I respectfully disagree

The following was a comment on my Sept. 8 post:

"Anonymous said...

A good trailer can sell me on a movie, and a perfect trailer evokes emotional responses to images without excessive revelation.

There should be no comma there."

Anonymous, I disagree that the comma should be removed. There are places where commas can be inserted or left out and the resulting sentence is correct either way. I believe this is one of those places. Commas are meant to inflict pause in the reader and that was my goal while writing the sentence. Similarly, I could've replaced the comma with a semicolon and removed the conjunction "and." This would have created the same pause. Either way, the sentence is correct. Thanks for your input.

I watched Underworld: Evolution. On one hand, I'm glad there's a solid set of movies about a war between vampires and werewolves; on the other hand, I wish it was more down-to-earth and less excessive in its use of gore. Just because you can make a special effect of someone's torso sliding off a cliff doesn't mean you should. An example of a good violence shot would be Wolverine slashing the guy across the face in X2. It's brief, you see what happens, and you don't see the guy's face bits spraying everywhere. In Romeo Must Die, however, when someone breaks a bone, the camera zooms into their body to show the point of fracture.

Movies can allude to violence without painting the screen red. Gory horror films are exempt from this criteria, because obviously gore has a place there. Gore does not have a place in action movies. Imagine if, instead of a staff, Neo used a machete in his fight against 100 Agent Smiths in The Matrix: Reloaded, and the animators rendered all the blood and organs that would spill out of the Smiths. If the same people who worked on Underworld: Evolution made this scene, that would've happened. I hope that example helped illustrate my idea to any of you who didn't appreciate the X2 and Romeo Must Die comparison because those movies have different MPAA ratings. Unfortunately I just remembered how gory Kill Bill Vol. 1 was, and that somewhat revokes my assertion that action movies shouldn't be gory, but let's call that a special case so I can wrap this up without getting into all the exceptions.