I'm Skipping the Latest Jason Bourne

[SGOS]

I've enjoyed lots of movies given a lowly 56% by Rotten Tomatoes.  Not all.  Some I'd rate a lot lower, but basically 56% means that half the reviewers liked it and half didn't.  Any movie goer could fall into either of those categories, but the negative reviews I've seen indicate that everything I've hated about the franchise looms large in this remake.

Director Paul Greengrass tries to up the perambulatory drama with lots of cuts, swishes, jiggles, and wobbles from his camera and swellings from his soundtrack, but the energy just isn't there.

This captures the essence of the cheap substitute for the tension in all Jason Bourne films.  First, jiggle the camera a lot, so when the hero is being chased by bad guys bent on doing something or other (probably bad), the viewer discomfort is magnified by adding annoyance in real time, while the film fails to deliver enough theatrical fear and confusion that the viewer can experience second hand.  It's like the panic of trying to finish an important project in 5 minutes while trying to put off going to the bathroom.  It's an annoyance on top of the fear of losing your momentum.

Second, cut the scenes short as if there is so much happening that the scenes have to be short to keep up with the action (although there isn't THAT much action).  I recall scenes as short as one second in previous films.  Cut to Central Control, with 12 people watching a large monitor tracking Bourne someplace 3000 miles away, and someone shouts, "There!" <Cut>  Oh great.  They've located Bourne 3000 miles away, not that they can do anything to control him or even send him a text, because he cleverly broke his cell phone in half.

Such an enormous amount of screen time is devoted to him sullenly trudging from place to place, I swear not even GERRY had this many shots of Matt Damon walking.

Well, he's always on the run.  Sometimes he walks.  The movie is about him going from place to place, so I suppose some of this is necessary, although if overdone as can be done in films, it seems more like filler than plot.

Oddly, I read the first Jason Bourne book when it came out 30 or 40 years ago, and I thought it was delightful, although I don't remember having to spend so much time reading about people watching Bourne on large monitors all the time.  Half of the movie, you end up watching people watching Bourne.  Yeah, the government was trying to track him, but they did it the old fashion way in the book by following him, although they were always two steps behind.  Now they do it on monitors and are two steps behind while having no way to do anything when they do see him.  The government always fails, but now they do it with high tech.

The first Bourne film wasn't bad.  I kind of liked it, but that ended with the first film.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We binge watched all four movies to prime for this one. I actually liked the last one best, because they bootstrapped a guy into a position where he was willing to risk his life to save the life he had found thanks to Treadstone. I recommended the program to several of my cousins, collective IQ: 18.

[SGOS]

We binge watched all four movies to prime for this one. I actually liked the last one best, because they bootstrapped a guy into a position where he was willing to risk his life to save the life he had found thanks to Treadstone. I recommended the program to several of my cousins, collective IQ: 18.

I've watched all of them out of respect for the books, but I don't remember much except for the shaky cam and a lingering feeling of theater goer's remorse.

[stromboli]

Rotten Tomatoes gave it 56. About where I expected it to be. At this point, Matt Damon is doing it for the paycheck. He also did a movie (The Great Wall) where he apparently plays a mercenary type battling nasty fog thingies from the Great Wall of China. White guy leading Chinese warriors, or something. No doubt the emphasis is on historical accuracy. Like Keanu Reeve's movie 47 Samurai. Mixed race guy leading Japanese Samurai. Takes guts not to err from the truth. 

That's what I like about Hollywood, holding fast to the historical facts. Like Patton was a sweet guy that loved his men without any homosexual tendencies whatsoever. Or Errol Flynn's version of General Custer. He really and  truly cared about the Lakota, really.

[SGOS]

Or Errol Flynn's version of General Custer. He really and  truly cared about the Lakota, really.

I'm curious about this.  I'm almost tempted to watch it just to see how Hollywood managed to create that impression.  Except, I'm not a fan of movies that old.  Old movies, yes, but not that old.

I was eleven years old when I was introduced to the idea for the first time that Custer may not have been an American Hero.  One summer, my family visited the Custer Battlefield, something I remember enjoying very much.  There was nothing there to indicate that Custer might have been an asshole, just a major officer of the army ruthlessly wiped out by savages.  Later that winter, my Dad handed me a clip from some article.  It was a document written by a recorder of events who had lived during that time (actually a mere 80 years earlier).  It reported the events and the personalities involved as we have now come to know them.  The author said he had failed to report any of this out of respect for Mrs. Custer, but felt free to do so after her death.

I don't know when the article was written, probably years earlier than my eleventh birthday.  It's possible the author was still alive although he would have been somewhere around 100 years old.  I was aghast.  The thing read like a cheap tabloid trying to sound sensational.  All my life, I had come to know of Custer as a hero, granted I was only eleven years old, but it was around that time in the 1950s when American public perception of the events and opinion of Custer suddenly shifted drastically, or so it seemed to me.  Perhaps more people knew the truth about Custer than I realized, but suddenly no one had much to say about his bravery and accomplishments anymore.

[stromboli]

Lol. At the end of the movie, his wife gives an impassioned plea to the command structure to be kind and gentle to the natives, because Custer just so really cared about them. I don't recall the Sand Creek massacre mentioned in the movie. Love me some Hollywood.

but then you have a generation of baby boomers that think Superman can stop a few thousand tons of locomotive by merely standing in its path, so credulity is built in. And them bad indians pickin' on the innocent, non genocidal whites at every turn, oh my.

Oh and btw, I heard second hand that all our current troubles are due to building golf courses on Native American burial grounds.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I always go to the movies with low expectations, and I'm seldom surprised.

[aitm]

I only go to the "movies" when I want the larger experience. LOTR and Star Trek and Star Wars and Harry Potter I enjoyed as purely entertainment. LOTR should only be watched in the theater imo. I don't go to the movies for anything else. The rest I wait till they come out on Redbook or some other venue for a couple bucks. And for a couple bucks, two hours of immersion into a fantasy is a okay with me. Hell I watched that fat chick in "the boss" last night. Mindless stupidity, would never pay a buck to go see it, the kid brought it over so I watched it. Yet it was 90 minutes of distraction from 90 minutes of some other distraction. Meh.

I don't care enough to look up the "ratings". I know I am not going to the theater so see it, so again…a couple bucks later on. Meh.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The LOTR movies helped me visualize the scenes nicely. I could pretty much recite the dialog from memory by then, so it wasn't as if I was going to see the World of the Ring for the first time. Same with the Potters, although going to them was mandatory.

[SGOS]

I only go to the "movies" when I want the larger experience. LOTR and Star Trek and Star Wars and Harry Potter I enjoyed as purely entertainment.

That's the biggest reason I go.  Movies can have deep psychological meanings and speak to the depth of the "human condition", and I can absorb that too, but first and foremost, movies have to be entertaining, and that even allows room for some slapstick comedy to be worth the price of admission.

Ratings are not as important, but like the movies, I find them entertaining too.  For me, they are a part of the "going to the movies experience."

[Gawdzilla Sama]

I happen to be watching "Horatio Hornblower" right now. Abysmal rendition of two different books, but sure is pretty. Oh, I wouldn't minding holding the Mayo, back in the day.

[Nonsensei]

I wouldn't use Rotten Tomatoes as any sort of factor in deciding to see a movie. After all they gave the latest Ghostbusters movie a Fresh rating of like 76% or something.

[stromboli]

Since I basically don't go to movies anymore, it is all immaterial to me. But the Bourne movies are strictly about action, and one guy defying the entire U.S. intelligence community over and over again is just so darn realistic, you know? At some point it will get watched, but most likely for free.

[SGOS]

I wouldn't use Rotten Tomatoes as any sort of factor in deciding to see a movie. After all they gave the latest Ghostbusters movie a Fresh rating of like 76% or something.

Movie reviews are mostly about writers writing something.  They are sometimes helpful and sometimes misleading, which I guess means not very helpful.  Considering that Rotten Tomatoes averages sometimes more than a hundred reviews, it is probably more statistically significant, while not being helpful, which still translates into not very helpful.

There is one compilation of movie opinions (I can't remember the name), that rates movies A, B, C, but almost never gives less than a C-, and gives most of the movies an A, which I think is even less helpful than Rotten Tomatoes.  In my mind, I try to convert that one site's C into an F- so that I can make some sense out of it, but then I have no way of differentiating between the remaining 99%, which are mostly A's.  Talk about a wacky and indecipherable grading system.

But here's a thought about Rotten tomatoes giving 76% to Ghostbusters and what that means.  If we translate 76% into a point on a standard Bell curve, using standard deviations, it would be average (OK, high average), which might not be too far off from what you walk away from the theater with.  76% sounds high, maybe, but it's not anything to write home about on a Bell curve.  It's just a bit above mediocre.

[SGOS]

Since I basically don't go to movies anymore, it is all immaterial to me. But the Bourne movies are strictly about action, and one guy defying the entire U.S. intelligence community over and over again is just so darn realistic, you know? At some point it will get watched, but most likely for free.

Oh, I'll probably pay Redbox $1.50 to watch it when it comes out, but I watch a lot of movies.  Of course when I say "a lot of movies", I'm including in that quantification the movies I only watch for 10 minutes.  So the fact that I will no doubt rent it at some point means near absolutely nothing.