"A fool and his money are soon parted". It's a very wise saying that couldn't be any truer when it comes my least favorite group of fans. Of course, in their case, it would be more accurate to say "a fool and her money are soon parted" since most of the group's membership is female.
I’ve never heard these people given a title like some fan groups, but I refer to them as the “Channing Tatum Droolers”. Usually teenagers with the ability to talk, text and put on shiny sparkle lip gloss all at the same time, these girls have money to burn (thanks Daddy!) and enjoy nothing better than burning it on a ticket to see Channing Tatum pretend to act.
Well, OK, so they don’t really have any interest in watching him try to act. And it doesn’t really have to be Tatum. They’ll settle for any actor with perfect pecs and a tendency to take his shirt off (actually, the less he can act, the better). You know the kinds of movies I’m talking about: Step Up, Never Back Down, The Covenant. Anything where twenty-something guys play high school teenagers. The Droolers sit in the theater, checking their eye-liner by the glow of their cell phone screen, only peripherally absorbing the paper thin plot. And then, as if guided by a mysterious seventh sense (their sixth sense involves the ability to communicate with each other through incomprehensible text-speak) they all snap their phones shut just in time to watch the afore-mentioned meat rack strip off his shirt and say something stupid.
As drool begins to spill out over heavily glossed lips, their ability to comprehend verbal communication (what little was perhaps there to begin with) disappears. Fortunately for them, the dialogue in these kinds of movies doesn’t really make any sense anyway, so the unblinking vacant stares don’t look too out of place. And suddenly, the scene ends or the guy puts his shirt back on and the theater is again aglow like Chernobyl at midnight as the Droolers furiously clatter their nails over phone buttons with messages like “omg hes soooooo hot n i luv hm 4ever LOLzzz”.
Most of you have no doubt never encountered this experience because you have no reason to waste your money on that kind of cinematic drivel. Unfortunately, the Droolers will see the movies in theaters several times, making sure that their parents’ wasted cash will help the film turn a tidy profit. That, in turn, ensures the green-lighting of additional IQ lowering films to further deteriorate its audience’s mental capacities. It’s a vicious cycle.
I, however, having drawn the short straw too many times, have had to review these kinds of movies and thereby endure the Channing Tatum Droolers as they sit and kill brain cells faster than a frat boy playing beer pong. I’ve seen them in their natural habitat and I have come to despise them and the movies they love.
Worst of all, when they can tear themselves away from their cell phones long enough to check their MySpace pages, they inevitably find their way to movie web sites and forums, leaving nearly illegible comments about their favorite movies. But don’t take my word for it. I’ll give you an honest to goodness actual example from a comment left on my review of Step Up:
“OMG! This moviee wass sooo goodd! i loveddd it soo muchhh!! its my favv moviee everr...Channing Tatumm is the hottest guyy everr im soo obsessed wit himm i luvvv himmm!!! thisss movieee ruleddd it had sucha goodd storyy i luvv it!! lolll channinggg i luvv uu!!”
Poor girl. She’s so clueless that she didn’t even realize that she had switched from her cell phone to a keyboard and thought she still had to hit the keys multiple times to get to the right letter.
I can handle obsessed Star Trek geeks. I can even tolerate the blind rages of Whedon’s Browncoats. But they have nothing on the fear and rage that consumes me when I am confronted with a Channing Tatum Drooler. They are the worst kind of fan out there and, thanks to their symbiotic financial relationships with cell phone companies and the makers of crap teen films, there’s a good chance they’re going to be around to terrorize me for a long time to come.
Cinema Blend writers fight back against out of control fanboys in our ongoing series of editorials, Bad Fandom! For more Bad Fandom click here.
