Did you ever decide to watch a movie because it stars an actor whose work you’ve really liked, so far? We fell into that trap the other night–Malice Aforethought, supposedly an English murder mystery. The bait was Ben Miller, a very funny comedian who’s also a pretty good actor.
You would be justified in walking a mile out of your way, in snow or rain, to avoid seeing this movie.
In fairness, we could only endure about 15 minutes of it, stubbing it out when a certain seduction scene turned out to be so ham-fisted, so inane, so jejune, as to start me whistling Lillibulero. It was that or throw something.
Once again, it set me to thinking… Here is a movie made by professionals, costing heap big sums of money. They hired real actors, real writers, a real director, and a real crew. Every day they had the opportunity to view the rushes and see how it was shaping up so far. And yet the result managed to be both fatuous and offensive.
How does a movie this bad even get made? Obviously it was going to be one ludicrous sex scene after another, with somewhere a murder mystery thrown in, if they ever got around to it. Why didn’t Miller’s agent read the script and threaten to shoot him if he agreed to appear in this clunker? Somebody should’ve been shot for this.
If people who actually make movies for a living can produce a mess like this, what does it suggest about any idea to grow the government and give spectacular new powers to equally inept and foolish individuals?
You can always turn off a rotten movie. It isn’t so easy to get rid of rotten public policy.
Over the last few months I’ve found that many movies I used to enjoy have fallen from my favor. So many movies, including some great stories, are based upon immoral premises. I’ve never gone for movies that are raunchy or dirty, but almost every movie out there portrays sex apart from marriage, at least subtly. When I see what has happened to the family in our day, I can’t but conclude that the moral erosion of this world has taken a terrible toll.