Last night I was talking with my wife about a sneak preview of a movie adaptation based on a very famous book I just saw last week (I shouldn't tell you which one it was, it's supposed to be ultra hush hush because we might carry it... ok, what the hell, it was "Love in the Time of Cholera", I need to tell you, otherwise you will not get what I'm about to say).

She asked me how it was, and my response is the same I gave when stepping out of the screening room: Very good, great, actually, but not my kind of movie. Why? Because it's essentially a chick-flick where idealized love overcomes all obstacles. Very rosy subject matter. Just like "The Notebook", or "The Lake House". My favorite characters were actually Liev Schreiber's Lotario Thurgot  and Hector Elizondo's Don Leo, precisely because they were easy going, cool fellows in a world way too passionate for me.  Oh, and I love anything with Shakira on it (she composed and sings three songs for the film).

After my wife complaining about me being so un-romantic as usual, I started thinking... so, what's MY kind of movie? And I realized it depends.

There is no really exact formula for me to love a film, but I realized there are some things I frequently love in movies, such as nihilistic, ironic endings: remember an old sci-fi film called "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun" with Roy Thinnes? or most of the original "Planet of the Apes" movies? or Steve McQueen's "The Sand Pebbles"? "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"? I love those films that leave you with a feeling in the end of "wow, bummer, but it was a perfect, clever / ironic  ending!"

Maybe that's the same reason I love the "Tales From the Crypt" comic books so much... or the horror genre in general, a good horror story usually ends badly in a clever way.

I also love easygoing main characters. Too much passion kills it for me if it won't lead to an ironic ending (see above). I could never actually relate to James Darren's Tony Newman character from "The Time Tunnel" TV series, he KNEW bad things would happen such as the Titanic sinking (which probably SHOULD happen, otherwise the time continuum would be broken leading to alternate futures where he might not even have been born... see the "Back to the Future" films), but he still went to all the trouble of trying to convince the captain to change the route (failing miserably). I liked Scott Bakula's character in "Quantum Leap" precisely because even though he had to figure out why he was where he was, he tried to go with the flow.

Anyway, I'll get back to the "what I love in movies" subject on my next post, right now I've gotta run. See' ya all!