I am one of the many billions of world citizens who had no idea who Bert Kreischer is, and after seeing The Machine, a wide-release, sub-Nic-Cagean riff on his beer-can-size meta-quasi-celebrity, I could hardly care less. You’d need to look to the Trump presidency to find a more odoriferous example of our 21st-century American desire to elevate pure asshole-ness, and at least Trump kept his shirt on. Apparently, in real life, Kreischer was a titanic alcoholic frat bro in the ’90s at Florida State U, big enough to have been profiled in a Rolling Stone article about party schools. Oliver Stone thought it’d make a movie, and commissioned a bunch of scripts, one of which got turned into National Lampoon’s Van Wilder micro-franchise in the aughts.
A Florida Man incarnate, Kreischer decided to capitalize, and launched a stand-up career telling yarns about his glory days as a souse. His capstone story happened on a school trip to Russia (he was unaccountably taking Russian-language classes), where he partied with gangsters on a train, earning himself the eponymous vodka-gulping moniker, and then helped them rob the other passengers while thoroughly hammered.
That’s it. Who knew the barrier to entry in viral-quasi-celebrity-land was so low? Let’s hope the Russia story is true; it hardly resonates as a witty fiction. Presumably this tale is somehow made funny in Kreischer’s actual on-stage schtick, performed beer-bloated and naked from the waist up, but I won’t be finding out any time soon. In the film, it’s dead on arrival. What should seem clear to us, if not to the new film’s producers, is the fact that, often enough, tens of millions of free streaming views, or partial views, because they are free, amount to next to nothing. If people had to pay a single penny to watch a YouTube bit, I doubt we and Kreischer would be having this conversation.
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Just like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Hypnotic, the movie is winkingly aware of how…
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