There are so many benefits associated with getting older, not the least of them are widsom and patience. Even the annoyance of the occasional new gray hair or sagging body part is offset by the joy and inner peace that comes from a long life well lived. But as the great sage Buggs Bunny once said, "I can't say it's been a slice of heaven, cause it hasn't." Surprisingly, one of the downsides of aging stems not from any physcial source but from Hollywood. Apparently, Hollywood, in its desire to keep the world supplied with a steady stream of movies has forgotten that some of us over the age of 30 still have functioning memories. How else can you explain the plethora of movies that are nothing more than pieces of other movies hastily thrown together and repackaged using contemporary themes?
Do you need examples? Oh where do I start or more appropriately, how much time do you have? Let's begin with a movie that I recently saw over the Christmas holiday, The Town. Shame on you Ben Affleck. If you didn't have the time to create an original movie or actually act as though you wanted to be in it, you should have said so. Please don't make me go over the entire movie, suffice it to say it was about a band of Boston, Irish-American bank robbers. In a different movie, Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins buried some cash and a note containing a clue to his whereabouts for Morgan Freeman. That's exactly what Ben Affleck did for his girlfriend. And just so you know that I'm not splitting hairs about this, both Freeman and the girlfriend discovered their hidden treasures while a narration voiced by the protagonists droned in the backdground. There's more. Tim Robbins' character was raped in prison, in The Town, Affleck's imprisoned father suffered the same fate.
Don't feel bad if you didn't know any of this and thought The Town was an original piece of filmmaking. My 20 year old daughter who is a movie buff and attends the number one film school in the world, USC in L.A., didn't know she was being duped either. In all fairness, there was one glaring distinction between the two movies -- ShawshankRedemption was an inspirational movie featuring great lines and standout performances by its main characters and The Town, well, it had one heck of a bank robbing scene.
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