Shut Up and Watch

by Steve Lazarowitz

I'm getting a bit tired of "so-called" movie critics. Not the people you see on television or the ones that have columns in newspapers (though they sometimes irk me as well). I'm referring to the self-proclaimed experts that can and do find fault in every feature film they've ever watched.

It's not easy to make a movie. Even with millions of dollars at your disposal, it's very difficult to please everyone. Sometimes there's a major oversight in a movie, but in general, they're what they are supposed to be. I've heard the same nonsense so many times, I can't believe it.

Tombraider was a sort of fun action flick. It had a nice looking woman running around, doing impossible things. It wasn't a particularly brilliant movie, but it wasn't supposed to be. If you've ever seen the video game, you would know that Lara Croft is Indiana Jones on steroids. It's a fun movie, filled with all sorts of improbable stunts, set into a plot that is completely in line with the plots of the games. The movie did exactly what it set out to do.

Yet half the people I talk to, tell me it's stupid. If you're going into a theater, you have to agree to suspend your disbelief to the degree required by the type of movie you're watching.

Someone once told me Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a stupid movie. Gee, do you think? I can't imagine anyone actually believing that the Monty Python crowd had taken the content of the film seriously. It was stupid in all the ways it was supposed to be. It brilliantly succeeded in its stupidity. Stupidity was the whole point. In fact, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was stupid to the point of genius.

I could watch an episode of Bugs Bunny and give it a thumbs down, because I know rabbits can't talk. Bugs Bunny is brilliant, only if you agree to accept the ludicrous. When I watch an Indiana Jones movie, I know damn well that much of it couldn't happen in real life, but I suspend my disbelief, because I want to enjoy the film. It's not a documentary, it's fantasy.

No one watched Mary Poppins and said the umbrella could never hold her weight. Yet many movies are judged by their improbability and that should only happen when the movie was intended to be feasible.

Hudson Hawk is another favorite of mine, that was not only panned by critics, but also didn't do all that well in theaters. Seems everyone that saw it expected it to be Die Hard. It wasn't. It WAS a brilliant satire of the action movie genre. It was a silly movie that was intended to be silly. In some places, I would go as far to say it was brilliant. Howard the Duck falls into the same category (though Lea Thomspon might well have something to do with the fact that I could watch it twenty times without growing tired of it).

My latest beef is with the people who say The Fellowship of the Ring was disappointing, because it didn't end. Of course it didn't end. It's the first book of a trilogy. A trilogy, for those of you who do not know, is not a set a three books. It's a single story that SPANS three books. There is virtually no chance of the story ending at the end of book one, because if it did, it wouldn't BE a trilogy.

The first three Star Wars movies were technically NOT part of a trilogy, since the first stands on its own and the last two wouldn't have been made, had it failed to make money. I'd also like to point out, the second Star Wars film, The Empire Strikes Back, is a fan favorite, in spite of the fact that it was the darkest of the three and didn't have an ending in the true sense of the word.

I've also heard another complaint about Lord of the Rings. I've heard it was too long. That is perhaps true, in the sense that it had no intermission and probably should have. But there were some sequences cut from the book already. In order to do justice to the original work, it really couldn't have been much shorter. I'm sure by the time most people went to see it, they knew how long it was. How can you go to see a three hour movie, and then say it's too long? It's like driving for an hour and saying that you wanted the trip to be forty minutes. An hour trip takes an hour and a three hour movie takes three. This is NOT rocket science.

The only time I dislike a movie, is when someone changes the end to satisfy some imagined status quo. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was an excellent book and an excellent movie as well. However, the movie ended on an upbeat note, when the Indian inmate escaped. This did not happen in the book. The book ends with the protagonist being smothered to death. It was a much darker ending. Why did the director or writer feel it necessary to change the end when the original was so much stronger?

How many times has Hollywood "dumbed down" a movie, in order to make it intelligible to us clods in the audience? Sometimes, I wish someone would talk to the people in Hollywood and tell them we are adults. We LIKE intelligent movies and dark is okay. Some people won't like it, but you can make a bunch of romantic comedies for them. I can understand a romantic comedy requiring a happy ending, but a drama?

My final example of what I consider the incompetence of Hollywood, is AI. It's a great movie, until the last twenty minutes. It has the perfect ending, twenty minutes before the movie ends. The end of the movie doesn't even seem to fit with the rest of it. I feel they tacked on the last bit, to give us an ending that wasn't quite so bleak. When I get the DVD, I will stop it at the point I like and never watch the rest of it, at which point it will be one of the best science fiction movies it has ever been my pleasure to watch.

Hollywood thinks we need things in neat little packages. I won't speak for everyone, but I know it's not true for me. A story has a natural ending and it's not always at a point that is emotionally satisfying. Disturbing endings can be just as much fun.

Of course there'll always be people out there complaining about how they hated a certain movie because it didn't have a happy ending and to those people I say this: if a movie doesn't have a happy ending, it's because the writer and director felt that was how the movie should end. If you require a happy ending, you should be more selective about what you watch, rather than play back seat director. Stop complaining, I'm tired of hearing about it.

If there is a lesson to be had from this month's column, it is this: when watching a movie, try to keep in mind what the writer and director were going for and allow them the opportunity to try to accomplish that goal. You'll enjoy a larger percentage of the movies you see and you won't annoy the people that did enjoy the film for what it was.

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