I regularly read a blog called /film which deals with movie industry news and gossip as well as humorous short parody films found around the internet by the writers. It’s content has recently begun to annoy me, although it’s not the blog itself that I’ve found fault with: it’s the Hollywood Movie Machine. /film reflects the movie industry, and as the movie industry seems to be currently suffering from a high imbalance in the talent to toe-rag department. Frankly it’s currently churning out piles of shite in desperate search of dollars and worse than that it’s dragging the English language down with it.
As a result I move we excise the following Hollywood-isms from common speech:
Reboot – Several online dictionaries list the word reboot as a noun, but I consider it more likely to be a verb. You put on boots, but you reboot a computer. I particularly despise reboots – the plural form of this word that’s appeared lately in conjunction with Friday the 13th and others.
RetCon – Retroactive continuity – This is where things are added, taken away or altered to fit the current storyline. Comic books, especially in the 50′s and 60′s were particularly bad for this as they were never written from the point of view of having an overreaching internal logic. Later on as the kids who read them grew up into self obsessed nerds the writers found that they had to write stories that made internal sense or risk the wrath of the fan boys. Retconning allows the writers to resurrect dead characters, change heroes powers and generally get on with telling the story, but it also tends to degenerate into screen time that has to be wasted to avoid a fan-rammy.
Franchise – Just give it up. If a movie makes money it doesn’t have to become a deluge of action figures, novels and worst of all sequels.
Adaptation – Taking a story from another form of media for example comic books, novels, computer games or even burger restaurants and making a movie out of it. Will someone, for the love of god, explain to Hollywood that many of the things their adapting worked perfectly because they were written for the medium in which they were originally presented? No two hour movie will ever capture every nuance of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and no movie adapted to a video game has ever been good.
Sequel – I’ll admit that some stories deserve a sequel, and they do often set the scene correctly at the end of the movie, but for every one that does a hundred more are made because the original was a money-spinner. Star Wars was fine with the first three movies, the lord of the Rings needed three movies to tell the story, but the Matrix should have quit while it was ahead. If the story can be told, and told well, in one movie we don’t need to see the characters going through it all again no matter how entertaining it was, and we certainly don’t need:
Prequels – A sequel where the action happens before the original movie. WHAT THE HELL IS THE POINT? The movie is supposed to be a heroic journey. The critical event in the hero/world/universes existence, but Hollywood doesn’t trust the audience to sit back and accept the world’s backstory. They’ve got to try and show it with better CGI, bigger name actors and huge special effects.
Hollywood-ism – I know I only coined this about 400 words ago, but it annoys me already.
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