Movies

I have been trying this week to watch some recent movies, of the sort normal people like, but am not having a lot of luck. I choose things which have elements I find appealing - fantasy or animation. I was unable to watch more than 20 minutes of most of them, simply because they are STUPID, and compounded entirely of cliches punctuated by huge things rushing toward the viewer. Alice in Wonderland is especially painful in that there wasn't a single person associated with the production with sense enough to go to Tim Burton and tell him that Jabberwocky was the name of the poem, not the creature; that the creature was a jabberwock, not a jabberwocky. Also painful was the fact that Danny Elfman has fallen asleep with his head on the keyboard of his mellotron and needs someone to kick the damn stool out from under him. Apparently that one trick of having a crowd of women all saying ah is enough of a creative challenge for him. I'd like to tie them together and dangle them over a shark pit, exclaiming "Gothfag your way out of THAT you pussy-assed bastards!" Clash of the Titans appears to be deliberately compounded of the worst aspects of modern film technique - for god's sake never let the camera rest in one place for even a moment - keep it constantly swooping through and around CG landscapes and cities, craning across sets the exact shape and size of a soundstage, or dancing around in closeup faux cinema verite. How to Train Your Dragon is a Dreamworks animation so you know that cool thing they do in all the other movies? Let's do that because that would be cool. Plus let's give our vikings irish accents. Because vikings are from Ireland, right? Or someplace like that. Made it through ten minutes of that crap. Strangely it was Salt, essentially a video game in which Angelina Jolie is an unstoppable superspy, that I actually found watchable. It was just intelligent enough in concept and structure to gloss over its fundamentally moronic basis and make a fairly entertaining experience, though the shooting and fighting were so broken up into microshots that it was impossible to follow the blur of activity - maybe that made it more tolerable. I guess I should try one of those movies where a bunch of women learn truths of life and love, or maybe one of those football movies.