that look like they were partially blown off by M80s.
Have you ever been through a 30-second standing ovation? By the 19th second of non-stop clapping, you start to look around and think, “Holy hell, let’s wrap this up.”
So 15 minutes?! I can’t even think of a movie that was so good I’d clap for 15 minutes.
And I am a great clapper. I like a good clap. But there’s something to be said about quality over quantity. I’ll take a few good claps where you get that pocket of air in your palms is better than a half-hour of fart-sniffing, film festival golf claps.
I think it means more to keep it somewhat short. After ten minutes, they should’ve hit The Rock’s music (I assume it’s always queued up for him to enter and exit places) so he can split and save people from turning their hands into stumps.
That said, this movie sounds pretty damn good. I’d check it out, but don’t expect me to clap for more than about 25 seconds when it’s over.
