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| Cardinal telling all it's Movie Time! |
Many years ago, when Rainy Day was young, cute, and dating, she and one of her dates went to the movies. They saw Sylvester Stallone single handedly save Los Angeles from the bad guys. On the way home from the movie, they stopped off and rented a couple other movies – one with Jean-Claude van Damme and the other with Steven Seagal. Both single-handedly saved entire areas, perhaps even countries, from the bad guys. Date and Rainy Day watched and laughed and thoroughly enjoyed the movies, violent as they were.
Which caused Rainy Day to do some serious searching of her soul, for she is not a fan of violence. Why, then, does she so enjoy those movies? This is a question she ponders now and then, up to and including even today.
The best answer she can up with come, is that violent movies where the violence is so improbable as to never actually being performed, is funny, at least to Rainy Day's warped senseless of humor (remember when Mel Gibson starred in the Lethal Weapon movies, and the time he tied his little pickup to the support of a fantabulous house in the Hollywood Hills and pulled the whole house down by pulling the support out with his truck? Well, it was funny – but it will never happen!)
Movies with violence that could happen, or has happened, aren't so funny. Rainy Day doesn't like In Cold Blood, or any of the Texas Chainsaw movies. She doesn't like 'Mob Movies' and yet.... Yes, this past week was Mob Week on one of the movie channels, and they played, several times, all three episodes of The Godfather. Now, when the book first came out, Rainy Day bought it, and couldn't put it down. She read it in a couple of days, and it wasn't until she finished the book that she realized there wasn't a nice guy in the whole lot of them! And yet, she found herself sitting on the sofa far more than was her true wont, watching, at various times, all three episodes of The Godfather, one more time.
And the movies she gets from Netflix? She's guessing that over 95 percent are Asian. The remaining five percent are either American, Canadian, or British. Rainy Day loves what she collectively calls 'Samurai movies' – movies where guns have yet to be invented, or at most, are invented, but only used sparingly (usually by the bad guy). She loves the sword fights, where single-handedly Zatoichi (the Blind Swordsman, masseur and inveterate gambler), saves the town from the bad guys. The movies with rich costumes (and bloody battles) – think Curse of the Golden Flower and The Red Cliff. She thinks the costumes are marvelous, and the special effects are great. (And, she notices with some delight when blood is let, it is always from a vein, in a steady gush and never from a pulsating artery. She also has a strong sense the human body could never, ever, contain the great amounts of blood the Asian movies have their victims bleed.) Oh, and she says not to forget the Zatoichi movies with 'spaghetti western' background music.
Perhaps Rainy Day isn't as much of a pacifist as she would like to believe? A friend of Rainy Day suggests the fascination comes from the world of the story – unfettered violence in a time and place Rainy Day can neither comprehend nor even begin to understand. What do you think?
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