Is it summer yet?

We stand at the edge summer waiting, wanting to be dazzled. Searching for respite from the heat in the cool darkness of the local "Megaplex". While we’re there how ‘bout some entertainment, some bombastic, flashy, escapist fun. We are ready for pretty people in fantastic situations in some exotic locales to do impossible things. Give it a pulsing soundtrack with a half a dozen hit songs by whoever is hot right now. Throw in some jaw dropping state of the art special effects. Oh, and don’t bother with story or character development. Please make sure you leave plenty of holes in the what little story you do use, so  in two years I can drop another twenty bucks to find out what’s gonna happen in part 3, two years after that.

The sad thing is that I fall for it. I am almost always disappointed. So I begin my trips to the theater by lowering my expectation. I fill up in the food court, pre-complain about the commercials and the ticket price and the jerks that talk during the movie and the blah, blah, blah, and then go in anyway. And by being so jaded and skeptical I can sometimes actually enjoy a slightly better than average film even though I can’t really remember much about it the next day. But is that any way to live? With previews, you are in that darkened room for three hours or more.

Maybe it’s time to make Hollywood aware. If we could just, as a people, skip some of the fluff. Let the powers that be know that we want to be engaged and given the opportunity to be involved with our leading men and women. It shouldn’t be enough to just sit and watch because it’s in Imax or 3D. Let’s face it, on a regular TV, Avatar will barely be okay. Pixar (with the exception of Cars) has managed to make a string of incredibly entertaining, visually stunning films. They have heart and soul. They draw you in and entertain as they do it.

I know that a lot of people don’t care. The Wolverine DVD sales are well above 73,000,000 bones, selling more than 24,000 copies this week alone. And that’s 32 weeks after this piece of cinematic shit plopped. Stop buying it. There’s better stuff to spend money on, like food. People are starving in the street and people are buying fucking Wolverine!? New?

Jeez. Sorry about that. I forgot to take my pill last night.

We here at fat and skinny are not above pure entertainment. We spend a lot of our day, and a good many of our nights, panning for gold knee deep in a river of shit. Nine out of ten movies are barely watchable. But that’s it isn’t it? I ask you movie fans, casual viewers, cinema aficionados. Is it this search that keeps us going. Is it as fun to revile a bad film as it is to lionize a good one? It is.

So here I sit. As I read what I’ve written it be comes clear that the bad ones make the good ones better. And as the waters deepen, as availability of the vast canon of movies find there way to DVD and OnDemand, cable and revival house we, I, will keep watching. There isn’t really any real point to criticizing a film. Someone will like it.
But that doesn’t mean we’re gonna stop. After all that’s a huge part of the experience, talking about it.
 
Matt’s at Motor City Comic Con in beautiful Novi, Michigan this weekend so check him out if you there. He’s always wrecked when he gets back. It should be fun. And when he does get back we’ll do #8. I actually saw some stuff that should be fun to talk about.

Also, I posted my top 5 monster movies over at the Facebook and got a lot of good feedback. Keep it coming. I know I forgot stuff. I want to talk about it on the show.

Cheers - Jason