I had a lovely day today of just being downright lazy. Watched my baseball team get beat for the fourth day in a row, which wasn’t so lovely, but then took a nap, did agility class with the Coops and the Ho, and then settled in for the night to watch a couple movies and eat a homecook meal.
Liz has done a couple weeks now of this Blue Apron thing, and I have to say, it’s very cool. A perfect amount of food for two people, the meals are all pretty healthy, and they taste great. Across the board. We haven’t had one yet that hasn’t tasted really good.
Tonight we first watched Elysium, you know that sci-fi flick from last year with Matt Damon. It’s directed by the guy who did District 9 from all those years back. Well, District 9 was flipping fantastic. Like, legitimately. Elysium was a pile of crap. Other than the design of the Elysium space station, there was nothing for me to latch onto. The script was bad, the action was boring, the accents were bad (except for the South African ones, because you know, those were real)…I mean it was just bad bad bad. Very disappointing.
Then, we watched Red 2. The first Red was so much freaking fun, I could hardly contain myself the first time I watched it. Both Liz and I loved that movie. I was so surprised by it, too, because I don’t think I’d heard anything about it except for the trailers and the posters. Like, I don’t think I’d known anyone that had gone to the theaters and seen it. Seriously, watch it if you haven’t. It’s great. This one, the sequel, was definitely not nearly as good. But, especially compared to the movie we’d just watched, it was quite fun. Plot is kinda incomprehensible, but it has Willis, Mirren, Malkovich, Hopkins…the list goes on. How can it not be fun?
I really don’t see that many movies, more than most of America for sure, but definitely less than a lot of people I know (this is hollywood after all)…and even I feel like it’s getting harder and harder to watch a good movie. Seriously. Liz and I were talking about it, but I’ve been feeling a lot lately that the FUN has been taken out of movies. That we have less and less characters we can relate to on screen that are going through stuff and reacting like “holy shit, this shit is bananas.” Like, why did Bruce Willis become such a huge action star after Die Hard? Was it because of all the explosions and the people he shot? No! Every fucking action movie has that shit. It was because he was like us. We would walk across a floor of broken glass without shoes and curse like a motherfucker too.
How have we forgotten this? How could that possibly have happened? That these tentpole movies should be FUN first, and CGI’d/intense second. It’s either that, or we just aren’t turning out as many talented writers and directors or actors as we used to. It’s probably a mixture of both…
Let’s see, who do I trust right now? Chris Nolan still has cred in my mind…Joss Whedon, obvs. Man…I just sat here for like two minutes trying to think of other filmmakers and I couldn’t. Even Pixar has fallen off.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say that I hate movies these days. I don’t. I’m still entertained. But 9 out of 10 of them are sooo mediocre. Just not exciting, or memorable. With gaping plot holes, or just bad choices. And the only way I’m seeing them is because they’re for “free” on HBO. It’s frustrating. There’s little I’ve found that’s more exciting and satisfying to me than watching a great movie. One that knocks your socks off and leaves you running to tell your friends or the internet about it. You gotta see it!
There is a valid criticism, which is that I likely have higher standards, or at the very least, am far more critical of things in movies than the average movie-goer. And while that may be true in terms of what I’ll say about movies, it most certainly isn’t true at the box office. People may want entertainment, regardless of its attention to quality and detail, but if you DO pay attention to those things and make a truly great movie, people will comes out in DROVES. Avengers is the perfect example to me. It had all the special effects of the Transformers movie that year. But, which of the two did over $1 Billion? That’s right, the one of them that was actually GOOD. It happens over and over and over.
Rant done for tonight. Tomorrow is a work day. The A’s are going to beat the Tigers in our home opener by hitting four homeruns. You heard it hear first!