Friday, February 10, 2006
Does the end justify the means?
The last two movies I watched were similar in a fundamental way, while being very different. The Skeleton Key and The Constant Gardner are two movies you will never find next to each other at Blockbuster, but these movies due share something in common. Neither was very good, but both had excellent endings.
The Constant Gardner was a very confusing and hard to keep up with movie. If you are not familiar with it, Ralph Fiennes plays an English diplomat in Africa whose wife is murdered and he spends the movie unraveling the secrets of her life and the secrets of her death. I wouldn't go so far as to say this movie is bad, it was in fact a very well put together story and Ralph Fiennes is always amazing. The problem really comes from the fact that the filmakers are trying to put together a rollercoaster ride where every minutes brings a new surprise, this might have succeeded except that the movie was so hard to follow that you spent every minute thinking about what happened in the previous minute. So you constantly feel like you are playing catch-up with the storyline. But if there is a redeeming quality to all this it is the ending, which was excellent and since there was no new information to process I was able to give all my attention to and enjoy.
The Skeleton Key starred Kate Hudson and I was never sure what this movie was trying to be. The previews made it look like it might be a horror movie, it wasn't. The tone of the movie early on made it feel like a thriller in the grand tradition of M. Night Shyalaman, it wasnt. I had begun to believe it was just a drama, it wasn't. In all fairness the movie had aspects of all of these and I feel that the filmmaker was trying to blend this together seamlessly, which didn't work. The problems with this movie are too many to name, but I will name a few of the most prominent and most distracting. The acting is atrocious, Kate Hudson is not only the star of this movie, she is the only person here who acts like they have been in a movie before, but don't take that as too much of a compliment to her, she wasn't that good either. The single biggest problem with the movie is simply how the story is held together. Greeks used to call upon the Deus ex Machina whenever their heroes got into spots they couldn't get out of or when they could think of no other way to advance the story. Here the Deus ex Machina is the main characters nosiness, which is insurmountable in size. There must be a dozen places where the story could have hung up and died, but Kate Hudson's character would then do something that would make you scratch your head and say, "Now why the hell is she doing that? That doesn't make any sense." In Stephen King's Misery, Annie Wilkes gets angry at Paul for bringing Misery Chastain back to life by unfair circumstances, Annie Wilkes would have kicked out her television had she been watching this movie. But just like a really long flight to a really beautiful place, once you get there you are happy, and I have to say that when you get to the ending and understand what is going on(and that does take a second) it is somewhat satisfying. Now I can't under good conscience tell you dear reader the ending and I also in good conscience can't recommend this movie, but if you want to know the ending you will just have to sit through 99 minutes of crap for the last good 5 minutes. It is painfully apparent when you have watched this movie that the person who wrote it obviously had the ending first and worked his way back, I think under better writing this might have been a really good movie.
So constant reader I will leave you with the question that is the title of this post. Does the end justify the means? These aren't the first bad movies to have good endings, my mind harks back to the 1980's and an early Kevin Costner movie called No Way Out. A movie with a stellar cast, but a confusing and slightly boring story, a movie similar in these regards to The Constant Gardner. Both had great acting, both were confusing, both were a little boring, but both had great endings. Also, Edward Nortons first movie a Richard Gere thriller called Primal Fear, it had an excellent ending the only problem was, when I got there I no longer cared. I will say this in favor of these movies, they atleast have a hook. The concept of Cat in the Hat was to dress Mike Myers in a cat outfit and watch him run around, there was no story to go with it. Another concept, let's milk eighties nostaligia for a fast buck by bringing back the Orange Charger and putting two dreamy guys in it for teenage girls and a dimwitted beautiful starlet in short, short, short, shorts in it for the teenage boys. How about this concept lets take a CGI kangaroo, but one with some street appeal, in fact let's make him a rapper, and we will put a sweater of money on him and let two nitwits try to catch him, but he is a sly, streetwise Roo. I am sure you can see where this is going by now, atleast if a movie has a good ending it doesn't feel completely like you've wasted your time, not all of it anyway. I just wish they could all be like an M. Night Shyalaman movie or The Usual Suspects, I like being surprised and shocked, but boredom is not the emoition I want to precede these reactions. If you got to take a flight to a resort far away, you might as well fly first class.
The Constant Gardner was a very confusing and hard to keep up with movie. If you are not familiar with it, Ralph Fiennes plays an English diplomat in Africa whose wife is murdered and he spends the movie unraveling the secrets of her life and the secrets of her death. I wouldn't go so far as to say this movie is bad, it was in fact a very well put together story and Ralph Fiennes is always amazing. The problem really comes from the fact that the filmakers are trying to put together a rollercoaster ride where every minutes brings a new surprise, this might have succeeded except that the movie was so hard to follow that you spent every minute thinking about what happened in the previous minute. So you constantly feel like you are playing catch-up with the storyline. But if there is a redeeming quality to all this it is the ending, which was excellent and since there was no new information to process I was able to give all my attention to and enjoy.
The Skeleton Key starred Kate Hudson and I was never sure what this movie was trying to be. The previews made it look like it might be a horror movie, it wasn't. The tone of the movie early on made it feel like a thriller in the grand tradition of M. Night Shyalaman, it wasnt. I had begun to believe it was just a drama, it wasn't. In all fairness the movie had aspects of all of these and I feel that the filmmaker was trying to blend this together seamlessly, which didn't work. The problems with this movie are too many to name, but I will name a few of the most prominent and most distracting. The acting is atrocious, Kate Hudson is not only the star of this movie, she is the only person here who acts like they have been in a movie before, but don't take that as too much of a compliment to her, she wasn't that good either. The single biggest problem with the movie is simply how the story is held together. Greeks used to call upon the Deus ex Machina whenever their heroes got into spots they couldn't get out of or when they could think of no other way to advance the story. Here the Deus ex Machina is the main characters nosiness, which is insurmountable in size. There must be a dozen places where the story could have hung up and died, but Kate Hudson's character would then do something that would make you scratch your head and say, "Now why the hell is she doing that? That doesn't make any sense." In Stephen King's Misery, Annie Wilkes gets angry at Paul for bringing Misery Chastain back to life by unfair circumstances, Annie Wilkes would have kicked out her television had she been watching this movie. But just like a really long flight to a really beautiful place, once you get there you are happy, and I have to say that when you get to the ending and understand what is going on(and that does take a second) it is somewhat satisfying. Now I can't under good conscience tell you dear reader the ending and I also in good conscience can't recommend this movie, but if you want to know the ending you will just have to sit through 99 minutes of crap for the last good 5 minutes. It is painfully apparent when you have watched this movie that the person who wrote it obviously had the ending first and worked his way back, I think under better writing this might have been a really good movie.
So constant reader I will leave you with the question that is the title of this post. Does the end justify the means? These aren't the first bad movies to have good endings, my mind harks back to the 1980's and an early Kevin Costner movie called No Way Out. A movie with a stellar cast, but a confusing and slightly boring story, a movie similar in these regards to The Constant Gardner. Both had great acting, both were confusing, both were a little boring, but both had great endings. Also, Edward Nortons first movie a Richard Gere thriller called Primal Fear, it had an excellent ending the only problem was, when I got there I no longer cared. I will say this in favor of these movies, they atleast have a hook. The concept of Cat in the Hat was to dress Mike Myers in a cat outfit and watch him run around, there was no story to go with it. Another concept, let's milk eighties nostaligia for a fast buck by bringing back the Orange Charger and putting two dreamy guys in it for teenage girls and a dimwitted beautiful starlet in short, short, short, shorts in it for the teenage boys. How about this concept lets take a CGI kangaroo, but one with some street appeal, in fact let's make him a rapper, and we will put a sweater of money on him and let two nitwits try to catch him, but he is a sly, streetwise Roo. I am sure you can see where this is going by now, atleast if a movie has a good ending it doesn't feel completely like you've wasted your time, not all of it anyway. I just wish they could all be like an M. Night Shyalaman movie or The Usual Suspects, I like being surprised and shocked, but boredom is not the emoition I want to precede these reactions. If you got to take a flight to a resort far away, you might as well fly first class.
# posted by Brandon Michael Collinsworth @ 6:42 AM 
