Mothman Prophecies

I am breaking some rule of blogging by having no focus for my blog (travel? work? random stuff? movie reviews?) but I have a need to report on the movie I watched last night. It was called The Mothman Prophecies and Richard Gere and Laura Linney starred.

Perhaps I chose this movie from Netflix to raise my geek profile; internet quizzes point to me being a pure nerd rather than geek. I remember reading a story about the Mothman legend in sixth grade language arts, and it always haunted me. Thus, I rented this movie hoping to learn more about the legend's origins. I have a genuine interest in unexplained phenomena and the cultural explanations for these. However, this movie was an X Files wannabe. If Mulder and Scully were in it, it would have been fine. Gere and Linney had no chemistry and failed miserably (not that they were trying to emulate the X Files, just an obvious comparison in my opinion). It had great atmospheric music and cinematography and production values. But you never had any sort of idea of what the Mothman was or why anything was happening. It needed more shots of a man in a giant moth costume, in my opinion. I will give it credit for the last 25 minutes were genuinely gripping but the rest of this movie just had a bunch of confused people walking around.

The real Mothman legend came from Point Pleasant West Virginia, where reports of a mothman preceded a bridge collapse in which 46 people died. They have a statue of the Mothman in their downtown, so I may go visit it someday. They also have the world's only Mothman Museum. Road trip.