The S.O. and I went to see Get Smart on Sunday. If it was a plane landing on the carrier here is the grade it would have gotten:
Way too much power on start, big settle in the middle, power on, flat at the ramp-1 wire.=No Grade.
(A no grade is like getting a C-minus on a test. Passing but nothing spectacular). I’ll not being paying to see it again that is for sure.
Which made me think a couple of thoughts about movies and what is wrong with them these days-or what is wrong with the movie going public.
Idea number 1– Computer Graphics is a toy that movie makers are starting to use way, way, too much. Don’t get me wrong-they have their place. And they make the visual effects seem a lot more realistic than hanging an airplane in front of a movie screen.
However, it seems to me that directors and producers have become overly reliant on them. They cannot save a movie with a lousy script. And no amount of computer effects should be so strong it makes the actors seem secondary to the movie.
I mean think about it-the one thing the old movies had was dialouge, which painted a picture and told a story. Think about James Stewart in Harvey. One never saw the rabbit-but you did not need to. His verbal performance had you sold early on.
Which to me, is where Get Smart falls flat. The real beauty of Don Adams and the TV show from Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, was the word play and its topical humor. The TV show did not have absurd visuals-it relied on the spoken jokes to carry the day. The movie tries-but never gets it. Even the S.O. turned to me about a 1/3 of the way into the movie and asked me when it was supposed to be funny. I think both Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway were horribly miscast. Carrell never pulls off the innocence of Don Adams of the role of Max. As for Hathaway-all I wanted to do during the movie was put a sock in her mouth and bend her over the couch. Her legs and ass ( which are Oscar worthy) gave a better performance than she did. Better acting-not stupid visuals and really bad sex jokes would have done more justice to the memory of a good TV show.
Observation number 2.- There have been a lot of movies that have been very political dramas lately. Spurred on by the news of the day and the war that never ends. They have been panned by critics and attacked by GWB supporters-but to me it misses another point. A movie is supposed to tell a story….and make a point. It is not supposed to hit you over the head in doing so however. Contrast, Seven Days in May-which was a very anti military movie, but still good nonetheless; to the recent Robert Redford movie about the War on Terror. It makes a point, but it really is a bad telling of the story. The same point could have been gotten across, but in a more subtle way.
But is that the movies fault? Or is due to the fact that subtlety is lost on audiences who don’t even know where Iraq or Afghanistan is-much less the history of how the West has never had a good look in either of these particular hell holes. Or audiences that think the only play William Shakespere wrote was Romeo and Juliet and think Henrik Ibsen was a Swedish gymnast. Think about it-could Arthur Miller-one of my favorite playwrights-have even sold a play these days? I wonder.
So the lesson learned in either case is-movie writers need to write better stuff. And not rely on the people at Industrial Light and Magic to save them from a poorly written script. Or to simply wish themselves out of a linguistic corner by the movie equivalent of “and then I woke up!”.
Just my opinion.
“and then I woke up!”
Ironic choice of words given that it is the last line (minus the exclamation point and in a different context) of one of the best movies I’ve seen in awhile, No Country for Old Men. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. And read the book while you’re at it.
There are movies out there worth seeing, but they aren’t getting the play that they ought to commercially. Satoshi Kon’s ‘Paprika’ comes to mind, as does (and I am with Mike on this) ‘No Country for Old Men,’ and ‘Charlie Wilson’s War.’
I’ve a friend of mine who is neck deep in the movie industry and says that the studios are constantly looking for ways to save production costs. One of those ways is through the liberal use of CGI that would have otherwise required the actual construction of some very large and complicated sets. This works, sometimes, when it is used right.
For instance, ‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ and ‘Sin City’ worked quite well as did the first of the three Matrix movies. The problem is that the outright abuse of computer generated imagery to make up for a weak plot is completely indefensible. (‘Transformers,’ I am looking at you.) Most of the stuff that is out there is made on the cheap and then sold to distributors as quickly as possible to guarantee some notion of profit. My friend tells me that as long as the film pulls about 10-15% in profit out of the theaters and then another 10-15% out of rentals and DVD sales the studio could care what the thing is about and overall script quality.
Insofar as classics go, ‘Harvey’ is an excellent example, I’d hold up ‘Mr. Roberts’ (as taking place almost entirely onboard four or five small spaces onboard The Bucket, specifically the scene where the crew is “cleaning” the binoculars), and ‘Vertigo’ as others. And not to forget ‘The Blues Brothers.’
“Oldsmobiles are in early this year.” No?
I haven’t seen ‘Get Smart’ yet, but I figure I probably won’t bother with it right now. My question for you is, does your S.O. ask you to explain (occasionally extensive sections of) dialogue in the movies after seeing them? Ours share a similar national origin and I’ve all but given up on watching movies in the theater with her because of these “interrogations.”
The S.O. studied English in college and worked for 18 years for a Japanese subsidary of an American company. So she had a a lot of exposure to Americans and American English. That said, she is not a natural English speaker, and it shows a lot when someone speaks quickly to her-or with a pronounced accent. ( Southern idioms drive her nuts-she knows standard English).
So in a movie, she will watch it, but like me listening to Japanese-you can tell she is concentrating hard to follow the dialouge. She understands the words-but she cannot pick up on nuance and political humor, -satire is just lost on her. So during Get Smart, I had to explain a lot of the jokes about Dick Cheney and a lot of the references to things that happened in the TV show.
Plus, given a choice, she won’t watch a drama or a comedy. In Japan, I went by myself to see the shoot em up dramas. What she likes is cartoons. All kinds of cartoons-especially the recent movies by PIXAR. Don’t ask me why. I think it is because its easier to understand a cartoon. I know I have an easier time with Japanese cartoons than regular TV -thus my theory.
In Japan, she hardly watched any AFN TV-NHK was her channel. Over here-she sticks to HGTV, Animal Planet, and she loves “America has got talent”. I think it proves my theory-they are easier to understand and there is no nuance to wade through. She watches the Weather a lot.
Of course I could be wrong and she just likes seeing animals and people on stage making fools of themselves.