Choice Of Movies These Days

Alright, here comes one of those posts that is liable to leave people stunned at my difference of opinion--and perhaps my boldness as well.

But let me lay out the idea right here for you: In general, peoples' choices of movies to watch these days are just terrible.

When I've heard about the movies that people want to see over the weekend this year, only once or twice have I really agreed with them, and that was on the Hunger Games and the Amazing Spider-Man. (The former I initially wasn't going to see because I was getting disgusted over the hype.) Other than that, here's what people have talked about seeing: Prometheus. The Dictator. Magic Mike. Ted. The Campaign. And even The Expendables 2.

Notice all how of all those movies have one thing in common: they're rated R.

Now, this is not a post to rant against R-rated movies in general. This is more of me noticing that the movie has the R rating on it, and suddenly people want to see it. And what is in those movies? Movies of which are supposedly comedies, and yet from the sound of what type of humor is in there, I would have the TV turned off five minutes in. The only one on that list that isn't a comedy is Prometheus, the prequel to Alien, a 1979 film which spawned of the scariest movie franchises ever. Prometheus doesn't appear to be any exception.

But that's another thing about the choice of movies these days: either they're so-called comedies that is really just filled with loads of foul language and inappropriate humor/content, or they're slasher R-rated films where the amount of blood spilled could fill more than five gallons of milk.

Honestly? Is this really what people want to watch? Really?

Now, it all sounds like shock value. And for some reason people get a laugh out of that. I simply do not understand these things. And back to Prometheus for a moment: a couple people I know said they were more interested in that than the Dark Knight Rises. I just about had a conniption. How can a mere mortal like Prometheus be better than the Christopher Nolan-helmed Batman? It's impossible. Literally.

I have seen four movies in theaters this year: The Hunger Games, the Avengers, the Amazing Spider-Man, and the Dark Knight Rises. All four of these felt more like the type of movies that people should be watching more often. And sadly, although they may make so much more money than those comedies do, they're still not just talked about as much--when really, in my estimate, we should be getting those type of movies every weekend during the summer instead of other junk.

And as much as I love movies like the new Batman trilogy or the Avengers, a lot of my favorite movies just happen to be... animated ones. Particularly from Pixar or Dreamworks Animation. Apart from the Batman trilogy, some of these movies convey more emotion than all the movies I've mentioned. They've got plots that are about as good as anything you can find in the live-action world. And although you won't find any awesome special effects or explosions here (except in The Incredibles), you can still find some heart-racing action in there. And especially in Pixar films, you won't find any inappropriate humor. You'll find some actual humor. Some good, clean humor.

I find myself asking that question fairly often: What happened to good, clean humor? However, when I watch those type of animated movies, it shows me that there is still hope for the human race.

I'm not suggesting that you dive your nose deep into animation and watch nothing else. There are great live-action movies to be watched out there as well. But if you're going to shun animation, at least try hacking off the R-rated movies a little bit. There's so much more out there.


A postscript: Here's a shortlist of animated movies that I love: WALL-E, The Incredibles, Cars (and the sequel), How to Train Your Dragon, Bolt, Kung Fu Panda (and the sequel), Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (don't be fooled by the title or the fact that it's based on a children's picture book), and the Toy Story trilogy. That's just the basics. Pretty much anything else by Pixar is great too, and I haven't even gotten into the rest of DreamWork's library. Oh, and be sure to catch Wreck-It Ralph in theaters November 2nd--that one looks to be a classic.

Social Networks: Problems and Obsessions

These days, the world pretty much operates on social networks. Especially teenagers. Teenagers can't seem to live without social networks. Facebook is the prime one. But it's not the only one. There are some people who don't like Facebook as much (or not anymore, because of Timeline), and so they use others instead. Twitter and Tumblr are the two other biggies right now. MySpace used to be a big one, but these days it's pretty dead there.

Now, I'm not saying the idea of social networks are a bad thing. Being an avid Facebook user myself, there are certainly many advantages to it. Being able to stay in touch with friends is certainly a fantastic thing. But what happens is that the type of powers you now have are abused.

Here's the type of things that happen: the posting of simply ridiculous and pointless things. Twitter is a nasty target of this; but really, Twitter is kinda pointless if you think about it. All it really is texting, only  you're sending the text worldwide. Tumblr? That's just a ripoff of Blogger that caught the attention of all the teenagers looking for a place to vent their junk. Oh yeah, and I guess we musn't forget Google+, although I suppose if you think about it, it hasn't really gotten quite the popularity Google hoped for.

Let's start with Facebook. Now, this one seems about as awesome as it can be: a place where pretty much all your friends are, so that you can keep up with what they're doing and chat with them anytime when they're online! Seems like a dream come true. And really, it is. But what it boils down to, though, is that if you don't have your security settings set to the max, everyone else can see what you're doing as well. And there's always a chance that if you accidentally friend someone you don't know... well... yeah.

One thing that's rather ridiculous about Facebook is that you get Friend Requests from people you're not really actually friends with in real life, or get requests from people whose name you might perhaps know, but you don't really actually know them in real life. Why? Just so they can add an extra Friend to their roster. It's like they're just adding you for the sake of adding you. This can be traced to the rather wacko ways in which girls fight--which includes comparing the amount of Friends you have. "Oh yeah I've got 1500 friends..." Really? You actually *know* that many people in real life? Really? And *all* of them are really actually your friends?

And how about those posters that go "Repost if you believe in God," "Repost if you want to help this poor person," "Repost if you're against bullying," and ending with "I bet 99% of you won't." There's a reason for that. Although there is a little bit of point to the anti-bullying ones and what not, the "Repost if you love God" ones are just ridiculous. The general idea is if you don't repost that picture, you're gonna go to hell. But really? Would God condemn us just because we didn't share a stupid picture? Really?

And what's the deal with Twitter? Well, basically, like I said earlier, it's just worldwide texting. When you tweet things like "Sooooo tired" and what not... well, here's the truth: The world doesn't care! Only the people that are Following you are gonna care. And really, this can actually be applied to Facebook as well.

And here's a couple things that really just pollute all social networks. For example, girls these days are totally into photography. That's all good and fine and well, but it's when they start taking pictures of food or are literally uploading pictures of random things every 10 seconds that it's going overboard.

And also, there's the fact that people are so obsessed with their social networks that they can't step away from it for 10 seconds! We've got teenagers literally trying to pull out their phones in the middle of school just so they can look at their News Feed or their Twitter Feed, or whatever they use. Honestly? That's about as bad as cell phone/texting addiction. I can live perfectly fine without either. I love Facebook, but I'm not addicted so badly to it that I'm checking my News Feed every 10 seconds, or posting a new status update every 5 minutes, or worse still--doing stuff for the sole purpose of being able to post a status about it.

But sadly, this is the truth about social networks: when something like that is super-popular, and/or when people have too much time on their hands, they start abusing the newfound powers they have.