The Reasonably Good Movie (an endangered species)

We just watched Fatal Attraction. It made me sigh with longing for a bygone era.

Not that it was a masterpiece. The worst thing about it: they spend so long fleshing out the character of Alex (Glenn Close consulted multiple psychiatrists to make her pathologies as real as possible) only to destroy her remorselessly at the end. Even in a monster movie, there is occasionally a tear shed for the monster when he dies. Why should King Kong get a little empathy and not this messed up girl?

And there are plenty of aspects of the plot that make you slap your forehead. Dan and his wife are made completely aware of how dangerous Alex is and that she could be lurking outside their home at any moment, yet they fail to take the obvious steps to prevent her from entering their home for the big suspenseful climax.

It's as formulaic as any thriller you could think of, but there is at least some amount of intelligence in its construction. You can imagine that the writer at least broke a sweat in his effort to craft a genre piece. There is enough room for at least a couple of surprises, and there are sequences which, though not much more than compulsory checkpoints in the plot, contain believable dialogue and performances, and bring us to a respectable level of interest and investment. The way Dan meets Alex, for example, is commendably subtle; not only does it not bludgeon us with the significance of the meeting, it avoids doing anything beyond what is absolutely necessary. And the scene that really feels alive is in the restaurant, where Dan, the fly caught in the web, gradually relents to Alex's flirtations.

What I'm getting at is, this is what genre films used to be like. There was plenty to criticize them for, but they weren't simply imbecilic. At least you could tell that everyone involved actually cared about what they were making, had some amount of skill and creativity, and gave it a good try.




Now watch these clips from the new Captain America movie.






Genre movies these days feel as though they are parodies of the genres they supposedly belong to. Why are female characters required to prove how no-nonsense they are all the time? Why do they employ such primitive means- shooting at the protagonist, and then strutting around, for instance- to drive this point home? Can't we all be given credit for understanding that women aren't weaklings? Isn't this whole routine cliche enough already?

And how about that Tommy Lee Jones? "The sumbitch did it." The only thing lazier than that line was the decision to cast Tommy Lee Jones to read it. I can't stand it when a good actor is commodified like that.

Okay, so it's only two minutes total out of a whole movie. Maybe it's not fair to write these things after only seeing these clips. Maybe this isn't a trustworthy sample of the quality of the entire experience. But… I doubt it.

What Stephen Baldwin said in Threesome about pizza- that even when it's bad, it's still pretty good- once applied to most genre films. Going to the movies was kind of like going for pizza, or at least Taco Bell. It was even comforting in that way. But no longer.

I don't know, maybe it's just me. I can't really tell if I'm losing my taste for fast food, or if the food is really getting worse.