Decadence of dreams
I’ve said this before – maybe my tastes in movies are changing or Hollywood is totally bankrupt in the ideas department. Or maybe it’s both :p I still have to see a totally satisfying and thoroughly enjoyable Hollywood movie in months. About the only US/Western entertainment that I’ve found to be enjoyable lately has come from TV. Maybe it’s the longer length, or the shorter episodes but there is some good stuff on TV that really works.
Take for instance, "Prison Break". While I have yet to see season 2 and am curious as to how they can maintain the same level of novelty and interest as the first season, I nevertheless found it to be a gripping and entertaining drama. Then there is "Lost". Sure the second season sagged a bit down the middle and I do hope that they tie everything up neatly in the third season (which I hear is the final season) but it’s still damn interesting. I also hear good things about "Heroes" though I’ve yet to see it.
On the other side of the coin, the Hollywood side, you have trash like "Miami Vice" :p We watched it yesterday and it is the worst excuse for a movie that I have seen in a long time. It appeared to be more of a soft-porn movie which had somehow stumbled into the area reserved for the more upstanding citizens of the movie world. I kid you not, the first part of the movie was mostly shower scenes and bedroom scenes and what not. Considering that you had at least five sex scenes in a two and a half hour movie, there wasn’t much room for story :p
Not that there really was a story, mind you. It appears as if Michael Mann decided to go experimental on this one (or maybe you should drop "experi" and you’d be closer to home :p) You get dropped into the story in-progress and at the end you are yanked out without any satisfying conclusions. The story was supposed to be about finding a mole in the FBI but at the end of the movie, we still have no idea who the mole is. The woman that Sonny Crockett risks everything for, goes away into the sunset on a boat. Life just drags on. No satisfaction, no emotion, no connections – basically, a big old zero. The only good thing I have to say about this movie is that we only paid $2 for a local DVD copy – my sympathies to anybody who paid full price for this garbage 🙂
The second movie that we watched yesterday, "Children of Men", was much more satisfying and engaging. The movie started off slow and I was beginning to think it was a dud too. I love science fiction movies but this was way too close to home to be entertaining – it was just depressing. However, as the story progressed, I became more and more involved with the character of Theo Faron, who goes from your average guy who just wants to make his own corner of the basket safe and nice while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, to a knight in rusted armour :p Of course, the high point in the movie, for me personally, has to be when I suddenly heard cries in perfect Sinhalese from a wailing woman standing by a slain boy, towards the end of the movie 🙂 Overall, it was a good piece of cinema though not something I’d want to watch if I wanted pure entertainment – it’s just too gruesome and hits too close to home for comfort of mind.