Big doings happened this weekend, and I don’t mean watching The Rock “battle” an Earthquake in the unintentionally hilarious “San Andreas.” I mean this might be the weekend where it finally became obvious that TV shows are now the place to find all the things movies no longer care about.
This weekend, I sat in the theater for two wildly different movies—“Aloha” and “San Andreas”—plus the different set of trailers for those movies (“San Andreas” had a roster of bloated, stale looking blockbusters based on loooong ago exhausted source material, while “Aloha” had a roster of stale-looking smaller films like “Ricki and the Flash” that don’t look much better) and it became obvious that there are now only a few different types of movies getting a wide release today: stale blockbusters that are hits, stale smaller films that are sleeper hits, and fresh, original flops…like “Aloha.”
If something in the summer season dares to be different then it will likely flop outright and probably even get beaten up by the critics—both “Aloha” and “Tomorrowland” have negative tomato ratings, “Aloha” with a terrible 18 percent—who used to be the last line of defense against a sequelitis they’ve now wholeheartedly embraced. [“Mad Max,” “Pitch Perfect 2,” “Avengers 2,” and “Furious 7” all have positive tomatoes with the latter two undeserving of them.]
So where does one turn for grand spectacle mixed with interesting characters and a worthy plot?
This weekend, I also sat at home and watched Outlander’s wicked season finale and a new Game of Thrones episode, and I actually had a better time doing that.
“Game of Thrones” had a snowy battle sequence between the living and the undead that featured giants, creepy skeletal children, and a White Walker king reviving all those who had just died in one of the most unsettling (and, admittedly, exciting) sequences of the entire series. Although it was grand, it was everything that the bloated spectacle of “San Andreas” wasn’t: character-based, rousing, fresh, exciting, and even–yes–convincing. Even if “GoT” is fantasy-based, so is the sight of The Rock driving a boat up a vertical wave or the downright cheap-looking effects of “San Andreas.”
“Outlander” had a nasty finale that was also surprising and darkly exciting but for very different reasons. It was essentially an hour long psychological showdown between hero Jamie (nice guy Scottish lunkhead) and one of the best recent villains I’ve seen on TV or film: Captain Jack Randall, sado-psychosexual British soldier who tortures not just the body of his prisoners but also their very souls. “Outlander” is the first TV show I can remember featuring the anal rape of the male protagonist, and the sequences are queasy-making not just for their horrendous brutality but also their intimacy. Randall is a villain unlike any I can remember seeing before, and I can’t say the same about the summer movie season’s major villains of Earthquakes, terminators, killer dinosaurs, and bland European spies. [Just compare Outlander’s Randall or GoT’s loathsome Ramsey Bolton or even Turn’s John Andre (the sinisterly clever British spymaster during the American Revolution) to the big screen’s Jason Statham in Furious 7 and you’ll begin to get the idea why TV’s British villains are much more menacing.]
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll always love the movies, and I’ll probably keep going for as long as there are movie theaters. It’s just that—these days—it’s TV that actually loves me back. Grade for Outlander Season and Season Finale: A-
Don’t get me wrong. I’ll always love the movies, and I’ll probably keep going for as long as there are movie theaters. It’s just that these days it’s TV is more convenient
“Outlander” had a nasty finale that was also surprising and darkly exciting but for very different reasons.
OMG, you can say that again.
“Outlander” had a nasty finale that was also surprising and darkly exciting but for very different reasons.
Acting was awesome.