First, did you hear the Peter Jackson news?
Del Toro is making the Hobbit movies. All I can say is "Well played, Mr. Jackson." Hadn't thought of him, but now that he's signed on, I can't say I can think of a better choice (and that includes Peter Jackson) for this movie. Can you? Sam Raimi's name was kicked around initially, but that certainly wouldn't have been good.
So, what's the warning, you ask. Well, let's just say that at one point I said to myself, If we cut our losses now, we can still catch Lost. But as I turned to express this to Ann, she informed me that she had just discovered that she lost an earring that she bought on our honeymoon. We stayed with hopes of finding it when the theater lights went back up.
All I wanted was a fun movie. That's it. Wasn't expecting much…but apparently that was even too much. '21' did not even attempt to be a good movie. It was, in every way, simply an effort to exploit what may have been good source material for financial gain. This movie was Coyote Ugly at MIT.
I can't imagine 'Bringing Down the House' was anything like this. It couldn't have been. Because this was a movie script written by a young adult who said to himself, "In order to make the best movie ever, I'm going to copy all of the best movies ever and combine them into one super movie." For a while it was Good Will Hunting, than Ocean's 11, than it was the Firm, then it made some Rainman references--all the while, never allowing the audience to feel like they were watching anything with more weight than a bad Jerry Bruckheimer movie. 'Cause, seriously, I think they must have purposely made the lead female character inscrutable so to distract their audience from the plot holes and clichés.
I gotta stop, so I'll leave with what may be my all-time favorite bad line from a movie. Our heroes just made the climatic decision to go ahead with the big one. That means Kevin Spacey's gotta have a great money line as they leave the suite and head down to the casino--you know the type. It's gotta pull together themes from the movie up to this point and create the trajectory into the final resolution--but it's gotta be cool enough to be trailer worthy. Spacey say, "Blackjack is about the past and the future; tonight, we're going to forget about the past." Brilliant!
Last week Viggo said, "Dad, you gotta watch this. It's so cool. Now, close your eyes!" When Viggo says something that's innately self-contradictory, it's cute 'cause he's four. Hey, maybe, the problem with the movie is that Kevin Spacey's character wasn't a four-year-old tenured MIT professor. Yeah, I think that would have worked.
