While recently watching the special features on The Creature From The Black Lagoon, I had to listen to some type of movie expert tell me that the idea of a monster movie is something that the audience has to buy into, so therefore it is somewhat harder to market from the start. Though I don’t completely disagree with this idea, I am somewhat offended by the very notion of it.
Without trying to convince anyone that “aliens are in fact real, you just haven’t seen them yet”, I will say that nearly all movie plots are somewhat unrealistic unless noted “based on true events” or the such. That being said, I find the idea of a lot of teen movies and romances to be far less believable than something in the genre of horror or science fiction.
My first case in point is kind of a classic teen movie that people make fun of yet still enjoy, She’s All That. First off, ignoring the rest of the “this would never really happen in real life” problems, why does the main character end up with the character that only helped make her over for a bet in the end? In real life, they’d be married after college and then divorced a few years later (If he didn’t cheat on her and have the relationship end somehow first.) Their whole relationship started on a lie, so it can never last. In real life (not the movies) when people treat you like that, you don’t suck it up, say “All right, I really do love you”, you run away from them. Far away. And, alas, how many people who have attended high school have ever seen one of the least popular kids end up dating one of the most popular ones? Sure, maybe after high school something like that could happen, but in high school- real high school- Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character would have been too concerned about his own reputation to ever have anything to do with someone who was once that unpopular. Or on the flip side, the girl would have realized her new found popularity and snubbed his character because he lied to her. In any event, the likely scenarios (that is the ones that I would actually believe happening) are not anywhere close to how the movie played out. I actually feel as if the movie Carrie had a more realistic interpretation of high school.
Another movie I find to be really unbelievable is that P.S., I Love You one. Okay, I admit it. I’ve never actually seen it. But based on the previews and ideas I have formed about it, I just don’t think it would ever happen. A guy finds out he’s going to die, and instead of spending his last remaining time doing all the things he never got to, he leaves clues for his wife to find when he’s gone to prove he still loves her? Hey jerk, here’s an idea for you: Why not spend your remaining time with your wife you claim to love so much instead of planning this whacked out scavenger hunt? But again, I have never seen the movie, so I don’t want to pass judgment on it too much. Sure, him somehow secretly plotting all of this and having it play out from beyond the grave doesn’t exactly help the woman move on, which should be one of his main concerns toward her happiness overall instead of her spending the rest of her life pining for a dead guy, but you know, haven’t seen it! As if I need to give you the horror alternative, just think of any zombie movie. People coming back from the dead? I can buy that. People leaving love notes from beyond the grave? Ehhhhh, not so much.
My third and final example (because I can do this all day) is simply the movie Knocked Up. Forget everything else, just know the one simple fact that a guy who looks like Seth Rogen got a girl who looks like Kathryn Hiegel pregnant on a drunken one night stand. Then they kind of end up falling in love or whatever by the end, and that’s its own suspension of disbelief right there, but we won’t touch on that one either. The simple fact is this: Does this happen in real life? Probably. I could have some really ugly guy send me a picture of himself and some really hot woman that he managed to have a one night stand with (and maybe even impregnate) whilst drunk or on drugs. I do not deny that this could or possibly has ever happened. I realize that. I just still feel like it’s highly unlikely in my mind. I do not live in a world where things like this happen, and it’s harder for me to believe something like this would happen as opposed to, say, the plot of Seed of Chucky.
Maybe romance is dead. Maybe it was the way I was raised. Maybe it’s society. Maybe it’s any combination of those things. But I find it a lot more likely that people will meet aliens, monsters or other such things thought to be of myth than they will ever be likely to find that one special person under the most ridiculous of circumstances. I am not a cynic; I am a realist.
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