Cinemadness

When it comes to food, it’s not my place to say what’s good or bad; I can only tell you if I like it or not. I’m sure somewhere there is a glowing review for fried rats (IF they are cornfield rats, according to a Cambodian friend), but a professional food critic raving about them holds little sway over me. And just as it is with food, opinions about movies are just too subjective for me to put any stock in them at all. Movies with talking animals have a huge audience, but they just creep me out. Except for TV’s “Mr. Ed.” That was awesome.

I’m not a movie critic. The fact that professional movie (or any) critics exist and get paid for their opinions is a mystery to me. In many instances, they hate the movies I love, and I hate the ones they like. “Real life” movies can be interesting and pertinent; but come on. If I can tell in the first ten minutes of a film what’s going to happen, I had better be so engrossed by the entire experience of writing and acting and sets and costumes and shots that I care about the character who can’t see what’s coming. I should want to scream at the screen. If I’m not anxious to see what comes next, it’s not working.

Escapism is the true power of filmdom. ANYTHING can happen in a movie, and, in my non-paid opinion, should. Indeed, in my little world, there are only three elements that can save almost any film from being an utter waste of time. Those three things are, in no special order, tits, fangs and blood. Now, I hope I didn’t lose you there. As I said, I’m not a critic, but all three of those elements combined in the same film always makes for something I can watch, no matter how stupid the story is, or how badly it’s acted. Am I a cretin? Perhaps, but I just went to a real theater and paid to watch a big budget movie with actors I like for the first time in I don’t know how long, and I was sorely, sorely disappointed.

I went to see “Priest”, a movie about vampires that have fangs and are horrible monsters that’s based on a story from a comic (or “graphic novel”, if you prefer). The trailers I’d seen actually made me want to go to the movies, and that rarely happens. I like the acting of the title character, Paul Bettany, and Christopher Plummer is, well, you know, Christopher Plummer, so I thought why not? As I said, I’m not a movie critic, but this movie was a train wreck (snort). My beef is that it could have been so much better. The storyline was just awful. I did a little peek around about the story it’s based on, and it shouldn’t have surprised me to learn that the plot of the movie had nothing to do with the original premise, save for the title. It was akin to making a movie that has Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster playing Sidney Poitier’s role in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, and titling it “Frankenstein”, because that’s what it was based on. Oh, and nobody notices that he’s a monster. Ridiculous, right?

Anyway, ten minutes into the movie, I knew what was going to happen, and the only reason I stuck around was to see the fangs and blood (no tits). This movie could have been so much better. So from my soapbox I’d like to say that the people in charge of making mainstream movies must think that the movie going audience is a gaggle of fools. Formulaic drivel is uninteresting and it frightens me to think that Hollywood continues to churn out this celluloid ichor (medical definition) because that’s what the public continues to pay for. Good stories are good stories and mainstream movie makers seem to have forgotten that. My three personal element preferences for a good movie aside, it seems to me that since movie makers like to call themselves artists, I would suggest that they stay true to what I believe an artist’s motivation should be: to create for creation’s sake, not for profit. If you tell a good story the right way, and tell it because it’s a good story, profit will follow, although most of the time, you’re dead before anyone realizes how great you are.

And so you know I’m not a total misogynistic ass, I would really like to see “The King’s Speech”, and not because it won a bunch of Hollywood self-congratulatory awards. There will be no tits fangs or blood, but I want to see it because George VI was the last king of England, and a stutterer in a tumultuous time, and I’d like to see how that went.