What Movie Did I Watch?

[mrissa]

Here are the lessons I learned from it:

1. My grandpa the Marine says you can't polish a horse turd. This is apparently incorrect: you can polish a horse turd and sell viewings of it for $9/ticket in some parts of the country. It will, however, remain about as appealing as the unpolished kind.

2. If you are writing a movie, do not include a scene wherein the characters are forcing laughter at someone's pointless anecdote unless you are absolutely sure that the viewer will not think, "Oh, yeah, that's just like watching this movie!"

3. If you are an actress (or an actor, this is not a gendered thing), and if you have played a pretentious, self-absorbed, and emptily self-important character in the past, do not let those mannerisms and intonations slip into the character you are currently playing if she is not intended to be those things. We will begin to think that your part as the pretentious etc. role was perhaps not the acting tour de force it might have appeared.

4. Similarly, if you have played in an action scene before, try not to make movies where the exact scene is replicated by a different character, if no one seems to be aware of it. "He just does that thing she did in that other movie -- oh, yep, that's exactly what he did" is not so good.

5. It can be very good to undermine the viewer's expectations of a genre. However, if one of the viewer's expectations is "this will be interesting and/or fun," perhaps not such a good idea -- especially if you're not showing them why they shouldn't think the original is such a good time.

Hmmm. Perhaps this set of bad-movie traits is not as unique as it should be. Very well, then:
6. Remakes, possibly all right. Sequels, possibly all right. Sequels to remakes? Be very very careful.

And 7. If you are relying upon a previous movie or a previous segment of the current movie to make people care about the characters' relationships, you actually need to set it up so that they do care in the earlier work or portion of work.

Sigh. Back to the couch -- with a book this time, not a movie.

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know what movie you're talking about, which is just as well. I will riff on

Remakes, possibly all right. Sequels, possibly all right. Sequels to remakes? Be very very careful.

The only sequel to a remake I can think of that's worth watching is For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, sequels to A Fist Full of Dollars which is a remake of Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Kurosawa's own sequel, Sanjuro is good, but completely different. Interestingly (at least to me), my least favorite of the bunch mentioned here is the original, Yojimbo

Re: 7

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Rather than, say, do a little flashback to something that a while ago and OFF SCREEN to generate instant care?

Re: 7

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Right, or rather than going, "You remember! These guys had a meaningful friendship of some sort! That we never really showed you although we hoped that their flat banter would hint at it!"

[shawn-scarber.livejournal.com]

Sounds like Ocean's 12, but then it sounds like a lot of other movies as well.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

On the nosey (and don't I wish I had a Gene Wilder-"Young Frankenstein" icon for that phrase). You win the prize.

[fmsv.livejournal.com]

Somehow, I'd guessed that that was it, even though I've never seen either version of Ocean's 11, nor have I seen Ocean's 12.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I like the earlier version of "Ocean's Eleven" in spots (and still need to rewatch it for the same reason I was watching this piece of junk today). Sammy Davis Jr. is the short version of why I like it, and I hadn't even thought of liking him before I saw it.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Oh. I would have never guessed that.

That movie was so bad I think I blocked it out of my long-term memory.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is probably the wisest course of action.

[the-flea-king.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is, I think they're already doing the groundwork for Ocean's 13. Do you think the 13th cast member will be a wise-cracking baby voiced by Bruce Willis?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Or possibly a computer-animated cat voiced by Bill Murray, yes.

The hives, oh, the hives.

[the-flea-king.livejournal.com]

Now I am thinking about writing Garfield and Ocean's 12 slash fic.

"Oh, Odie..." Ocean purred. "You sure do have a big tongue."

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Depressing, innit?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

>1. My grandpa the Marine says you can't polish a horse turd.

You can, however, varnish moose turds, thread them on a string, and sell them to tourists as necklaces or wrist bangles...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I will have to bring this up the next time Grandpa shares the horse turd-related wisdom with me!

[the-flea-king.livejournal.com]

I must buy one. Where?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Various Gifte Shoppes in the Moosehead Lake region of Maine keep them in stock. I wouldn't be surprised if you can google them up and order on-line...

[pieslut.livejournal.com]

How odd. I both
a) identified the movie immediately from your negative description, implying that I had a similar enough viewing experience to relate, and
b) liked the movie.

This would shatter my psyche, but it happens a lot. I know why someone would think the (insert whatever) sucks, and I don't disagree, but on the other hand, I enjoyed it. 5 years of liking Britney Spears has accustomed me to this dichotomy.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

This is utterly reasonable. I'm fond of Snow Crash, for example, despite knowing that it's utterly silly in spots, and that the ending is no good as an ending at all. I don't have to be blind to its faults to like it.

This applies to people, too.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

See, right up until "remake," (and "couch" because that implies DVD, not theatre) I woulda said the latest X-Men movie.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Sucked. Lots.

But who do you have in mind for the actress in #s 3 and 4? In this case it was Catherine Zeta-Jones, with the movie in #3 being "High Fidelity" and in #4, "Entrapment."

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Kelsey Grammar as The Beast/Frasier for 3--I thought he was doing an admirable non-Frasierish turn right up until... the Beast became Frasier. Since you equivocated on gender. :)

And for #4, well. Insert action A into slot B. I took it as a generic rant about the crappitility of the action sequences. And I've never seen Catwoman. So I thought maybe you meant Halle Berry.

And also? What the hell is up with the rule that women have to fight women being taken to the max in this last X-Men where black women have to fight black women? Like, bad enough that catfights are inevitable, now action is racially segregated too?

[one-undone.livejournal.com]

See, that's exactly what I was thinking until then. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who was lost after that.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Steve Den Beste (http://denbeste.nu/Chizumatic/) has some parallel thoughts on this. I'm finding less mass media and even genre that I might have paid for not worth my time. I guess that's why I'm more into hard science non fic these days.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Wow, do I think he's wrong.

A hundred years of movie-making means they're out of stuff to say? Guess the novel was finished around 1100, then -- or at least the Japanese novel must have been. (In English, we'd have been through well before the American Civil War.) Same old "nothing new under the sun, bitch moan complain," attempts at argument. The fact that he's not interested in what people are saying, or doesn't know where to look for what does interest him (and given his stellar example of novelty was Dragon Ball Z, I'm going to guess that it's the latter), doesn't mean that no one's doing anything worthwhile.

If one is going to decide that it's all the same blather anyway, one can just as easily decide that about scientific research as about fiction. New species of dinosaur validated as a dwarf species rather than a juvenile specimen of a known species? Yawn. More people going on about how many dimensions their untestable variant of string theory might imply? Oh, again? Another new planetoid discovered and its planetary status debated -- don't these people have anything else to do? (I don't actually think any of that. But I don't think that, say, TV or movies or written speculative fiction or written mysteries or etc. etc. etc. are dead and dull, either.)

Science has its charms -- I'm the last to deny them. And if you're enjoying reading science writing, great; I do, too. But as a refuge from boredom with the rest of society or the arts, it leaves a good deal to be desired.