clearly, the month can only go up from here.
The quote of the day:
I can't believe I enjoyed Blade more.
Running news:
Yesterday: 5.3 miles.
Today: slept in. And I do mean, in.
As Darin said, "In ninety minutes, it's tough to fully flesh out a lot of characters. But I would have settled for one."
Vampires is the story of a bunch of Vatican-sponsored mercenaries who hunt down vampires and kill them. Which is a great idea. The movie's set in the Southwest, so it has that western kind of feel. Also great. The vampire hunters run across the Master, who is a centuries-old vampire who's looking for a special cross that will allow him to walk in the daylight--basically making him invincible. Also a great idea.
So where did this movie go wrong?
- Hateful characters. As someone I know said, James Woods's character in any other movie would be the villain...but he's the hero. And everybody else is either loathesome or weak or both.
- A meandering, contradictory plot. In one scene, James Woods points out the history of these vampires and says they're looking for something; in another scene a priest is abducted and killed, but when told that the priest is an expert in Catholic history of the area, Woods in incredibly uninterested.
Half the fun of these movies is setting up the rules of the world and then trying to maneuver around in them. James Woods tells the priest that vampires don't wear capes and don't have cheesy Eurotrash accents. Unfortunately, the master vampire in this movie has both. Bullets don't work on these vampires...but the vampire hunters insist on going in fully armed anyhow. Bullets barely distract vampires from what they're doing...but a speargun will throw them across the room.
Sunlight always burns them, though. Well, except for...
Diane sez: Save your bux.
On one of my screenwriting lists, a guy asked why women get so upset if a character in a movie happens to be a hooker.
Jeez. I don't know. Gosh, are we being unreasonable?
It seems like every damn movie we go to these days features a hooker. How many roles for women nominated for Oscars over the past 5 years have been hookers? (Answer: most of them.) Maybe the guys who make movies only meet women who are hookers, but most women aren't. And yes, we tend to resent being portrayed as sex commodities, especially as there aren't many other images out there.
Every major actor has played a cop; every actress a hooker.
What cracks me up is that the hookers in these movies are amazingly monogamous. We never get a sense that they're in control of their sexuality; they're there to be fucked by the lead actor and then dedicate her body to his satisfaction.
I read a very interesting book recently called Why Men Are The Way They Are by Warren Farrell that goes over the way men and women relate and why they keep talking past one another. I didn't buy everything he said--a couple of times I thought he made unjustified leaps--but he did say several things I thought were insightful and gave me a new appreciation for how to approach relationships.
Anyhow, he talks about what happens when men agree to participate in beauty pageants. They think it's fun at first...until they start to lose on the basis of their looks. And they start to get very concerned with their looks.
We do that to men for a couple of centuries; we'll probably stop seeing this crap.
|
|
|
|
Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com