The Way I See It - Movies & Entertainment

    I know this is a pretty insignificant thing to talk about, but this movie cliché has really started to annoy me. It is more annoying than climbing through ventilation ducts, more annoying than drawn out monologues and even more annoying than the king of all movie clichés, which is the ridiculously poor aim of bad guys shooting at good guys. It is what I call the protagonist-antagonist switcheroo, and nothing makes me angrier.

Basically, the way it works is that when the antagonist has a position of power over the protagonist, he will make some insolent comment that makes the protagonist sad. Eventually, the protagonist goes through his hero cycle or whatever adventures this movie calls for, and ends up facing the same antagonist again, only this time the power has shifted in favor of the protagonist. The idea is that now the protagonist will recite the insolent comment word for word to the antagonist in a sardonic tone, in an effort to give him a taste of his own medicine.

So for example, Timmy is walking to school when Bill beats him up and takes his lunch money. Then Bill goes, “Until you get stronger, people will beat you up.” Timmy works out and gets strong. Then he goes and beats Bill up. Then he goes to Bill and says, “Until you get stronger, people will beat you up.” Timmy adds insult to injury.

There really is nothing wrong specifically with this line. Maybe it is unrealistic for characters to remember the exact words for a whole timespan of a movie, or maybe the morality of the protagonist, who is supposed to be a role model with values, should not be lowered to the standards of the antagonist to using his words. But really I have no problem with this concept besides its repetitiveness.

It was in Batman Begins, when Morgan Freeman got his job back after being fired and fired the guy who had fired him. It happened in 300 when the king’s wife killed the guy who was being paid by Persia. You can find it in pretty much any major Hollywood movie these days and I am tired of it.

    Usually, an ideal movie is one that keeps you drawn in and at the edge of your seat with every twist and turn, or one that keeps you laughing consistently. But sometimes, you just want a movie that can…just be on. One you can kind of ignore, or at least be entertained by without paying too much attention, so that when you are sitting at your computer or doing your homework (although I am constantly nagged to turn the TV off when I’m doing my homework)  you don’t have to put up with that eerie feeling of quietness.

Believe it or not, there are plenty of movies that, despite being varied in actual qualities (in fact, quite often terrible), fill this role perfectly. There are certain general characteristics that make an ideal “white noise movie.”

First of all, it usually should be a light movie. Nothing that is even slightly intense at all. Usually a romantic comedy works best. Like I said, these aren’t movies I would watch if I was planning on intently watching it.

The plot should generally be very simple. All of the best white noise movies require simple plots that are explained early and often, and never change. For example, movies like Dodgeball (win a dodgeball tournament), Fever Pitch (Guy must decide between baseball and Drew Barrymore) and Joe Dirt (Guy with mullet goes from place to place talking to people) all work well. Basically, all the movies that television channels such as TBS, FX or Comedy Central would show on a weekend afternoon.

Perhaps the most absurd characteristic of these movies, however, is the fact that it really can’t be good. If it becomes more than mildly entertaining, and you become tempted to look at the screen for over a full minute at a time, than the movie is not serving its purpose. For example, the other day I tried to do my homework with The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and I found myself unable to keep from watching and laughing. (Side note: I love Dodgeball. The only reason why I don’t see this as too funny to watch is because I have seen it so often I know it basically line by line.)

So I’ll close this out with a list of some of my personal favorites:

Dodgeball
Fever Pitch
Hitch
Joe Dirt
Bubble Boy
Stuck On You
Napoleon Dynamite  

I WACHED A ‘SCARY’ MOVIE LAST YEAR THAT WAS VERY ENTERTAINING. IT IS CALLED ‘THE VILLAGE’ I THINK IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A HORRER BUT I DONT SCARE EASILY SO IT WASNT AS SCARY AS I WANTED.

IT IS ABOUT A YOUNG BLIND GIRL WHO LIVES DEEP IN A WOODS WITH THE REST OF HER VILLAGE, THERE ARE STRANGE AND SCARY RED CLAD FIGURES THAT FRIGHTEN THE CHILDREN AND STARTLE THE PARENTS THAT LURK IN THE THE OUTSKIRTS OF THERE VILLAGE, WHAT THESE UNASUMING VILLAGERS DONT KNOW IS THAT THERE IS MORE TO THIS VILLAGE AND ITS PEOPLE THAT MEETS THE EYE.

DO YOU DARE WATCH WHAT YOU DONT UNDERSTAND?!

WELL I AM DARING YOU

D@NI

Just watched the movie Charlie Bartlett. I was not sure what to expect because I had heard only a few things about it, and they included terrible, ok, and our generation’s Ferris Bueller. Reviews were all average, so there was nothing to indicate it being good or bad.

And honestly, after seeing it, I had the same idea of whether it was good or bad. There were so many things I liked, mixed with so many things I didn’t like, mixed with so many things I didn’t care about either way. Part of me wants to say it was great and part of me wants to say it was awful.

I guess I’ll start with what I liked. Robert Downey Jr. for one. Although I am in the minuscule minority of people that did not like Iron Man, he is a likable actor who stood out among the otherwise inexperienced cast. Many of the characters, including Charlie Bartlett himself, were fun to watch, and there was some good humor every now and then. Finally, a soundtrack by Beck never hurts.

Now for the things I didn’t like. First of all, it was annoying how they made it seem like every single human being has at least one parent that is a drug addict, or negligent, or has any significant problem that makes their child’s life miserable. Also, many of the characters were flat and seemed like they were acting like a cliche rather than a person, like “that bully with the mohawk,” or “that cheerleader.”

The thing that killed it for me though, and automatically took away any chance I had of really enjoying this movie, was that it was so unrealistic. I’m all for suspension of disbelief, and one of my biggest pet peeves is when people complain about a movie being unrealistic because what happened is impossible, but this was different. It wasn’t the events that made it unrealistic, it was the high school environment set up.

Basically what I mean is that I don’t care if its unrealistic because a normal high school boy gets abducted by aliens, but I do care if the seemingly normal high school boy’s high school is completely absurd when it claims to be normal. But this is especially bad in a movie such as Charlie Bartlett, which prides itself on capturing the high school experience. Movies like American Pie and Superbad had so much appeal, besides their hilarity, because they were relatable, not necessarily in the problems that they are having, but in the way the high school works. The classes, the conversations, the parties, are all similar to real life.

But in Charlie Bartlett, students were representing not the real high school experience, but some made up one where students didn’t go to class at all, spent the entire day hanging out in an outdoor student lounge with pool tables and televisions (something I’ve never heard of schools having, and could yell profanity at or do drugs in front of the principal without being disciplined in the slightest. And this unrealistic interpretation was what made Charlie Bartlett an unrealistic, forgettable movie.

    Remember when you were young and each and every movie you saw was your favorite as soon as you walked out of it. I remember a specific brief period where I spent weeks raving about the movies Titan A. E.  and Dinosaur, movies that are hardly regarded as anything special.

During this period, every single movie with either Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider was automatically hilarious and any poorly acted, simple plotted action movie that had at least one explosion was Oscar caliber. I also remember being confused when I saw poor reviews for Little Nicky and thinking how the critics are always wrong.

The interesting thing is, the change in taste of movies did not occur gradually, but was a chain reaction stemming from one film. One occasion to make comedies need more than farts to be good and make action movies need more than slow motion, or to make horror movies need more than decapitation by chainsaw and drama movies need more than some cheesy piano melody playing while the sun sets.

For me, it was when I saw Mr. Deeds. I didn’t see it in theaters, and my friends who had seen it were raving about it to me since they did. I finally saw it at this youth group event when I was in seventh grade, where they loaded around 50 children into a gym and put it on. And as it played, everyone around me was laughing, and I was just silently thinking that’s really not that funny.

All of a sudden, every comedy movie I had ever seen was put into a new perspective. I re-watched and re-evaluated many of them, and realized that many of them were not actually funny, and were too shallow of a humor to really even be good movies. It wasn’t every movie, I still find many funny, but there were so many movies I previously loved that I was suddenly able to take off the list.

From there, it spread into other genres. I realized that Jason X,  oddly one of my favorites at one point, was actually one of the worst movies ever created. I even needed to watch The Matrix, which had always been one of my favorites, to make sure it was actually good and not just good to the old me.

It worked both ways though. Many movies that I had considered boring were suddenly entertaining. I used to always assume that movies made before roughly 1990 were too hindered by their poor special effects to be good, but I managed to cross this idea out of my mind. North by Northwest, Vertigo, Chinatown and even The Godfather were all movies I have learned to love but the old me would have hated.