New York City is not all fun and games. It doesn’t all work out in the end. No one will always be happy. Bad things happen to good people, so why should movies portray that? Is it to satiate people’s need for happiness and love because their own lives can’t supply them? To me, it seems like this fantasyland of happiness and love in these unrealistic movie scenarios are junk, and everyone’s addicted. They fiend for their junk and try to get a quick fix anywhere they can, whether it be romantic comedy like Moonstruck or fuzzy singing gloved hands in The Muppets Take Manhattan. Those movies are not realistic, and they warp the mind of anyone who’s gullible enough to think that’s how the world actually works. If you want a real depiction of the world, regardless of how grim, Taxi Driver and The 25th Hour are much more accurate than any other movies we’ve seen this semester.
Moonstruck… this was a stupid movie. “Oh I’m just going to leave my fiancé for his brother because his brother is broken and I like to fix men.” That’s basically this story. Oh yeah, plus add a cheating husband/father, a dying old mother who no one cares about but her pathetically passionate “mamma’s boy” son, Cher, and a wooden hand and you’ve found yourself moonstruck: literally “dazed, confused, irrational.” Moonstruck is irrational. No one is going to be okay that their partner has cheated on them. In the real world, not everyone would be drinking wine and laughing in the end: you would hear shouting, cursing, and a ton of blame being tossed around like a hot potato. While some people with a simple sense of humor might actually find this funny and entertaining, it goes without saying that this is unrealistic and would never happen, especially not in New York City, which is known for two things: buildings and the rude people who inhabit them.
The “feel-good” movie of the semester obviously goes to The Muppets Take Manhattan without a doubt, but does that make it accurate? New York City is not a “feel-good” city: when creeps holler at women, the women can’t scare them off. When you’re robbed, you can’t take matters into your own hands and chase them. This isn’t Batman. People is people is people? I don’t think so. People are animals in clothes. Animal Planet’s slogan is literally “Animal Planet, surprisingly human.” Even bad TV knows that humans are nothing more than animals with suppressed instincts. Yeah, maybe a frog and a pig can get married in Muppet world without any weird looks, but you’ll never catch interracial marriages in New York City without someone acting surprised or disapproving. Granted, the Muppets can make anyone with a heart laugh, but New York City is no place for laughter, it’s serious here.
Taxi Driver, unfortunately, seems to be a good description for life in NYC: repetitive, long, and meaningless. PTSD, prostitution, and murder are all real problems pertaining to both the past and the present NYC environments. These are real situations that people of New York face everyday. Nobody wants to go through them, but it’s not by choice. This unfortunate lifestyle is lived by some. For anyone who doesn’t know the effects of this lifestyle firsthand, Taxi Driver is a fun action movie to see in the movies to see how the “other half” lives.
The 25th Hour was another more realistic movie: everyone makes mistakes and we have to live with them. Monty’s mistake was his selling of drugs, and his punishment was time in prison. By the time he realizes the mistakes in his lifestyle, it’s too late. For the whole more he lives in his 25th hour, or the moment after the end. A late shot after the buzzer. A time for “what if’s” and “could’ve been’s.” Monty was not a bad person, but he made bad choices that he had to pay for. He could’ve run away, but if he did, then this movie would’ve fallen under the category of “unrealistic lives.” There is no permanent escape from the guilt of one’s one conscience: he did the right thing by doing his time.
Movies can be considered more than just art and self-expression: it can sometimes distort the audience’s view on reality. Life is not easy. It’s not a walk in the park; it’s hard, full of twists and turns that will take people off of their original path. The feel-good movie are inaccurate it their portrayal of NYC because sometimes life sucks, so that’s why movies like Taxi Driver and The 25th Hour are here to remind us
