Tastes

Today's rant will be about taste. People have tastes in movies, books, music, fiction, brands of cola, and a slew of other thingsMore importantly, no two people's tastes are ever entirely the same.

People also talk about taste as being "good" or "bad", but these are honestly useless for actual categorization. There is a person out there whose three favorite movies are The Terminator, Home Alone, and Dumb and Dumber. He thinks that I have the worst taste in the world. I can name people worse than him, but his IS pretty nasty. Then there's a third person, possibly you, who says we both have great taste, and a forth who says we all suck. Besides which, if any of the parties concerned really had BAD taste, there wouldn't be movies geared right towards them. So, while I can't talk about tastes in general, I'll have to talk about mine, and hope most of you will relate, since you'd have to have SOME overlap with me to even find this page.

People occassionally try to apply labels to my tastes which not only don't apply, but represent demographics I honestly can't stand. For example, someone once suggested I only like things that are old and hate everything new. Nope. There's a many things I like that are very old, like the original Twilight Zone, many things I like that are current, like Trigun, a slew of things in between, and a decent number of things I anticipate I will enjoy in the not too distant future. I've also been told I hate things just because they're popular. Again, nope. Such people will cease to enjoy something once it gains popularity. When I like something, I try to encourage it's popularity. Take Escaflowne and Koudelka for example.

Now then, here's the actual list of what I don't like, when it comes to movies (since my tastes in other things are quite different). Generally speaking...

• I don't like the Hollywood formula. (When I can describe exactly what will happen in every single scene 5 minutes into the movie, I get bored. Heck, when I can tell who's going to die 5 minutes in I get bored)
• I don't like movies based on other things I like. (The people turning the thing into a movie have this tendancy to remove everything I liked about it. Why? Because they don't share my tastes!)
• I don't like many movies that don't have the same person for writer and director. (See above.)
• I don't like references to whatever fad exists at the time of the movie's production.
• I don't like spoof movies that throw together the obvious references from every movie in the genre that year with no real context or thought. (Yes, that's right. I care how well written spoofs are.)
• I don't like shock value for the sake of shock value passed off as humor. (I think Jim Carrey is both funny and a good actor mind you. He just gets cast in some HUGE piles of garbage.)
• I don't like breaking the rules. (This one needs some explanation. It applies to external rules: If you're making a gritty realistic movie set in deep space, you'd better stick to ALL the laws of physics. If in your movie, someone dies, then comes back to life because the girl they just met says she loves him, this is bad too. It also applies to internal rules: If the armor on the robot is impermiable to anything but the material it's made from, destroying it with a laser cannon is BAD. And then of course it's possible for a movie to exclude rules that apply in real life which is absolutely fine: If your movie establishes that everyone can lift 50 times their weight and keep walking around after someone vaporizes 40% of their torso, you can do it all you want.)
• I don't like the solution to all of life's problems to be blowing up the biggest thing around, or killing some guy. (To be fair though, this one doesn't bug me NEARLY as much as the rest of these, which is a good thing since it happens at least 99% of the time in stuff I tend to watch.)
• I don't like Romantic Comedies.
• I don't like movies that can't decide whether they take themselves seriously or not.
• I don't like the 2 or 3 copycat movies that come with every really popular movie.

I might be leaving a couple off, but I'm sick of listing'em anyway. Now, you're probably looking at that list and thinking "So... you don't like ANY movies then?" Not at all. I like a vast array of movies. A few of those dislikes aren't quite set in stone, and even if they were, you'd be surprised how many movies avoid all of those pitfalls. Generally speaking though, everything I like falls into one of three categories: A- Something completely original. B- Something that wholely embraces a genre and gets it right. C- Something with this certain tone I can only define by example: Bill and Ted, Men In Black, The Princess Bride, 90% of Tim Burton's films, Time Bandits. Movies that REALLY present a well fleshed out world score points too, but honestly once you get past the rest of those criteria, you almost always get such a world as a freebie.

My tastes regarding TV match the rest of that pretty nicely, with extra points awarded for serialization, but TV shows REALLY don't tend to meet those standards.

Now, horror deserves it's own discussion. I'm not particularly a fan of the genre, but my TV finds itself on the Sci-Fi channel pretty darn often and it comes with the territory. A movie can be classified as horror yet honestly be a comedy, and that's just fine by me. Heck, that covers many of my favorites. Most horror though tries to be scary, and fails miserably. ESPECIALLY with the so-called "masters" of the genre. Take Steven King. When you're doing horror, you generally want to keep things short, so adrenaline levels don't drop, and you need a punchline of sorts for an ending. Steven King writes thousand page epics and then can't think of endings for the. On the off chance that Mr. King happens to be reading this, let me make this suggestion. Switch over to Fantasy. Mash your keyboard for a few of the names and you have all the qualifications to become an instant success.

The real problem most writers and directors of horror have though is that they confuse fear with screaming. You can take ANY movie, cut the sound way down, and then have someone start screaming for no good reason, and people WILL jump up and possibly scream. This is not due to being scared, this is an instinctive reaction to loud noises, and anyone can pull it off with no creativity or talent needed. A perfect example of this is the movie Wishmaster, which I was unfortunate enough to see not too long ago. Another false source of horror is gore and goo. If someone gets chopped in half, that's not scary. If someone melts into a puddle, that isn't either. At best, it's nausiating. There is an exception to this, but I'll get to that later. Perfect example: Parasite Eve.

Now, here are some tips for successful horror. If you have a monster, don't let the audience get a good look at it. Ever. If you're going to have a gorey gooey scene, stretch it out to at LEAST a full 5 minutes. Make sure other stuff is going on there too, even if it's just everyone freaking out and torching the room with flame throwers. While the first minute or so of a guy's head splitting into a mass of slimey tentacles is often laughable, and the next couple will make you queazy at best, if you keep it up there long enough, it WILL get downright disturbing after a while. As much fun as it is to play with computers, you really can't beat rubber and latex coated in something syrupy. Remember the basic kinds of fear, and incorporate them. Claustrophobia, paranoia, and your old pal dread. Oh, and for the record, the 30 seconds where you know the person is about to be stabbed from behind, that's not dread. For that matter, don't put that sort of scene in at all. It's way too perdictable. Finally, the audience expects the false climax. They even suspect the second false climax, maybe the third. Use as many endings as you want, just make sure the last one could stand on it's own.

There were some other things I was planning to put here, like my much more relevant opinions on anime, videogames, and other things I actually MENTION regularly, but, well, it's 5 AM. So let me just leave you with a brief list of movies which I actually found most enjoyable despite previews and word of mouth making them look wretched, on the off chance any of you found yourselves actually agreeing with me. Believe it or not, these follow everything I said up there:
Final Destination
Mimic
The Princess Bride
Johnny Mneumonic
The Matrix