As a screenwriter, I spend most of my free time doing one of three things: writing movies, watching movies and ‘reading movies.' The first I do for obvious reasons, but the others I do purely for education and practice. They give me a pretty good idea what to do and what not to do when writing a screenplay.
During the years, I have seen my fair share of good movies. I also have had the unfortunate displeasure of seeing more than enough bad movies — and even some that have no right being made.
When I watch movies, I categorize them in three ways: good movies, fun movies and bad movies.
Good movies are the ones where you leave the theater or turn off the DVD player feeling stunned. It doesn't happen often, but there are a great number of good movies — "Casablanca," "Apocalypse Now," anything Scorsese or the Coen Brothers. Then you have fun movies which are categorized as fun because you leave the theater feeling happy; the bulk of the movies in Hollywood are fun — both "Transformers" movies are fun, "Night at the Museum" was, dare I say it, fun, "300" was exceptionally fun. Really anything with loud noises, cool car chases or Megan Fox is a fun movie.
The final category that movies get placed in is the bad movie category. This includes movies such as "War of the Worlds," "10,000 B.C.," and anything with Macaulay Culkin (post "Home Alone"). Some of the movies that unfortunately fall under this category are there simply because I don't like them, or couldn't get through them. "Independence Day" was full of explosions and alien abductions, unfortunately it was also full of stupid Will Smith lines and witty remarks that left me wishing for an ice pick in my ear.
Now, I normally don't bash bad movies, I understand that showbiz is hard; even I'm liable to make a bad movie or pitch an idea that gets laughed at. It's hard to believe but true. But the last movie I saw nearly killed me.
If you haven't seen "Paranormal Activity," it's about a couple who is haunted and, in a documentarian style similar to 1999's "Blair Witch Project," catch the progressively worse interactions with the demon on film. The entire movie is the camera set up at night watching the couple sleep and occasionally something eerie happens. When the camera is not watching them sleep it is shoved into Katie's face by Micah who pesters her with questions and constantly assures her the situation is under control. As the film goes on, the demon becomes more active, Micah becomes more persistent as he challenges the ghost to various things and Katie gets more frustrated with Micah because he is acting like an idiot.
The movie is done so that the audience is left wondering whether these happenings are real or scripted, but as it drags on — and this movie drags on forever — it becomes apparent that these are paid actors reading from a script. At one point, Micah goes so far as to blame Katie for the haunting and yells at her to "go hang out with your friend," meaning the demon. The movie itself had some scary parts but, unfortunately, they happened two minutes after I silently predicted they would.
Not only did the movie suck, the ending was one of the worst ones in any movie I have ever seen. The movie ends abruptly and illogically leaving you thinking "that can't be the end, can it?" To add to the confusion, there are two endings: the original ending that shows in theaters and the crappy cliché ending that was leaked online.
The only kudos I can give this movie is the fact that it recently surpassed "Blair Witch Project" as the most profitable movie of all time, raking in over 400,000 percent of the $15,000 it cost to make, according to Yahoo! Movies' Web site.
The fact that the director and production company can get pigeons to see their movie and can sucker theaters into actually showing it as opposed to falling to the straight-to-DVD bin at Blockbuster is beyond me.
For those of you who are still wanting to see the movie, brace yourselves and just keep in mind that the theater doesn't give out refunds for crappy movies, so watch at your own discretion.
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