Speaking of John Waters he's hosting a show on Court TV that starts tonight, if anyone cares.
But back to movies.... while snowed in in New Jersey this weekend with a four year old as mentioned elsewhere, I saw the movie Madagascar. It is about cartoon zoo animals from New York City who, through a series on comic mishaps, end up in the wild.
I thought it was very funny and enjoyable. And before you say of course I would like it - I avoided watching this movie until trapped into it, because I assumed it would be stupid. I assumed they would ruin the whole idea of cartoon lemurs and the jokes would be lame and I would want to punch someone.
But not at all. There were many different species of cartoon lemurs and it was appropriate and amusing to anyone who knows lemurs that the king of the lemurs was a total bubblehead. The usual jokes about New Yorkers in a strange place were amusing out of the mouths of animals. I liked how the animals acted like being in the zoo was their career and the humans were the management - and how when they get to Madgascar they analyze the scenery and decide they must have been transferred to the zoo in San Diego. It was very amusing to someone in the business.
And anyway, my point, and I think I have one, is that I realized that while I whine about most movies I watch, a lot of the movies I have enjoyed in recent years have been cartoons: I liked that one about the superhero family, and Shrek was tolerable, and I really liked Monsters Inc which is just the kind of concept that tickles my fancy.
But also here is the other thing: It is still so hard to make cartoons, even computer generated ones, that these movies are never TOO LONG. Almost every other movie I see I think, this two hour movie could easily be an hour and a half if anyone had bothered to edit it, without losing any content. So many of them seem to have ever single scene go on for 10 or 20 or 30 seconds too long, after we have gotten the point, and it adds up. Whereas with a cartoon, it is so much work to make another ten seconds that they are just hella efficient about making good use of their time and not having things drag on.
So I don't know what I am saying here but I think it is something about techological limitations being a good thing, or limitations in general. All my life I have written things and then been forced to edit them shorter and while it is torture, in the vast majority of cases you can do what you need in less space if you put your mind to it and it forces you to make the most out of every word. I wish that someone would do this to moviemakers. I think that movies would be better, and if they weren't, well, you'd have wasted less time watching them, so where's the downside?
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Topic: wombat tries to watch movies again (Read 99963 times)