Background Noise: Love I Can't Defend (Elvira Nikolaisen)
Random Thought: Intoxication Tends to Be Unkind...How true
Mood: T minus 4 days until vacay
Let me welcome myself back to blogging by saying that entertainment has gone to shit lately. Now, I understand that big-budget summer movies cater to the same audience that is currently watching futbal 24/7 (in every country but here, where we are a bit behind). But I have to say that I've been difinitively disappointed with entertainment as of late.
First, I've seen a lot of movies that make better other things:
DaVinci Code made a better book,
Lost City made a better soundtrack,
The Sisters was superior as a stageplay,
X3 was pretty but can't hold a candle to
The Last Stand (This gives me hope for
Superman, which was penned by the same scriptwriters and is also directed by Brian Singer).
Second, I've been on a
Rent kick recently, meaning that insteas of smiling as one of it's songs staggered across my i-pod, I've been listening to it in its entirety. It makes me so sad to think of the film version, which I am planning on buying. Because it falls into the category that I will place
DaVinci and
X3 in--pretty. I can pop it in and do something else. I'm not engrossed.
That brings me to what I think is the overarching problem in entertainment as of late--I don't care about the outcome because I don't care about the characters.
Rent--OBC is an example of a story that weaves layered stories of interesting, conflicted, human characters into the fabric of a plot-line with a rollercoaster of emotion. The movie is a flat painting of those people that ignores much of what made them matter--there is no suicide, no bulimia, no beggars, no rioting, no disapproving parents, hardly any snark and a complete lack of depth.
And this is prevalent in other mediums as well--I'm on a hunt for quality reading material and find nothing but cookie-cutter chick-lit and knock-off
DaVinci Codes, tomes about supernatural beings and precocious dead people. Remember when
Bridget Jones and
Angels & Demons were fresh and new? They got buzz because they were intriguing and something different--now I can hardly raise a care about historians stumbling into conspiracies involving shadowy history or plucky singletons.
Media's problem--laziness. They find a rut that sells once and repeat it until they're in a hole so deep they can't see the sun. They flatten down films so that they will be easier to screen in foreign markets. They make sequels and remakes without worrying about if the current installment is any good on its own. And the whole idea that there are no new ideas is crap. People who say there are only a certain number of story lines (romance, western, buddy-flick, etc) are grasping at straws. There is one--love. The love of another person, the love of family, the love of a friend, love of the game, etc. You wouldn't have revenge if you didn't love what/who you lost, and you'd have a pretty crappy war film without the characters love for something. If characters don't love (even if they only love themselves), then there is no reason to care what happens to them. And this is what is becoming so prevalent in media today. Comic hijinks are linked by boring intreludes and book characters tread the same old boring quest for ramance while being simultaneously enviable/identifiable/idealistic/jaded/hunting for a relationship/yearning to be an idividual/and part of the requsite quirky family. Good storytelling just isn't that hard. Find a character and what they love, and it will tell itself. And people will want to take the journey with them.
Find the Love people, and you'll be making good.
