I'm not sure when or if I'll get a chance to see "Fright Night" but as a fan of the original it's something I'd like to do, hopefully before it leaves theaters. Truthfully I'm pleasantly surprised by the reception it's getting.
That said, I did see "Conan" there was no way I couldn't despite the bad reviews. To be honest, I can't see how they managed to go wrong with this movie. I can easily see how it got greenlit, Jason Mamoa looks like the character and can play the gruff tough guy role well as he's proven in "Stargate Atlantis", and "Game Of Thrones". Rose Mcgowan has the sex appeal, ahd she became famous playing a witch on TV for years, and showed she could do cheezy action and make it entertaining in Grindhouse's "Planet Terror", an evil sorceress should be pretty much second nature to her. Then for support we've got Ron Perlman, who has made otherwise abysmal movies watchable and carried things like "Hellboy" where I would have said it should have been impossible to do it right as a movie. I mean heck, he's probably what made "The Mutant Chronicles" watchable.
In Conan I'd think Rose Mcgowan totally lacked talent and was doing her first screen role ever if I didn't know who she was, and this goes beyond the script. I mean all criticisms aside, this is one role that she of all people in the world should have been able to utterly nail given her TV career. Ron Perlman seemed to be dialing it in... and well truthfully I think Jason Mamoa might have come accross better but whoever was directing and doing the choreography sort of made him look bad too. The dialogue was atrotious mind you... going off about slavery, and then "I claim the woman Grrrr" and so on, but the role of Conan would have been redeemed by good action scenes, and I know Jason can do the choreography, but whomever shot the fight scenes decided to speed everything up and do cuts so it rarely seemed that you got to see anything that was especially good... and well, it came accross as being very weak.
Horrible movie, and I expected a lot more. What's disappointing is that even with a horrible director I would have expected the people in it to make it a lot better than it was given the roles they were given. Really, I'm especially disappointed with Rose Mcgowan... I just can't excuse that one.
Other than that, I'll say that I think people are taking the commentary on "The Help" a bit too far. Not my kind of movie, and I'll never see it, but I get the gist of the complaints. It's valid to say that putting the civil liberties movement at the foot of some bimbo trying to make a side point... even in fiction, is going a bit far. On the other hand saying Blacks themselves did this, that's going a bit too far as well. The actual truth of the matter is that the whole issue of ending slavery, civil liberties, and other things was always up to white people because they had the power. Especially early on the entire movement could have been ended rather brutally, and it was a matter of developing white western morality that has previously resulted in the ending of slavery. Part of the point of what made guys like Martin Luthor King Jr. such a big deal was that he "got it" where a lot of other people didn't. He realized that the white majority that allowed this to get started were the ones who would ultimatly make the desician, and was a big presenter of non-violence because if the movement that was being allowed (under a lot of resistance) got violent, and caused people to change their minds, the entire thing would be shut down with the needed majority support disappearing. Had this movement not had him to guide things in that direction, and the entire thing been run by dudes like oh say Malcolm X, it would have ended in an orgy of violence and the hopes of civil liberties... and the message what we did in the US that went to the rest of the world, would have died.
See, people tend to like to sit around and white-bash, especially nowadays, and that kind of irks me. All sarcasm about "oooh, white people, is there nothing they can't do" aside, I think people tend to overlook the accomplishments of "white people" if you must break things down, and what we've actually done. It's pretty staggering, and I think that breeds a lot of the resentment. Nobody who is drawing things along racial lines wants to sit there and admit that whites dominated, and things changed because of our changing morality and the simple fact that we let them.
For example, slavery as an institution has existed for thousands of years. For most of that time, us "white dudes" were the victims. Where the great civilizations flourished around Egypt and the fertile crescent, we were the fur clad barbarians leaping around our caves. We got run down and marched back as slaves and such for a long time. This lasted pretty much until the development of the great Mediterreanan civilizations... and the Dusky/Olive skinned greeks and romans also exploited us pasty white dudes. Rome fell, and with it came the rise of the Anglo-Saxons. We did indeed practice slavery, but arguably not for very long overall in comparison. Where other civilizations made their mark as slavers, we're the ones who pretty much ended slavery on a large scale. The whole "all men are created equal, skin color doesn't matter" thing is pretty much our ideal, and even today if you look at monoethnic cultures throughout the world in Asia and so on you'll find that we're bloody tolerant comparitively speaking, and one of the reasons why nations like the US are disliked is because we go running around disrupting racist policies, defending minorities in other people's countries, ending genocides, and other things.
Now, I am being deliberatly simplistic here, the basic point here is that while it's perfectly fine to say "The Help" is idiotic in it's presentation, I conversely think it goes too far to say "it's idiotic because black people grew tired of oppression and rose up" because that's really not what happened, some indeed did, but it was largely the realization of white people that the social conventions were wrong that changed things, and caused them to change society. Blacks really took nothing, but were given equality... and the way people were convinced to do this, and how once the movement was allowed to get going it was kept from violence that would have undone it is why Martin Luthor King Jr. is a great man (where in comparison someone like Malcolm X strikes me as being a bit of a douche whose attitudes if ever fully embraced would simply end in a lot of dead people and more hatred and resentment than ever before).
