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By Eileen Peterman
2/1/2004
Here is an introduction to a movie reviewer. Me. I think this is a necessary because if you are going to take someone’s advice about something, be it car mechanics to what restaurant is good, you have to have some knowledge of them and their tastes to know if you have any faith in their advice. For instance, do you want the snobby movie reviewer of your regional paper telling you what movie to see on a Friday night if they only love movies with subtitles and depressing story lines? I don’t. There are many different types of movies suitable to many different moods and attitudes. What makes a movie ‘good’ is the enjoyment value of it and it often seems that the movies at the top of most professional reviewers lists are not that enjoyable. Like a root canal, something you do for your own good that certainly doesn’t give you a pleasant feeling.
For me a prime example of this is The English Patient. Released in 1997 this film went on to win a number of Oscars including those for cinematography and best film. I went to see this movie. It was possibly one of the most boring movies I had ever seen and I and my companion spent the majority of the film trying to stay awake. I was struck by the artful way that whenever there was a love scene the filmmaker had managed to get at least one nipple into the corner of the frame, I found this both gratuitous and distracting, and most definitely unnecessary. The wide sweeping vistas were there so that one could admire the wide sweeping vistas, again, in shots that did not enrich the story. The acting was good enough but it was a story in which one did not really care about the characters so whether they were blown up or died in a cave was fairly irrelevant as the film plodded along to its conclusion. After seeing it I could not see what all of the fuss was about.
Now there was another dramatic sweeping film set in the desert, but Lawrence of Arabia is a night and day difference from the disarray of The English Patient. Lawrence was an opportunist, but he was also a magnetic personality and Peter O’Toole’s portrayal was luminous. The friendship between the Sharif and O’Toole characters was truly believable and the desire to see these characters win and grow as individuals is overpowering. The vast landscape serves as a character itself. The desert presents both the beauty and the obstacles that the characters must overcome and the vast expanses are both beautiful and starkly vacant of humanity and warmth.
Of course not every good movie is an Academy Award winner, some remind us of a particular time and place, like the films Valley Girls, or Footloose, or Breakfast Club. Some films are just fun if you are in a stupid mood like Ace Ventura or Something About Mary. Some are classic comedies like Some Like It Hot and some are comedies of the moment like The Hot Chick. Great movies don’t have to be three and a half hours long, involve war, and come out in two theaters the week after Christmas. Some of the greatest movies of 2003 were released over the summer like Finding Nemo, The Pirates of the Caribbean and Seabiscuit.
In my personal collection I favor movies with a high level of watchability. That means a movie that one can watch over and over. Often these are the movies on TBS on a Sunday afternoon. It doesn’t matter whether you turn it on at the beginning or somewhere in the middle, it is a timeless film and you know it so well you can just turn it on anywhere. The best example that I can think of to show this is the TNT Christmas Day marathon of the Christmas classic A Christmas Story. In my house it is a requirement to watch this film at least two and a half times on Christmas Day. It doesn’t matter if you come in at the first bee-bee gun scheming, the visit to Santa, or the final debacle with the Bumpas’ dogs, you just turn it on and watch from there knowing that Christmas Day will arrive bringing with it the perfect moment of kiddom fulfillment. I could go into the matter of watchable films some more, but I think I will leave that for another column.
I will conclude saying that I will review films to the best of my ability and rate them in mind not only of the film’s artistic achievement, but of its likeability and possible inclusion in the pantheon of classic watchable films. So I hope dear reader that I didn’t bore you and that you will find some shred of wisdom in what I have to say about the movies I am going to review. If you completely disagree with me, well then at least you can look at my reviews and go to everything that I hate.
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