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.