Ghost Rider
Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 01 Jul 2007 18:02:00 GMT
One of the most notable things about Ghost Rider is how closely it met my expectations, mainly that Nick Cage would seem far too old for this role. He was too old to be the young kid to Sam Elliott’s wise old man character, too old to pull off the endlessly repeated pointing gag, and too old to curse the Devil.
Now, I have to admit, it was somewhat metal. I have a couple of interesting observations:
- The primary compositional element of a blockbuster movie is not plot devices, characters, cinematographic elements or events. Rather it seems to be the “part”: the part where the bike changes, the part where the cars explode, the part where he fights the devil’s son. You can almost hear the douchebags brainstorming “parts” in a big conference room over their lattes. There’s a distinct lack of artistic soul.
- No matter how inappropriate it is to the movie, or how much the average person dislikes symphony music, every movie has a score. This exists in parallel with the so-called soundtrack, which is really just thirty second snippets of a bunch of pop music. Everybody pretends that the score doesn’t exist. There’s probably a brilliant marketing reason for this completely intolerable dichotomy.
- Villains, at least in superhero cinema, can be pages taken from horror films. People who “hate” horror can tolerate pretty amazing quantities of it in non-horror movies.
In spite of all this, it actually wasn’t that bad. A step or two above mediocre, but not quite decent.
