Movies
I like going to the movies. I don’t go to every movie that comes through Sanpete, but every so often one comes along that I feel deserves the “big screen experience.”
Sometimes it feels like “feast or famine” with movies here. A couple of weeks ago, there were three movies playing in Sanpete, and we wanted to see all of them.
So within a week or ten days, we saw, “Sound of Freedom,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (5th of the Indiana Jones films),” and “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One” (7th of the “M:I films).
There was awareness raised by the “Sound of Freedom” movie. It is sort of a “docu-drama” relating to the world-wide problem of child trafficking.
Due to the way the show was made, distributed, advertised, crowd-funded, etc., there were a lot of people at the theater who I don’t normally see at the show house. The movie has been quite a phenomenon which depicts Utah resident Tim Ballard and his organization’s efforts to save children.
I’m still impressed with Harrison Ford’s acting in the Indiana Jones movies. He’s now 81 years old. With some fancy-dancy movie magic, they had him appear much younger for flash-back parts of the movie.
Tom Cruise is still doing his own stunts in the Mission Impossible movies. He’s 61 years old. He rode a motorcycle off a cliff six times in one day to get the stunt done the way he wanted it for the movie.
We liked all the movies and had good nights out. It was unusual for us to “feast” on the movies like that in that short of a period of time.
I sometimes go to www.rottentomatoes.com for movie information. (Don’t forget the second ‘e’ in tomatoes. I had to throw that in, just in case Dan Quayle was reading.) The site is helpful for me when I want to investigate movies that I’m considering spending money on.
The site has dozens of reviews from a variety of critics for each movie. The reviews are compiled and totaled and then each film is judged as being either “fresh” or “rotten.”
Years ago, I remember going to a movie which the critics overwhelmingly deemed rotten. I saw “Wild Hogs” which stars some big names – John Travolta and Tim Allen among them.
Many critics said the movie was bad. The consensus statement was, “a dreadful combination of fish-out-of-water jokes and lazy stereotypes.”
One of my friends asked me how I liked the show. He was thinking about going to it. I told him that it had a poor script, a thin plot, and big-time actors, not acting at their best. Furthermore, it was implausible, vulgar at times, relied on juvenile humor, and – after all was said and done – I LIKED IT.
Sometimes it’s just good to see a movie without having any high expectations for it. I knew going into it that I wasn’t going to be seeing something in the category of high art. If you never saw it, it’s basically a story of guys going on a mid-life crisis motorcycle trip.
Maybe I should have higher standards, but for some reason a movie doesn’t have to be “critically acclaimed” for me to enjoy it. When selecting a video to watch at home from the zillions of tapes and DVDs we have stockpiled, I’m as likely to pull “Ace Ventura, Pet Detective” off the rack as I am “Hamlet.”
I’ve watched Indiana Jones movies over and over again. But somehow “Pride and Prejudice” doesn’t jump off the shelf very often for me. It’s one of those things where there’s no accounting for taste. We all like different things.
And if you’re a movie critic, you’ve got to justify your job by always cleverly picking apart a movie. That’s why I don’t trust them. See you at the movies. — Merrill