26 | March | 2022 | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

For me, most of the best movies I have seen are true stories. The new movie “Infinite Storm”, starring Naomi Watts is a movie about Pam Bales, who was a mountain rescuer in New Hampshire, near Mt Washington – a mountain range within certain times of a year is the coldest spot on Earth.

At the start of this film, I wondered why anyone would go hiking alone on any dangerous mountain, considering the huge odds of certain horrendous death, should anything go wrong. Slowly during the course of this story, we find out that something extremely horrible happened to Pam Bales and perhaps her reasons for taking such huge risks are to distract herself from what happened to her. Then we find out that this same condition is within John, another hiker she finds at the top of the mountain, almost freezing to death. Taking extreme risks, short of suicide, is how many people are able to get past a horrible tragedy that would kill many. I thought the way all of this was resolved at the end of this film, was very well done along with the way the two of them survived their trip down the mountain.

The ratings for this movie are so low, only 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, because this story is nothing more than a series of events, mostly about surviving the cold, frostbite, a badly injured ankle, major falls and finally their way back to a common parking lot and their cars.

My rating for Infinite Storm is around 70% and a very mild positive review, mostly for Naomi Watt’s acting.

In 2009, Sandra Bullock received the role of a lifetime, when she won best actress for “The Blind Side”. Her performance in this movie is more proof of how extremely difficult to get that one great role and once received – the odds are – it just may never happen again. Another great example of this is Mary Tyler Moore in “Ordinary People”, released in 1980 – where everybody in this movie, including director Robert Redford, never got a shot at a great movie again.

I for one was hoping that Bullock would follow up her role in the Blind Side, with more great parts like this one – but this is not how screenwriting, life or the movie industry works. The hard truth is that very few great scripts or in the case of the Blind Side, great true stories come around very often, and when they do, they should be considered miracles. Unfortunately Bullock in recent years has reverted back to the average movie roles including this latest example “The Lost City”, along with Channing Tatum with a cameo by Brad Pitt.

With the Lost City, about a writer of romance novels, somehow winding up in a remote Island looking for a treasure – there nothing new here, or even interesting. The attempts at humor with the nude scene by Channing Tatum (an obvious attempt to save the Box office), mostly fail, and too many times this movie falls into a boring coma that ultimately dooms this story.

I do not agree with the too high 76% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, giving this average film a 60% rating and a solid pass.