Post a response to this discussion thread
I might have to concede "Big Kahuna" to you -- according to the IMDB, its official release date was 4/28, but it didn't make it to my market until 5/19 (I guess we were a really late bloomer). We could argue about "Virgin Suicides" until the cows come home.
Actually, in a way, I sort of liked the fact that Commodus wasn't particularly ungodly evil (a lot of people claim he was just plain weird rather than mean) -- that keeps him from becoming a caricature (which Tavington pretty much was in "The Patriot" -- so evil that he wasn't even much of a real person; Amon Goethe from "Schindler's List" was a much more rounded truly evil villain than he was). For some reason, I never really thought that much about how many fights there were in "Gladiator" -- but regardless, the "tiger match" alone was as good as a dozen tired cliche fights in most film.
"What Lies Beneath" annoyed me too much to bore me. Particularly the fact that the whole first half of the movie is a false plant. And the "ghost" had some strange rules and motivations...
Actually, "Fargo" WAS spoofed by "Spy Hard" or some other Leslie Nielsen movie I accidentally saw a few years ago. But I see what you're saying about Coen brothers films, particularly "Hodsucker Proxy." But spoofing a comedy film is generally just asking for trouble anyway. "Scream 1" wasn't much of a comedy, at least not a "laugh out loud" comedy or even a black comedy. "Scary Movie" is not intended be scary in the least and is definitely intended to be "laugh out loud" funny. I think, most of the time, "Scary Movie" works as a parody of "Scream" et al, whether it should have or not (I already said the whole concept seemed kind of silly -- but sometimes silly is successful!).
I do agree with your other reasons behind "Scary Movie's" success (which are some of the same ones most industry analysts gave). But they also all mentioned the trailers, and most people I know who saw the movie said they did so entirely because of the trailer (your average person doesn't think "Hey, it's mid-summer and I've seen everything else -- let's watch 'Scary Movie;!" That's more like something *I* would say...). By the way, just so we understand each other, I'm not defending this movie as one of the best of the summer or anything like that (I already listed it under my disappointments)-- more or less, I'm just defending the trailer!
Post a response to this discussion thread