Chateau Lloyd

I seem to be in a bit of a slump, movie-wise.  Both of my last selections looked good on paper, but ultimately amounted to far less than the sum of their parts.

The King of New York had a lot of potential.  Christopher Walken is always fun to watch, and a crime drama with him and Larry Fishburne (that's what he went by in the credits), Wesley Snipes, and with a cameo by Steve Buscemi, should have been quality entertainment.

It wasn't.

Walken was wasted, indeed the whole cast was wasted in a bad, dull plot, flat dialog and a film that was tedious to sit through.

This is probably why I didn't remember hearing about it.  I figured that it might have been good and just slipped by me because in the year it came out (1990) I had a lot going.  Moreover, crime drama/gangster movies weren't my thing.  Turns out, it was simply mediocre.

I often rip on modern movies for being less than the sum of their parts, but every era has its share of clunkers, the issue is generally just how bad they are.

Not quite a year ago I watched Castle Keep, which was terrible.  How could a World War II movie be so bad when the memory was so fresh?  I'm not sure, but it's awful.

As a sidebar, looking at Amazon's current offerings, they seem uniformly slick, designed to appeal to modern aesthetics but utterly lacking in anything remotely interesting.  If the movie has an "adult" premise, one can be sure it will lack any actual depth or nuance.  Everything today has been broken down to an intellectual level that would embarrass Warner Brothers cartoons.

It's strong, square-jawed girlbosses as far as the eye can see and all protagonists are effectively Yard Sign Calvinists, people whose essential goodness justifies them being awful human beings.

Such is the spirit of our age.