This is for the movies that have everything you like: your favorite actor or actress, director, or writer. Your favorite genre. They might be based on your all-time favorite novel or comic, or have a great soundtrack, or a smokin' sex scene, or SOMETHING that totally appeals to you. But try as hard as you can, you just can't really get into the movie. And you feel like you should have. If you can relate, please reply with your choices. I have a few:
1. Blade Runner.
A bad-ass movie, by all rights. I'll be the first one to admit the direction is just gorgeous, and way ahead of its time. It still looks amazing, 20 years after it came out. Harrison Ford is always cool, and a movie that combines sci-fi and film noir elements should really grab me. After all, 1998's Dark City is one of my favorites, and then of course there's that Matrix thing.
But I just find Blade Runner to be very slow-paced, to the point of it being draggy and boring. I've tried to watch it on Sci-Fi Channel, but it plods along. I want to love this movie--I actually feel like I should love it. But I think I need to watch it with fans.
2. (No offense, HEROKILLER) The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.
I had always been curious about this movie, but people have told me my whole life that it is unwatchably bad, and nobody ever wants to rent it with me. It happened to be on Encore recently, and my dad taped it for me and sent me the video in the mail as a surprise. But the tape had been used to record something previously, and the sound was really fuzzy. It made the dialogue very hard to hear, so maybe I missed some key lines. I guess this is one more reason people love DVDs.
The movie had one of the best ensemble casts I've ever seen, and it had a lot of elements I should have been crazy about. It was an obvious riff on the multi-talented pulp hero Doc Savage, but thrown into the crazed 1980s. Buckaroo Banzai as an adventurer/scientist/neurosurgeon/rock guitarist/leader of a team of heroes, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, who just happen to be his band. THAT IS COOL. It had cool early '80s fashions and one cool instrumental new-wave number, aliens, lots of camp, and Ellen Barkin, who is sexy as hell. Peter Weller, who played Buckaroo, even looked like Adam Ant! But the movie didn't grab me, and I was so hoping it would. Maybe it the poor quality of the videotape didn't help, but I think it just wasn't that great in the first place. What did I do wrong?
[ 09-29-2002, 02:33 AM: Message edited by: Big Bad Voodoo Lou ]
