Two movies:
- Escape Plan (2013) – very smat movie.
- Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013) – pretty poor script.
Why watch a poor movie?
Some thoughts:
- In Escape Plan, I liked it a lot that you are told you should always try and have a plan B.
- Arnold Schwarzenegger speaks in German for a while in the movie. Something worth seeing.
- If you focus on the subject so much (Cloudy …), you risk of losing the details. In the movie, characters have to get from A to B. Pretty much nothing else matters in this process, they just need to get from A to B. Very simple. Well, details matter, and it’s not that simple.
- The main differnce between Escape Plan and Cloudy … is the solution for problems – in Escape Plan when something doesn’t work, you find an alternative. In Cloudy …, you just insist. “Ah, it didn’t work the first time? But I insist! Oh, if you insist…” (there’s a scene like this in A Few Good Men (1992)). It’s a very poor way to solve a situation. In Escape Plan, this happens in the fights with the guards. First the guards resist, and then they die. Because of insisting. The third escapee also dies of insisting. He’s hurt, but he fights. He still fights, he’s hurt more. They insist, he dies. Rather stupid.
- In Escape Plan some of the clear paths are blocked. You can’t easily see the solution.
- Cloudy… is a rather poor movie, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like their rather social/socialist theme, they’re preachment of things, lots of “we want you to have emotions at this stage”. Very very commercial (like most movies I watched lately). But I got some learnings out of it, and it was a useful lesson.
- I learned some things on the differences between family / model / friends relationships.
- Also – what’s important in life? What’s worth living for?
- In lots of the movies I’ve seen recently, there is a lot of emphasis on the truth. Arnie speaks German. The two main characters in the movie are strong, but not infallible. In Cloudy…, the truth is told plainly, sometimes as funny remarks. In Free Birds (2013), people need to see the truth. But this leaves little room for imagination. A goes to B, B goes to C. OK, where’s the imagination room left?
- As a conclusion, sometimes I learn much more things from a poor movie than from a “smart one”. I still want to re-see Escape Plan (I’ve seen some scenes 4 times, already), while Cloudy… has no substance. But there are teachings from not-so-smart movies, also.
P.S.: I feel a need to watch non-commercial movies. Just like modern music is mostly electronic, it seems the modern movies are mostly corporate-ish. There’s a boy & a girl, they must fall in love. If there’s an animal, it’s small, big eyes & cute. Very very simple messages. Little emotions other than the obvious one – A goes to B. Simple & clear. Not too much thinking.