I agree with you entirely, FeatherDaemon, much like always
If one thing can definitely be said about motion pictures, it's that they're often extremely cliched spanning across all genres. I mean, one of the chief pans a film critic will resort to is that a movie is "predictable" and, let's face it, many of them are, with awfully simplistic plots to boot. ALL Disney films, as glorious as many of them tend to be, nonetheless are carbon copies of each other in terms of their essential plots, and the good guys HAVE to always win or else countless small children will weep for weeks. Further, many film adaptations of controversial, gripping, sometimes bitingly satiric novels are either altered to produce a "happy ending" (The Natural), or else their impact is softened for palatability from the general masses (Less Than Zero), OR the satirical edge is mostly filed down to a mere goofy irony (Forrest Gump) in an attempt to avoid predictability. Even Titanic, which truly was an epic, breathtaking film, could have its plot summed up in two words: "boat sinks." And we KNEW the blasted thing was doomed. And if you try anything different in Hollywood, the results are often rather horrific, to the excrutiating tune of fare such as Freddy Got Fingered, Surviving Christmas, or The Pacifier.
I think a film like The Silence of the Lambs would be truly exquisite. I've read the book three times, and it's chilling, provocative and impossible to put down for long. It's that type of more psychological horror I prefer, and the truly scariest movie I've seen to date, believe it or not, was Fatal Attraction. The last twenty minutes of the picture are gripping, terrifying and sheerly brilliant. I remember all six-foot-plus, over two hundred pounds of me practically fetal in my seat from the fourth row, murmuring with trepidation. Long live the thinking man's (or woman's) screenplay!
