Judging Movies By Their Background Scenery
More and more recently, I’ve noticed how much I like a movie depends on where it is set. I think this is because I’ve been watching so many bad movies lately, and if the actors don’t do or say enough to make the movie interesting through the dialogue… Well, I need *SOMETHING* pretty to look at while I’m killing time til the next plot point. For this reason, I have to watch movies like “Iron Man” in the theater. Desert scenes are boring to look at unless they are huge and you can feel almost like you are there. (Except for that pesky theater air conditioning that works against the illusion… Hey, somebody should built an interactive theater where the climate changes to match what is on the screen! You’d have to wear a parka to watch The Day After Tomorrow.)
So, let’s test this theory against the movies I watched this week.
I Am Legend — I hate this movie. It wasn’t just a “meh” like I thought it would be; it actually made me angry. I don’t usually get angry at movies. Usually, I can laugh off their failure to suspend my disbelief. But this one’s violent and ugly, and the “Dark Seekers” aren’t supposed to be 28 Days Later zombies at all! We still haven’t had a good movie with a post-Apocalyptic world full of vampires, though Omega Man came fairly close for me and at least had the right atmosphere. As far as setting goes… maybe I’ll like it better if I can make myself watch it again. I’m told there were some interesting mise en scene details in the abandoned apartments Will Smith is checking, like an apartment that was abandoned just before Christmas by a family expecting a baby. But otherwise, Manhatten just isn’t much fun to look at. How come all the CG animals disappeared after the first ten minutes? And even RiffTrax didn’t salvage my enjoyment of the movie after we meet the Brazilian lady of magical faith. Blech.
The Wicker Man — Here’s a movie whose *only* saving grace is its setting. Some folks on the RiffTrax forum were laughing that there is an HD-DVD version of this one, but I can totally understand why someone would buy this in high-def. It was set in the forests of Puget Sound in Washington, which is in my opinion the most beautiful part of the United States. I got nostalgic during the scene where Nicolas Cage is on the ferry boat. I had a nice New Year in Seattle with my boyfriend last year or so, and I would love to live somewhere where you have to take a ferry fairly often to get around. There was also some decent art direction on this movie, with its weird field of beehives with honeycomb walking paths, pickled babies and God only knows what else in Sister Summersisle’s house, and the old-fashioned bicycle Nicolas Cage bikes around on. And I can only imagine the swarm of HD bees stinging the heck out of Nicolas Cage’s giant puppy dog action hero face. Again, when the movie sucks, just look at the beautiful deciduous rainforest in the background and ignore the screams of “Not the bees!” and the smacks of Nick Cage hitting women for your entertainment. For interesting dialogue, just add RiffTrax and you find that this is actually a comedy disguised as a bloodless horror movie. If you have a good HD entertainment center, the setting plus the RiffTrax commentary make this stinkburger worth the price of admission. Especially if you bought a used copy on Amazon for $0.01.
Glitter — Well, aside from this being a terrible Mariah Carey vehicle of epic fail, it’s set in urban New York again. Two interesting apartment sets plus a lot of boring grey. Without RiffTrax, it’s a total honk-shoo. Awesome job by the way, Mary Jo Pehl! This plus X Files won me over so I now like both CinTan *and* RiffTrax.
X-Files: Fight the Future — Yup, another movie saved by the scenery. Two hours is too long for a TV episode, even if it is the season finale. When I saw this one in the theater in 1999, my brain kinda glazed over until they left dusty Texas behind. And it wasn’t til I listened to the RiffTrax commentary that I could pay enough attention to follow the early scenes. (More kudos to MJ for making this fun and also making me realize the movie is much more mockable than I thought when I first saw it and bought the action figures. ) This one only had my full attention when it got to the part with the bees and all the running through cornfields. And Antarctica. Hmm. Desert = boring, but ice = interesting, especially with all the special vehicles they had for moving through the snow, until Mulder reaches the pretty emerald green alien host containers. In the desert all you get are jeeps and camels.
Signs — Another one that kinda made me mad, but at least it succeded at being scary. I had to check the dark, empty bedroom next door to mine for aliens before I went to sleep last night. And here’s some more evidence that cornfields work for chase scenes. The thought that aliens were hiding in the corn was enough of a distraction that I forgot how much I hate Mel Gibson for a few minutes. I hope the RiffTrax team tackles this one someday.
But that’s enough RiffTrax/mainstream studio movie talk. There are also the two released episodes of Cinematic Titanic, of which I finally watched Doomsday Machine today.
Out of the two episodes I’ve seen so far, my favorite is still The Oozing Skull, due to the boring metal or space matte painting scenery in Doomsday Machine. The jokes were good in both, but Doomsday Machine drags more as the original movie and even with the riffing the last half hour was a chore to get through and I found myself thinking thoughts such as, “Huh. At least they *tried* to make the inside of the rocket more interesting. Note to self: if I make a space movie, add lots of multicolor lights to the budget to break up the greyness of metal walls painted in Air Force base colors. With good dialogue and an actual plot, this could work! Too bad *this* movie had neither of those things…” The different plastic spaceships were interesting, but they went by too fast for me to appreciate them. And on my second viewing I’m going to look harder for the fingerprints on the clay planet models.
In contrast to the boring scenery in Doomsday Machine, The Oozing Skull had a lot of interesting visuals, and the set changed often enough, and there was even a chase scene albeit a really boring one. Even though the building in Khalid was a postcard, it was at least as pretty as a postcard. And there was a field, a laboratory with brightly colored fluids in test tubes, some woods, and a dungeon with an interesting set of stone steps. So, outside of the riffing, which is too close to call, The Oozing Skull is still my favorite CinTan episode. Because of the movie’s background scenery.
