not at the movies

[calimac]

An article a month or two back about the forthcoming outcrop of fall movies - the serious films, you know, that succeed the empty-headed summer blockbusters - had me so excited, I'm sorry to say, that I was writing premiere dates in my calendar. Now they're starting to come out, and whaddaya know, they're turning out to be lousy. I shouldn't have been surprised. Winner for snarkiest review so far goes to Dana Stevens on The Changeling, citing "an interrogation that will lead to revelations so shocking they will cause the investigator's cigarette ash to fall to the floor in slow motion."

That, plus having to have a Godfather II reference explained to me (I've never seen it, having found Godfather I so bad), prompts me to polish and present my list of categories of "good" movies I will no longer go see. (So this is leaving aside all the superhero cash-ins, all the horror movies, all the films with "III" in the title, etc.)

1. Boxing movies. Sorry, but I see nothing heroic in two men - or women - standing on a stage punching the crap out of each other. Exception (a movie, with boxing in it, that I liked): Mighty Aphrodite.

2. Gangster movies. Sorry, but I also see nothing heroic, or believable, or identifiable, in gangs killing each other off at such a rate that they ought to have all been dead before the movie started. Yes, I mean The Godfather. And what was with that scene with the bloody horse's head? The sheer logistical implausibility of this just ruined the entire movie almost before it got started.

3. Movies about corrupt cops in Los Angeles. Enough already. True, I enjoyed L.A. Confidential, though I only watched it because I was stuck in an airport hotel one evening with nothing else to do, but: enough.

4. Biographical films in the form of blackout sketches of highlights of the person's life. I like a good bio-pic [and please, use the hyphen: "biopic" looks like it should be pronounced "bi-opic"], but I couldn't stand more than about 5 minutes of Pollock or Hilary and Jackie. That's why I'm skipping Oliver Stone's W. Please, don't let Milk turn out this way.

5. Steven Spielberg movies. Can you say, "crassly manipulative"? Also, his penchant for lovingly framed shots of naked people being totally humiliated (Amistad, Schindler's List) is more than mildly disturbing.

6. Albert Brooks movies. His oeuvre is a cellarful of bottles of expensive whine.

Comments

[emerdavid.livejournal.com]

In general, I agree with you. For the last several years at least, most of the "Oscar bait" movies have been overly serious to the point of pomposity (Crash, Babel), over-rated (Sideways, Lost in Translation), or just plain depressing (Million Dollar Baby, No Country for Old Men). I found all of the previous to be quite dull. Even the Oscar nominees that I actually enjoyed (Juno, Little Miss Sunshine) I thought were good but not terrific.

A while ago I resolved to catch up on all those cultural-unconsciousness films that I'd never seen, so I could see for myself the origins of such common references as the horse's head in the bed, or "What we have here is a failure to communicate." So I watched Godfathers I & II. It was like getting a colonscopy.

A category I would add would be teen-age gross-out movies (e.g. American Pie). I saw "Knocked Up" (only because I admired Katherine Heigl's performances on "Grey's Anatomy"), and that was enough.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Did you see "Lost in Translation" in the theatre, or on DVD? A strange division seems to pertain to that film: those who saw it in the theatre (including me) liked it a great deal; those who saw it only on the small screen did not.

And here I am flushing all the "Godfather"-haters out of the woodwork. I'd thought I'd be lighting a match by criticizing it, that everyone admired it except me. Last time that happened was with a film called "Whale Rider", which I'd thought was widely praised until I saw it and found it bad. Then it turned out that nobody liked it, not even the critics.

[emerdavid.livejournal.com]

Well then, I am a supporting datum for your hypothesis. I did indeed see it on DVD, not in a theater. I have been told that Bill Murray's performance was brilliantly understated, but that must have only come across on the big screen; on TV, it just seemed flat.

I liked "Whale Rider" okay enough, I guess, but I thought the plot was entirely too predictable to warrant the praise it seemed to be receiving.