The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Deborah Taylor-Hollis

Spare me the previews, just give me a good movie

It's hard for me to look forward to new movies anymore. The entire industry seems intent on giving me way too much information about new releases.

I ran across this problem when my favorite books became motion pictures. Why go see the movie after you've read the book? No matter how well-written, no matter how wonderful, no matter how innocent, exciting, classic or timeless a book is, those happy-go-lucky guys in Hollywood just have to change it. They used to claim artistic license to do this, or the need to cut characters. Now they just admit they want action! Rumor was that even Jane Austen looked like a good bet for at least one female mud-wrestling match in the prudish English countryside.

So, having jumped the hurdle that the book would in any way resemble the movie, I continued going. But reviews got in the way. One morning, Joel Siegel had to spill all the beans about Speed II right on Good Morning America, and that was another movie I had to forgo. I had to quit reading most magazines' film sections because good reviewers can't seem to give me the good/bad info without piling on the details. Three of the most long-awaited suspense/horror films were ruined for me because the writers just had to give me a "clue" (read: blatant information drop) about the villains. There was no reason for me to spend money after that; I'd had the Reader's Digest condensed version force-fed to me with my morning paper.

Television commercials haven't given me too much trouble yet: They have fast cuts and overlapping dialogue from all over the movie, so that they seldom give away anything in 30 seconds. Unfortunately, in the attempt to be artsy, they don't really tell you what kind of movie it might be. My rule of thumb is, the faster the images move on the screen, the worse the movie must be.

Theater previews are much worse than television: They can spend all the time they want going on about their film, and after a good 10 minutes of exposition, I feel like I've already seen the movie being previewed.

My family really felt that, barring special effects, video was the way for us to get our celluloid fix. We could start the film when everyone was finally quiet, well-fed and in various states of dress; we could still smoke all we wanted to during the film (ah, for the days of Ingmar Bergman!), and best of all, when the characters mumbled, we could instantly rewind and replay it until we understood the vital information they were imparting. Unfortunately, filmmakers have fouled up video, too.

We rented Ghost and the Darkness last year, several months after it came out, while keeping our hearts and minds pure by avoiding all reference to it in the media. I knew it would be a great picture, shot entirely on location in Kenya, and stunning. I put in the cassette, forwarded through the "previews" that would wreck anything else we wanted to see this summer and started the tape when the African veldt came up on the screen--only to hear lots of explanatory dialogue and see long cuts from all over the film, including several key scenes--all this in the name of selling me the soundtrack before I'd even seen the movie.

They must think that the greater movie-going public has no short-term memory cells left functioning and likes being constantly reminded about how a movie ends just as they sit down to see it.

About the only thing I've enjoyed seeing in the last two years was Twister, and the reason was fairly simple: There was no plot, just a quick intro of the people who were going to get blown away by the special effects. It's hard to give away a good effect; you could watch it seven or eight times before you've really seen it all.

In a way, film has gone full circle. Before 1926 and the advent of sound, the best films had lots of action you wanted to see over and over again. Watching Harold Lloyd hanging 12 stories up on the big clock face was something your friends couldn't ruin for you no matter how many times they tried. Today it doesn't matter if it's cows flying through the air or dinos charging the natives: As long as there's no butler for someone to expose as the killer, hope will spring eternal that I can be entertained.

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