I love movies, just not all of them.
The artsy fartsy ones generally turn me off. Why would anyone watch “Out of Africa”? It is bummer of story about a woman who moves to Africa to be with her philandering husband who neglects her, while she tries to run a failing coffee plantation. She falls in love with an ivory hunter, but that does not work out, so she eventually moves back to Europe with a raging case of syphilis. This is entertainment?? Only if you are into masochism or dead elephants. This sad, oozing puss of a picture won 5 OSCARS including best picture. How fucked is that! After that I made it a point to never pay for a movie that won an OCAR for anything. Obviously, Hollywood does not understand why I go to a movie.
Paying for a movie is analogous to going out to eat. I want sushi, spicy Mexican, some French dish that I can’t pronounce but order it anyway because its an adventure. I do not order meatloaf. I pay to watch a movie to escape from the daily grind that is normal life. I want to laugh, be scared, go on an adventure. I don’t want to learn about AIDS, gay love, drug addiction, and serial killers. I get enough of that on the news. If the director and actors take a few unrealistic liberties with the location, plot, or dialog, I don’t care as long as I have a good time.
Which brings me to the point of this my latest rant. Of late there has been a lot of crap on social meda about movie details the “ruined” the pictures. Here are just a few examples.
In “Django Unchained” Will Smith sported sunglasses that had not been invented in the era of the antebellum South. Really! A slave kills off white people including a plantation owner with the help of a German bounty hunter and the purist want him to be realistically attired! And Will Smith looked really cool in those shades.
In “Raiders of the lost Arc” Indiana Jones carefully removes a small volume of sand from a bag in an effort to match the weight of a golden idol on a bobby trapped pillar. So what if the figurine was pure gold that in reality would require Arnold Schwarzenegger to move it. The scene was dramatic and led to one the greatest foot chases of all time compete with rolling boulders, poison darts, and a pet snake named Reggie. Would you really want the future governor of “cal-if-ornia” to play Indie over Herrison Ford for the sake of reality?
In Star Trek Into the Darkness, purest trekies complained when a gorgeous blond undresses but in the next scene she is wearing the exact same clothes. “It’s so dumb. Why did she get undressed? It definitely wasn’t to change.” For the sake of clarity let me repeat what I originally stated…A GORGEOUS BLONDE UNDRESSES! Do I care if she puts back on the same outfit? Oh hell no!
In gravity George Clooney saves Sandra Bullock by cutting the rope that is tying them together. This is a dramatic cliché that has been used in many mountain climbing movies and never fails to touch my sole. Ok, it was in space and Clooney falling away defied the laws of physics. So, what. It let Clooney behave like the hero he is and allowed Bullock to display the pathos she does so well. I didn’t make me throw up my hands and walk out of the theater.
In Iron Man 3, the villainous mandarin turns out to be an actor and not a real villain at all. Apparently, this was not how he was portrayed in the comic books. According to the purists, this “ruined the movie”. I quit reading comic books in grade school. Grow the fuck up and move out of your mother’s basement loser.
Saving Private Ryan may have been the most realistic war movie of all time. It certainly was the best. But the nit-picking bastards found 24 factual errors that ruined the movie for them. These included things like the tanks they were fighting were not Nazi Tigers, but Russian T-34’s, the tank traps on Omaha Beach were not in the proper orientation, when bullets hit a dead cow the blood that spurts out was the wrong color of blood in a decaying cow, in the typing pool scene one of the manual typewriters is too modern. How many of you under the age of 60 have ever used a manual typewriter, let alone could tell the make, model and year in a movie back drop that lasted five seconds. Give me a fucking break! You have heard the old expression that some people can’t see the forest for the trees. These anal retentives can’t see the forest for the bark.
But the one that really get to me are the people who opine on things that were not rigorously explained in the film. For some reason these people have to know the unspoken backstory. For example, in Forest Gump, they are obsessed with Jenny’s death and what she died of. Was it AIDS due to her free love lifestyle, or hepatitis C or was she just pining for the Fjords? Why did she have to die at all? BECAUSE IT WAS IN THE FUCKING SCRIPT YOU MORONS.
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