Barney Fife Must Be In Charge of Government Records

BW and I don't attend very many movies anymore. First reason is the price. When we were dating we would go to a double feature with cartoons, newsreel and previews of coming attractions and selected shorts for 50 cents each. Don't ask me how many dollars I had but that is another issue.

As I ponder movies weren't very realistic back then either. So many movies of today have so many scenes of tired pedestrian clichés. And there is so much copying in movies. One movie shows a scene or action and then the next 63 movies have the same scene or similar. Let's discuss some of those tired old clichés.

In all of the action movies I have seen or watched the previews, all villains could not hit the red side of a green barn with a shotgun at three paces. Don't they have a shooting school? Indiana Jones, James Bond or John Wayne, are assaulted by 74 "nogoodnicks" shooting submachine guns, pistols, rifles, Uzis, howitzers and a battery of 16 inch guns from the battleship Indiana and they never hit the victim.

I am tired of female hostages. In all of these movies a woman is taken hostage by the "nogoodnicks" and in a showdown the bad guy holds a gun to her head while she whimpers like a kindergarten student denied an Eskimo pie. Or she screams and looks terrified as she is being suspended upside down over a huge flame or from a skyscraper. The villain's gang calls and threatens to kill her, ergo the villain is released.

The U.S. Government files and computers are vulnerable to everyone. No wonder the U.S.A. is in trouble. Watch the movies. Anyone with a laptop, a blackberry, an Ipod, WiFi at the coffee shop, public library or a precocious 14-year-old kid with zits in his "technoelaborate room" can hack into the super secret database of the FBI personnel files or super secret defense plans or super secret blueprints for a massive bomb. Barney Fife must be in charge of government records.

How many times have I seen the villains catch the good guy and then become conversational? Why not kill James Bond immediately? No! They try to talk him to death. They talk more than a car load of women trying to decide where to eat lunch. Movie villains devise elaborate schemes meant to torture and kill their victims, i.e., shark pool that should be the end of James Bond. Dr. Kananga lets his attention stray and Bond cuts the rope with the saw in his watch and escapes.

Villains never learn in the movies. Their genetic structure must have been donated by Dr. Wrong.

Is it necessary to discuss the ticking time bomb? So many movies have it. A bomb is ticking with just seconds to explosion; the steely determined action hero is searching for it. He finds it and now must determine which wire to cut? Red or green or white? It doesn't matter. The hero always cuts the correct wire with seconds to go. Why doesn't the hero find the bomb with three days left on the clock, cut the wire and go out for a leisurely lunch? There would be less tension.

I know that movies are not real. They are escapist fare that we watch while putting our minds in neutral and stuffing our mouths with obscenely priced unhealthy foods while trying to keep our shoes from becoming permanently attached to the floor. I suggest that Elmer's Glue should do research on that stuff on movie theater floors for their next super glue. Movies are celluloid pickpockets. They need a "clichectomy."

Larry Vandeventer grew up north of Calvertville, graduated from Worthington High School and can be reached at Goosecrick@aol.com or at 6860 Sunrise Drive, Plainfield, Ind., 46168 or by phone at (317) 839-7656. He has written five books about his experiences.