Movies: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Have you seen a good movie lately? I have, but I've also seen a lot of bad ones. First the good ones. A couple of months ago, I went with my seventeen-year old daughter, Maria, to see Avatar. We both agreed it was one of the best movies we had ever seen. For me, it was the most entertaining and creative movie I had seen in a long time. And we didn't even see the 3-D version, so we want to go back sometime and see it again in 3-D. I thought Gran Torino was an excellent movie; so good that after watching it at the theatre when it was first released, I have since watched it a couple more times on DVD. I watched The Blind Side with my family on DVD and we thoroughly enjoyed it. Good story, good acting. What these three movies have in common is that they have an interesting story to tell and interesting characters portrayed by good, and sometimes great, actors.

Now for the bad movies. Where to begin? There are so many of them. By bad I mean movies that don't tell an interesting story, lack interesting characters, and have generally bad acting. The length of this blog doesn't permit me to go into detail about all the bad movies I've seen, or refused to see, so I'll just mention one movie genre as an example: Chick Flicks. Because I have three daughters (one teenager, and two now in their early twenties), I have endured watching so many Chick Flicks that they have all kind of blurred together. It has been an act of love on my part to have endured watching so many of these awful movies with my daughters and wife. You know the ones I'm talking about; anything starring Hannah Montana or the Olsen twins, for example. I won't go into detail about why Chick Flicks are so bad, because this blog would end up being too long. I'll just say that they are almost always bad because their plots and characters are so predictable. So bad that even great acting couldn't redeem them. Having said that, I have seen a couple of pretty good Chick Flicks; one that comes to mind is A Walk to Remember, one of my daughters' all-time favorites. Otherwise, these movies are kind of like Danielle Steele novels. If you're read one, you've read them all.

I'll continue tomorrow with more on good, and bad, movies. The good, the bad and the ugly.