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Letters From North America |
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Come on sunshine…Come on sunshine! Please don’t let it rain again next weekend. Now, you’d think that after a long dry spell, we’d just be content with staying home on the weekend and doing nothing. Well, that’s usually the case. However, and this is a big HOWEVER, this past weekend we decided to go to the store, get some stuff, make a big pot of soup and stay inside since it was so gloomy looking and scheduled to rain. On the way home, we passed a movie rental place and the wife says "Why don’t we get a couple of movies and watch them?" Now, being the reasonable person that I am, this sounded perfectly ok with me. We both enter at the same time, with approximately the same idea, pick out something that we both can live with and take it home. From this point on the similarity ceases to exist. Men head straight for the action, thriller, western section and women head over to the area that holds the films, which have become known as "Chick Flicks." This is not my definition, but the one given to me by the young man at the rental place, so if you want to be mad at someone for giving me this term, be mad at him, I think his first name was John, or Todd or something like that. He was about 19 or 20 years old, blond hair, you can’t miss him. Now, I will be the first to admit that there is entirely too much violence in our movies and television today. We’ll get into that discussion at a later date. However, I do like something with some action, some sense of suspense, some thing that shows me that these people are actually alive. But today, I basically wimped out and we walked out of the store with 5, count ’em 5 full-blown REALATIONSHIP movies. Now, I say to myself, "Self, how bad can this be? I can survive this" Woe is me. I am lost. Little did I know what to be in store for me. 5 movies translates into roughly 13 hours, excuse me, that’s 13 LONG hours of doing time before the TV. Now I know that relationship movies are all the rage. I know that it probably takes a lot more money and thought to write, film, and produce a movie about people rather than one where 254 people are killed and they have blown up 176 cars and trucks, plus several rather large buildings and perhaps one or two small towns. I know that fleshing out how people react to each other gets really involved and takes a lot more thought. What gets to me is that these movies all follow the same basic theme. People are at odds with other. People have a crisis in their lives of one sort or another. People are forced to be in contact with each other even though they don’t want to be. People fight and verbalize what they perceive is the problem with them that caused them to be separated. Someone dies. Everyone cries. Everyone makes up and lives happily ever after (except for the person that died.). Everyone cries again, but this time it’s for happy. End of movie. Give me a break. I can’t take this anymore. All of these movies were about the same thing. Almost everyone lives in various parts of the world. Someone, (the mercy figure in the movie) is taking care of ________(fill in the blank with Old Dad, Mom, Brother, Sister, ex-wife). Old Dad, Mom, Brother, Sister, ex-wife is about to give up the ghost and pass onto the next phase. So the mercy figure makes contact with all of those that have moved away because they hate each other. All of the hatees (is this a word?) end up back at the house where the crisis is headquartered. As time passes, their differences began to become apparent. We are treated to nearly an hour and one half of fighting and bickering over things that have happened over the lifetimes of these fictitious people. Most of us can get this at home, without having to pay for it. Anyway, whatever it was that created the problem passes. Someone dies, someone gets well, someone survives the operation, someone goes to jail or someone gets out of jail. Everyone somehow manages to be in the kitchen when some old MOTOWN song from the 60´s or 70´s comes into the scene and everyone grabs a mop or spoon and pretends that it’s a microphone and lip-synchs the words to some golden oldie. Then they all cry and make up and the movie is over. Some of them stay at home; some get in their cars and drive away. You get the idea that when everything is over and done with and they are all best buds from this point forward. How predicable can you get? I’d much rather rent a good old western next week. You never, ever know how those things are going to turn out. |
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