A Good Marriage (2014)

Spoilers, typos, and bad grammar ahead. You've been warned.

I don't know why I continually do this to myself but, I watched another made for TV, Stephen King "movie" this week. I think I'm just a glutton for punishment; I know what I'm getting into when I do this, but my morbid curiosity always gets the best of me. On the chopping block tonight is A Good Marriage.

A little leg work tells me that this movie is based on a novella. I often question that translation process and this movie is a good example of why - I'm not convinced that there is enough in a novella to merit 2 hours of film. That's not always the case but, it certainly seems to be in this instance - and I write that not having read the source material. You regular readers know how I feel about Stephen King.

Even in the context of made for TV material, this movie was complete shit. It has some of the worst, stilted acting I have even seen. Joan Allen (Darcy) & Anthony LaPaglia (Bob) have less than no chemistry and couldn't convince me that they had even met before, let alone that they are a happily married couple; their sex scene at the beginning of the movie is one of the most awkward, terrible things I've ever had to watch - and I sat through BOTH Human Centipede & A Serbian Film.

Throughout the movie I kept thinking that the score was ripped right out of Kiss The Girls (speaking of movies based on books about serial killers.) Too bad that's the only thing they borrowed, while not a terrific movie, A Good Marriage could still have benefitted from even a .0001 of the acting skill in Kiss The Girls.

The plot is nothing new: a serial killer settles down to raise a family while he continues to kill in his free time. This story line could be said to have roots in classics like Jekyll & Hyde or Dorian Gray - where we the reader are asked to confront the duality of human nature and confront the classic struggle of good VS evil. If we choose to look more at the surface of the whole thing, it's really just a standard plot line of the thriller genre.

Darcy (the meek, unknowing wife of a serial killer) eventually discovers his secret and a confrontation ensues. Romantic promises are made, but no one in the story intends to keep them. Things eventually go badly for Bob (our serial killer) and we're left to wonder if Darcy will let sleeping dogs lay OR if she'll become a killer herself, now that she's tasted the power of taking another human's life. At least, I assume that's what I was supposed to be thinking as the end credits rolled by. What I was really thinking was, "thank god this movie is over and I never have to think about it again."

Apparently, King says he was inspired to write this gem based on details of BTK's life. BTK was a serial killer who Bound, Tortured, and Killed some folks in Kansas and was kind enough to write detailed accounts of these killings. Seems King isn't the only prolific writer our great country has been graced with. We're so very lucky. Anyway - I can only hope that BTK had something more interesting to write than this boring tale.

You can bore yourself to death with the Good Marriage trailer here:

You can pick up a copy of A Good Marriage here - if you literally have NOTHING ELSE to spend money on:

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There are terms that always seem to come up when talking about films: director, actor, plot, theme, score, etc. These terms are all self-explanatory; no one ever asks, ‘what’s a director?’ However, there are other terms that are equally common but less clear: genre, sub-genre, auteur, oeuvre, etc. These terms are more abstract then ‘director’ or ‘actor.’ It is entirely likely that someone will ask, ‘what is genre, anyway?’ This question specifically is what I will be answering with this paper. The answer to the question ‘what is genre,’ is multi-layered: genre is a means of classification. Genre is a means of communication. Genre is a means of understanding films. Genre is a means of relating to films. To one person all movies rated “PG” are a genre – possibly one also known as “children’s movies” – while to another all movies with similar topics treated in similar ways are a genre: i.e. movies dealing with frontier life depicted in a nostalgic manner are a genre often kn

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