So last week, in Pittsburgh, Ben and I returned to our hotel room early and decided to watch a movie. Sadly, the only movie we could find (that we didn't have to pay for, and that didn't feature full-scale nudity) was the Ashton Kutcher/Amanda Peet classic A Lot Like Love, an annoyingly drawn out love story with many things wrong with it, such as:
1. The fact that it stars Ashton Kutcher
2. The fact that it stars Amanda Peet
3. The fact that it is an annoyingly drawn out love story.
Really, it's number three that really gets me (although I really do harbor a likely unhealthy dislike of both these stars, particularly Amanda Peet, who needs to learn that being naked in a movie does not make you an artiste). In his book Killing Yourself to Live, Chuck Klosterman goes into a digression about how all people just have movie archetypes that they truly cannot stand-- he, for example, hates "nobody believes me" type movies, where people's wives are kidnapped and no one will help them. And I, it turns out, simply cannot stand movies where couples get together, break up, get together, break up, get together, are suddenly separated by 1,000 miles and changing life views, get together briefly again, break up this time seemingly for good, and then, desperately, at the last moment, get back together again, one can only assume forever, but given their past, it might be unlikely.
I realize that this is the plot of almost all romantic comedies; this is why I avoid them. While I understand that it would really be pretty boring to watch a movie where a couple just hits it off right away and never breaks up, only having minor squabbles about who walks the dog more often, it would also be much more realistic, and waste a lot less time-- if we know they're going to get together in the end, why prolong it with a series of tortured montages set to Ryan Adams music of them staring out the window moodily?
But this whole rant is not really about why I hate romantic comedies-- it is more to find out what movie archetype makes you insane. For instance, Ashley has told me that she really hates movies that in any way involve the apocalypse or any type of post-apocalyptic world, such as Waterworld, The Postman, or pretty much any other Kevin Costner movies (themselves a sign of the apocalypse).
So doooo tell-- I'm fascinated by this whole concept. Your least favorite movie archetype-- spill it.
Sunday, July 30, 2006
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10 pipers piping:
There are so many to hate.
I just wish that after the guy flies to Venice/London/New York/her parent's house, finds the girl and tells her he loves her (never mind that a same-day plane ticket would be, like, $5,000), they would show how they keep it fresh, day after day, forever.
i hate any movie where i'm aware of the ethnicities of the characters, painfully aware of the trite plot, the stereotypicalness of it all- anything not nuanced... but it doesn't explain why i liked the devil wears prada... i think it's bcs i like meryl streep being just unabashadly unapologetic... i will ponder. it's a curious- archtype phenom. thanks for bringing it up! i'm curious too.
I also hate films in which it was all a dream. (That means you and your Vanilla Sky crap, Mr. Cruise.)
Ashton Kutcher is in films?
I really do not at all appreciate movies that work so hard to point out how sad and hopeless life is, and are all about desperation and despair. Movies that are REALLY ugly...ones that are usually directed by people like Paul Thomas Anderson, Lars Von Trier, and Todd Solondz, I especially do not like. LIGHTEN UP BOYS!
I agree with Ashley--the "twist" ending of "it was all a dream" just pisses me off, as does any movie where the "twist" cannot be supported by the rest of the movie. i.e. you cannot go back and rewatch the movie and "have it all make sense." Damn. I'm tired out by my own facetious quotation marks.
Another movie I truely hate is the bet movie...where the girl or guy takes a bet to go out with someone hideous, then they fall in the love, the hideous person finds out and then the bad bet-taker has to prove the validity of his/her love. Blarg! I shake my fist at the bet movie.
I hate movies that have much cooler titles than their plots can live up to: Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, Against a Crooked Sky, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (ok, decent B grade camp), Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (ok, not bad but the title is way too cool though).
If it weren't for cool special effects and villians, I'd say that the super-hero genre is getting pretty tiring. Notice the same formula. Introduce the character(s); they have to be troubled about their super hero fate because, hey, you have to have conflict to have a decent movie. Add in the iffy girl/boy friend relationship. Then throw in one or two villians that no matter how powerful their superhero talents are, they always find something to easily defeat them with (temorarily). What is up with all of this? Oh, I forgot....they are just COMIC BOOKS!
Looking over what everyone else has written, I found myself nodding so much that I'm amazed there are any movies I actually like. Just about any film that obviously follows a formula annoys me. I shouldn't be able to guess a film's story arc before I sit down to watch it.
And what's with all this nudity-dissing? Am I right fellas?
Oh, and since we're on the subject of movies, I shall gratuitously post a link to The Editing Room.
I forgot to mention that I also really, really hate it when people use sign language in movies even if there are no deaf people around (which is something that also happens in "A Lot Like Love."
Also, did I spell archetype wrong like 100 times up there? Is it archtype? I think it is. Oh, God, I'm an idiot.
No no! "Archetype" is correct. It's all good.
Another movie trope that gets on my nerves is the "cabbage head" phenomenon. That's where one of the characters inexplicably becomes a total moron for five minutes so the other characters can explain something to the audience. It happens a lot in science fiction. The hero's spent his whole life around aliens and space ships and such, but suddenly he needs it explained to him that gravity can be stronger or weaker on other planets, just in case the rubes in the audience didn't know that.
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