Two Movies

I recently saw two movies that I really enjoyed, "3:10 to Yuma" and "The Mist."

"3:10 to Yuma" was a good solid western. It followed all the conventions of a typical western movie, but it didn't feel cliched. Christian Bale and Russell Crowe gave solid, even impressive performance, and the direction was crisp. It was just good, old- fashioned movie making. I really enjoyed it.

The other movie was "The Mist" based on a Stephen King novella. It was much better than it had any right to be considering its premise. The conceit behind the story is that the army has opened a dimension to another world, and the mist that creeps into our world from the other dimension contains a variety of hideous monsters. A group of people are trapped together in a grocery store and are soon split into two camps, a rational, reasonable group led by Thomas Jane's character, and an irrational, religious group led by Marcia Gay Harden, who gives a terrific performance. The movie has one of those Twilight Zone endings that you will either find haunting or silly. Personally, I found it to be haunting.

It occurred to me that these are the types of movies Hollywood should be making and promoting, rather than the huge event movies of which they are so fond. They'e trained their audience to only attend "event" movies. People used to go to the movies regardless of what was playing on the off chance that it might just be good. Now you can buy a movie and have it forever for nearly the same priceMovie tickets are so expensive now that people only want to spend the money on sure things that they've seen advertised to death on TV. It's no longer feasible to spend $10 to take a chance on a smaller movie that you may either like or dislike. It's safer to go to see "Spiderman vs. Predator III". Maybe they should have a two-tier pricing system, so people could hae a chance to go see smaller, well-made movies, like the ones I've just discussed.