the golden era of grisham films
2 Oct 2022 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cimoreneWe watched another John Grisham film from the 1990s today. Sometime in 2021 we watched the one with Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones, which was also directed by Joel Schumacher, and today Wax said "He was making these around the same time he was making those Batman movies." Which is a funny observation.
It's a well-established truth that the Grisham movies in the 90s spawned a whole wave of Legal Thriller imitators, many of them actually bad although most of the Grisham films are good, in tv as well as movies I suppose. But movies more so. This genre has pretty much disappeared now.
Wax points out that they wouldn't exist now anyway, because of the oft-cited disappearance of the midbudget movie. They had been succeeded already by then with, I guess, espionage thrillers and terrorism thrillers. At least mostly. Thrillers tend to be streaming now, and rarely film length, although miniseries length would probably have been better for a lot of legal thrillers too, for that matter. But today's thriller miniseries seem to be espionage, terrorism, "politics", and of course, just plain crime and cops stuff but with ~suspense~ rather than the more classic piecing-together-clues formula common to early CSI and NCIS sort of cop shows. (Eugh.)
My dissatisfaction with contemporary mystery and crime genre offerings and ambivalence about law enforcement on film aside, though, I think this range of offerings is still a bit inferior. Partly this is because the espionage-suspense subgenre, in the intermediate (not-A-lister-like-Le-Carré) level, is plagued by mystery box writing, lazy stereotypes, loose ends and nonsense politics that don't match up, and usually also plagued by attempting not to have bad actors represent any actual ethnic groups, countries, or realistic terrorist interests. Except for muslims, of course, which are represented with shocking inaccuracy and racism in these genres (crime, espionage, "political"/"terrorism") and hardly anywhere else in media. I've talked about this issue in the context of the Mission Impossible movies before, which presumably got tired of bad actors within the US and UK intelligence services (the only remotely realistic premises they've ever used, tbh) and needed some more variety in villains but couldn't think of anything but implausible terrorists without coherent plans, ideologies, motivations, or goals, or even visible ethnicity. But that's a rant I've made before. Multiple times.
It's a well-established truth that the Grisham movies in the 90s spawned a whole wave of Legal Thriller imitators, many of them actually bad although most of the Grisham films are good, in tv as well as movies I suppose. But movies more so. This genre has pretty much disappeared now.
Wax points out that they wouldn't exist now anyway, because of the oft-cited disappearance of the midbudget movie. They had been succeeded already by then with, I guess, espionage thrillers and terrorism thrillers. At least mostly. Thrillers tend to be streaming now, and rarely film length, although miniseries length would probably have been better for a lot of legal thrillers too, for that matter. But today's thriller miniseries seem to be espionage, terrorism, "politics", and of course, just plain crime and cops stuff but with ~suspense~ rather than the more classic piecing-together-clues formula common to early CSI and NCIS sort of cop shows. (Eugh.)
My dissatisfaction with contemporary mystery and crime genre offerings and ambivalence about law enforcement on film aside, though, I think this range of offerings is still a bit inferior. Partly this is because the espionage-suspense subgenre, in the intermediate (not-A-lister-like-Le-Carré) level, is plagued by mystery box writing, lazy stereotypes, loose ends and nonsense politics that don't match up, and usually also plagued by attempting not to have bad actors represent any actual ethnic groups, countries, or realistic terrorist interests. Except for muslims, of course, which are represented with shocking inaccuracy and racism in these genres (crime, espionage, "political"/"terrorism") and hardly anywhere else in media. I've talked about this issue in the context of the Mission Impossible movies before, which presumably got tired of bad actors within the US and UK intelligence services (the only remotely realistic premises they've ever used, tbh) and needed some more variety in villains but couldn't think of anything but implausible terrorists without coherent plans, ideologies, motivations, or goals, or even visible ethnicity. But that's a rant I've made before. Multiple times.
