The end of the Summer Movies
by Shannon on Wednesday, 12 of September, 2007 at 6:04 am
There is a distinct chill in the air that can only mean one thing; summer is coming to an end. Along with no longer seeing people walk around in shorts wearing knee socks and sandals, comes the end of the block buster summer movies.
What can we say about this past movie going season? Hmmm…it sucked. Okay, maybe suck is a little strong, perhaps it would be better to say it was overly ambitious. It seemed every movie I saw, especially those in the sci-fi fantasy arena, didn’t know what they were and how to stick to that. Didn’t know what their main story points were, or there themes. In short, they suffered from forgetting some of the most important rules of story telling. Let’s just take one movie here as an example. Stardust.
Everyone knows I was looking forward to seeing this movie, everyone knows I love Neil Gaiman (whose book this movie was based on). While the movie did have enjoyable moments, as a whole it fell a little short. There were differences between the book and the movie, the most major one being the end. But more then just plot devices, the movie was trying too hard to be epic, to be…well bigger then what it really was.
At it’s core Stardust is a coming of age tale, a love story, a very simple and sweet fairy tale. It is (at least in tone) very much like The Princess Bride. Light hearted, fun, simple and sweet. It’s the kind of story someone might tell around a campfire, and the movie totally lost that appeal. There were moments of sweetness, moments of lightness, and moments when the movie almost hit the target, and then the producers, writers, and directors seemed to remember that any good fantasy needs sword play, lots of it, and an epic ending battle, and of course an ending where everything is just super duper okay. In the end of the movie, kings were made and immortality was found, not really at all like the book. So, in the end, it seems Hollywood is incapable of the light sweet fairy tale, of a simple but no less heartfelt, story.
Similar afflictions affected the rest of the summer movies. None of them really knew where they wanted to go or how to go there. Too many plot threads not fully developed, too many characters introduced and then ignored, too many endings that tried to tie themselves neatly into happy little bundles at the end. Oh well, I suppose there is always next summer. Or maybe I’ll just stick to the books from now on and ignore the movies. Yeah right, that’s never going to happen.
Category: Movies
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