Keeping Time

I don’t watch that many movies, and read books even less, which always leads me to wonder why I feel this urge to be some sort of writer. But futures aside, I believe that I tend to stay away from movies for a couple of reasons. One would be cost and another would be the lack of a story that you can really sink your teeth into. Not to say that it lacks a plot, but it’s about at thick as tracing paper and simply serves as a device to move the characters from point A to B.

Now I don’t mean to say that all movies should be four-hour slow moving epics, but it’s nice to have some substance. But at the same time, there are a quite a number of exception to this idea, because I’m pretty sure I don’t want a heavy dose of story served with my Iron Man. Those are the movies where I’ll gladly replace engrossing story for flashy visuals and special effects. But it’s the movies that try to do both things at once that fail so miserably in my mind.

Take Spiderman 3 for example. Seeing as how it was the third (and final) installment in the series, it had plenty of loose ends to tie up. It’s the same way for anything that consists of three acts. So when it came out, and consisted of plenty of, what we’ll call, emotional substance, I don’t see why anyone was surprised. The Peter Parker/Mary Jane (or PP/MJ if you’re into abreviations) relationship had it’s ups and downs over the first two movies, and if they (they being writers/producers/director/etc) had simply left them alone, they would have sacrificed a large element of the story.

So yes, Parker did go a little…emo, if that’s what you choose to call it, but it was because, as far as I’m concerned, inevitable. But what they forgot is that people went to the Spiderman series for the entertainment value, not the story. Spiderman was cool. It had great CG, special effects and all of that flashy visual stuff. It didn’t play to it’s audience.

And sadly, that seems to be becoming our reality. Screw in-depth story and characters you grow to care about. As long as it has an A-List celebrity and flashy visuals, those are the movies that will succeed. The only saving grace for the other end of the spectrum seems to be an Oscar nomination, and even those don’t seem to do much.

Maybe this is just an age-old gripe. Good things always tend to be overlooked while flashy, shitty whatever gets all the attention. I guess that’s just how it goes, but as of late, it seems to be getting worse. Meet The Spartans? Really?