The Red Dragon doesn't like American movies

Awhile ago I stopped watching American movies, which wasn't a conscious decision. In fact, I could only see I'd made it after realizing I hadn't watched an American movie in months. And while working in advertising made product placements veritably leap of the screen and pluck my disbelief down from where I'd suspended it, I don't think that's why I stopped; I think I stopped because I had turned into a bitch who was impossible to please. Witness a couple of the movies we watched this weekend after last week's stress and Friday night took us out of physical and mental commission:

No Country For Old Men. Not liking this movie pissed me off so bad because I was 100% expecting it to be good. But it was flat. It wasn't a landscape that I could enter and get lost in, like Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing, The Man Who Wasn't There, Fargo, even Raising Arizona . . . just felt like a bunch of gross, sad stuff happening and then it ended. Okay, maybe the Coen brothers didn't want to get hemmed in to a traditional sort of storytelling or pacing, but if I run out of characters to be interested in by the 2/3 point of the movie, then as an audience member I'm just marking time until the thing ends.

Javier Bardem was great but they didn't give him enough to do. And finally I didn't care what he was doing because he spent too much time doing boring stuff. I love the way the Coen brothers use little visual cues to tell a story, like having him check his shoes for blood at key moments, but that's not enough to carry a film, especially when they labour other points for visual impact even when the node has tapped out. It was cool the way he blew up the car in front of the pharmacy to go get stuff to fix his leg. It was lame that I had to sit there for five minutes watching him fix his leg.

Ah, that's the thing . . . the whole movie felt like a visual wank - trading in character development for a series of visual impacts and shocks and conceits. Fuck.

Anyways, we were left disappointed and then tried to fix the disappointment by watching I Am Legend. For all his arty-fartiness the F-word likes an event movie from time to time - witness the 300 debacle - and I didn't mind as I wanted something that was sure to have an ending, which this type of film also does. Also, he'd told me it was based on the Omega Man, and I figured watching it would give me a better background on the Simpsons Halloween episode parody without forcing me to watch Charlton Heston 'act'.

I liked it more than I thought I would, as the fact that there was lots to look at and not much of a story helped me over the plotholes, and wasn't even unduly annoyed by the Brazilian god talk. The thing is, Will Smith can't cry without making me cry. It's awful. There are a couple of actors like that, who, if they have any reputation for talent, probably get it from making people want to cry when they do. Tom Hanks is another. You know, actors who are always playing more or less the same person, maybe with different accents or in different weight ranges, but more or less the same character in every movie, who you know is flawed but also probably a really great father so they're always showing them holding kids, and who is basically normal but who would lay down his life in a reluctant but determined Jeebus-like fashion in the face of real danger or iniquity - a James Stewart-y sort of guy without the whininess.

So there was a point in the movie when Will Smith's dog had just died, and he was going nuts, and he was all alone and hadn't got laid in years, and his family was dead, and there were all these flesh eating zombies around, and he started crying, and then I started crying, and then I felt manipulated, and then other humans came into the movie and I didn't care because I was too busy feeling manipulated, and then they plugged the Shrek series for 45 UNBROKEN SECONDS, and the bungee cord of my disbelief snapped, sending it hurtling down to the bottom of the ravine below, which is not where you want your disbelief during the climax of a zombie movie.

Ugh.

Then I remembered we had reefer butter, so I ate a bunch of that and we watched Dracula: Prince of Darkness, and that was keen. But more on that later.