Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea. —Henry Fielding

10 March 2004

Fun Story

Watched The Ladykillers this morning (the original).  No thank you.  I hate movies from the 1950s that are like this.  Now, I am opposed to old people to begin with, and the old lady in this thing is annoying as all Hell, but a lot of 50s movies have this Capra-esque legacy that says that good salt-of-the-earth people who are genuine and have good motives always deserve to win out, even if they are dumber than shit.  Notice this in Capra movies like Lost Horizon and Pennies from Heaven.  This is bad Capra.  I genuinely like movies like It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.  The Capra legacy of which I speak are movies that try to recapture this spirit of good triumphing over evil (which usually means stupidity triumphing over intelligence) in movies like Forrest Gump (blecch) and The Majestic (double blecch).  In the '50s, the bad guys always lost and they were always captured or foiled by idiots.  This drives me crazy.  I sound a little bit Fascist here, but it's not that I want intelligence to always triumph over stupidity or banality, but at least sometimes it could happen.  In the 1950s movies just didn't do that.  If you were a good guy you won... no matter how stupid you were.  Is it sick of me to root for the criminals and to wish that they would just snuff the old lady and get it over with?

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