Watch these movies

If you haven't seen these movies already, I recommend you watch them:
13 Assassins
Source Code
Micmacs
Sucker Punch
True Grit
The Fighter
Winter's Bone
Four Lions

recent views and reads

This post is lame, filler, not worth reading. But since I have nothing else to blog about, here are things I've read and watched that are much more than memorable (meaning I loved them):

Movies
The Baader-Meinhof Complex
District 9
Zombieland
How to Be
The Vanishing
Sin Nombre







TV
Neverwhere

Books
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Y: The Last Man

movies characters as caricatures

Last week I watched the film Chocolat for the first time. I'd never watched it before mainly because I'm prejudiced against chick flicks. Jo watched this movie a few years back and tried to get me to see it with her, but I declined. But last week I did. The movie itself was good. I love Johnny Depp and think he's one of the greatest actors ever. The thing that struck me the most about this movie is the way the characters were actually caricatures.

The priest in Chocolat is a great example. He is a bumbling young guy who doesn't seem to know what he is doing. Plus he is controlled by someone else. He doesn't seem to add any real value to the community except just be a placeholder for the office of priest and guide the congregation through rituals.

This caricaturization is not unique to Chocolat. Usually, any Christian portrayed on film or on TV is one of several extremes - they're either an over the top holy roller, an idiot, or a hypocrite - or possibly all three. Roman Catholic Christians seem to get the most frequent and worst portrayals. They are widely used to represent Christians and the Christian faith, partly stemming from the externals of Roman Catholicism - the robes worn by priest, the blacks suits and white collars, the habits of monks and nuns - you immediately identify them as a Roman Catholics. These visuals translate well into a medium which uses images to tell the story.

On one hand it bothers me that Christians are portrayed so stereotypically, but on the other hand, I realize that this kind of caricaturization happens across the board in movies. Characters are stereotyped and have qualities which lead to them being not a representation of real people, but to being caricatures of certain types of people. Muslims are terrorists, or at the very least untrustworthy. French people are arrogant and rude. Americans all carry guns and are violent. Etc, etc. Its easier to stereotype than to try to portray people in real ways.

In life this is true too. Its just much easier to say, 'all of group X is like this or that'. It takes more work to meet people in whatever group X is and befriend them. And how many times do we have our dearly held stereotypes broken down once we interact with someone from group X? I'd say almost always.

movie pet peeves

I'm currently re-reading Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams. Its the second book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. A movie was made of "Hitchhiker" so you might be familiar with that. Not much to say about that, except that they might be the funniest books I've ever read.

But it leads me to one of my pet peeves about movies - books that are made into movies. As a general rule, the book is better than the movie. Even with some of the better adaptations (like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter) I always love books better than the movies that are made from them. Don't get me wrong because I love the HP and LOTR movies, but in general, I don't like the whole turning-books-into-movies thing. I've never seen a film adaptation film of a John Grisham book that was as awesome as the book. The movies weren't terrible, its just that John Grisham is such a brilliant author and its hard to translate that brilliance to the screen. Seriously, The Firm is one of my favorite all time books, but I could not sit through more than half an hour of it because it paled in comparison to the book. And there are some movies I refuse to watch because the books are so amazing and to watch the movie would spoil the book. Interview with a Vampire is one example. For me to not watch that is saying a lot, because I love vampire movies. And even though Stephen King is one of my favorite authors, films made from his books and stories generally don't compare to how good the books are.

This leads me to even another movie pet peeve: Sequels. I hate them. I'm not talking about Star Wars, LOTR, or Harry Potter, because they are serials. Each was intended at their conception to be a series (thus the term serial). But what I hate are those terrible Hollywood part 2's and 3's and 10's that never live up to the original movie's glory. And since many of the movies being made into sequels aren't that great to begin with, that just means that the sequel is going to be painful. So in general, sequels are never a good idea.

Here are a few categories of sequels that I thought of:
Horror/ Thriller movie sequels: Jaws, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Saw, etc.
Comedy sequels: Weekend at Bernie's 2, Nutty Professor 2, Big Mama's House 2, Police Academy: Infinity
Action movie sequels: Speed 2, The Transporter 2. This category also includes the sub-category of The desperate aging Hollywood star sequels: Live Free or Die Harder-er with Bruce Willis, or Sylvester Stallone in Rocky/ Rambo 19: Cold Cocked

My last movie pet peeve deals with the worst kinds of movies made - movie adaptations of old TV shows. Seriously, the Brady Bunch movie (and don't forget the Very Brady Sequel)? The Brady Bunch was never that good anyway. And The Dukes of Hazard movie? Yawn... Although, I'd personally love for somebody to make a movie out of The A-Team. That's one that I would see.