By Lida Prypchan
For several months, movies shown in Valencia have been of very low quality. Very few movies have arrived from well-known and good directors, and these last up to three days in the movie theaters, because twenty people go to see them, ten of whom go away believing that they went to the wrong movie. The problem is not in the movie, but with those who fail to understand it. Due to the small number of people who go to see good quality movies, movie theater owners do nothing other than present terrible movies over and over again. They are not just superficial and boring, but they are also completely devoid of arguments in order to distract people, and apart from this, the performance of those who work in them is equally catastrophic. The themes of the movies shown here and their style can be easily classified:
1) Kung Fu: These are divided into before Bruce Lee’s death and after it. All of these are made up of flying legs, shouts, slanted eyes and bricks chopped in half.
2) Mystery, which offer a wide variety to please even the most discerning tastes. The main ingredients of these movies are: a haunted castle, a senator from the White House, a child with an angelic face and evil intentions, a wicked housekeeper, a black dog with killer eyes; others show a psychopath, whose weakness is children cared for by nannies; others, such as Agatha Christie movies, which after seeing one, we already know the rest by memory, have a murdered heiress in a boat traveling to Greece, but there are so many involved that we do not know who it could have been. Eventually the detective, a fat genius (although overeating dulls the senses) discovers that it was the person one least suspected: the lady who left the bathroom at the moment of the murder, tripped the heiress, who fell, fractured her skull and died. Other mystery movies are so overly mysterious that once they finish, you do not know if what you saw was Superman, The Exorcist or The Sound of Music.
3) Movies about love, passion and beauty, like the Bo Derek movie, which is overloaded with American humor: as repetitive as could be, producing drowsiness and tiredness by exaggerating trivialities until they become stupidities. And Bo Derek is not the perfect woman and only appears for 15 minutes. The American Gigolo movie is a little better, although it does not have a message either, and has a dismal performance by the model Lauren Hutton.
4) John Travolta movies, whose latest movie is El Macho (Urban Cowboy). The only thing that can be said for this is that it attracts young Travolta lovers of the movie Saturday Night Fever, and adolescents who identify with the title of his latest cinematographic creation.
5) Space hero movies. The last of this kind was Flash Gordon. Since Flash Gordon, what has been done is a new adaptation of the hero created by cartoonist Alex Raymond in 1934. This, again, is the typical “Made in the USA” space hero: a flawless blond that neither bullets nor bombs, swords, or anything, can kill. He will dethrone Ming, the cruel King of Planet Mongo, to prevent the destruction of the earth and rescue his girlfriend Dale, who is in the hands of the evil Ming, to become King of that planet or return to New York.
However, not all of them have been bad. On the contrary, in the midst of this mediocrity of movies, there was also the opportunity to see quality films, such as: Al Pacino’s movie, Cruising: quite original, entertaining and with good performances. Very good in its style. Another was “The Show Must Go On”, which especially in the second half of the movie has scenes full of creativity and ingenuity and we are introduced to a character, the lead actor, a fabulous man and his dialogues and wars with death and his struggle to live and present his art. Another was Woody Allen’s latest: Manhattan, which received very good reviews and too much advertising. Although it was good, it perhaps caused disappointment, especially to those who, months earlier, saw Annie Hall.
