Archive for the 'Hollywood Movie Machine' Category

The Reimaginarium of Doctor Asshatuss

Published on April 15, 2010 in Hollywood Movie Machine. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Dear Entertainment Industry,

I’m writing to you today as a loyal consumer, viewer, gamer, reader, listener and one of the faceless multitude that ultimately keep you in business. You seem to have forgotten, or perhaps no longer care, that it is my hard earned cash that keeps you in the manner to which you’ve become sadly accustomed.

In times gone past every new film, game, book and television program was new and unique. They may have followed a similar genre, and many, especially westerns, seemed at first glance to be carbon copies of each other, but they all brought their own new and individual stories to the table.  Some became classics because of good casting, Oscar worthy acting or stirringly unique scores, and others were consigned to the dust of history because they couldn’t cut it.

It makes me sad, and deeply concerned, at how much you’ve lost your way. I believe it’s fair to say that the Entertainment Business is far more about business than entertainment now. Like so many industries in the world the day of the individual skilled craftsman is gone and only mass produced products remain in it’s place. Entertainment has lost its focus. I would go as far as to say that very little of modern media is actually entertaining. It might put backsides on seats, move tonnes of popcorn and keep cinemas open, it’s good enough for that purpose, but it’s not good.

Your recent, and seemingly increasing, fascination with the so-called “re-imagining” of older ideas has got to stop. In fact the very idea that you’ve managed to introduce the neologism “re-imagining” into common speech galls me. Equally galling is your hijacking of the computing term “reboot” to signify an attempt to start again from scratch. Let us be honest with ourselves though. What you’re creating is fan fiction, with high production values truth be told, but at it’s heart it’s fan fiction where the creators often show utter contempt for the original whose name and fan base they’re so desperate to trade on.

Strangely I don’t blame the writers, and not because I’m a writer myself, but because I’ve seen and read much about what happens between a story being written and a story reaching the bookshelves or cinema. An outstanding example of this was the recent movie Babylon AD. It was critically panned, and I have to agree it’s a shoddy film, but even before release the director Mathieu Kassovitz had complained bitterly about the constant interference from 20th Century Fox. There’s no guarantee that if they hadn’t interfered that the film would have been a hit, but given Kassovitz’s earlier success I have to wonder about what might have been.

I’ll admit, grudgingly, that sometimes these re-imaginings have exceeded the originals, but only for a time. The much vaunted re-imagining of Battlestar Galactic springs instantly to mind. The original, much as I love it, was campy, high sci-fi hokum of the worst kind and it’s a running joke that many of the episodes were set on whatever set was going spare  on the back lot that day. Like Buck Rogers, Knight Rider, The A-Team and dozens of others from the 70s and 80s it was very much of its time and place, and it should have been left there.

Don’t get me wrong here, I loved the “re-imagined” series, but it wasn’t Battlestar Galactic. It was a modern Sci-Fi show trading upon the glory of a show that’s had it’s day. They could just as easily not used any of the names or ideas from the original series and it would still have been just as good, at least until the writers got carried away with their own success….

So, lords of the Entertainment Business, I’m asking you, hell I’m begging you, stop pushing out this recycled crap and re-imagined ideas and start bring new things to the table. Stop ruining our minds with formula rom-coms, rehashed 1980′s series, painful ruinations of dear childhood favourites and comic book movies that make the original creator puke up their livers.

Oh, and no more FUCKING VAMPIRES OK!

Throw the brakes on the reboot wagon and start supporting imaginative, and original projects, like the guys who are producing Iron Sky, before it’s too late.

Regards

GK

Hollywood Go Home

Published on March 10, 2009 in Hollywood Movie Machine, Movies, People Be Fools and Ranting. 0 Comments

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.

Cities In Flight

Published on February 4, 2009 in Hollywood Movie Machine, Movies, Musings and Screenwriting. 0 Comments

The Hollywood Movie Machine seems to be determined to remake, re-imagine or adapt every book, computer game, novel, short story, play or song ever made. We’ve got the highly anticipated Watchmen movie due out soon, a heretical remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and even a Far Cry movie from Uwe Boll with a mainly German principle cast.

I find it strange however that nobody has yet tried to adapt the four novels written by James Blish’s that make up the Cities in Flight series. They seem more than perfect for the big screen treatment, particularly the middle two books: A Life for the Stars and Earthman Come Home. The premise of the novels actually begs for a big screen adaptation, especially in the current climate where spectacle seems to be far more important than substance or even plot.

The four books primarily revolve around the city of New York, or more accurately Manhattan Island, which has left behind a polluted and increasingly authoritarian Earth and is wandering through the galaxy in search of work. This bizarre situation is made possible by the use of a MacGuffin called a spindizzy which through the magic of science creates an anti-gravity field around an object. The limitation of the device is that the efficiency and power of the device is inversely proportional to the mass lifted. Therefore it’s far more efficient to lift a city than to move a conventional spaceship. The cities themselves form a vast spacefaring culture where they trade their skills and advanced technology to various colonies and alien empires in return for supplies, food and raw materials. They refer to themselves as Okies in reference to the historical Okies who left the American Midwest during the 1930′s due to a combined effect of economic depression and the infamous Dust Bowl.

The first book They Shall Have Stars describes the development of the spindizzy and its associated effects on Earth. The western governments become more and more paranoid over the potential of the spindizzy and eventually execute the protagonist as a political threat after he reveals the science and existence of the spindizzy to the world. It’s interesting, but essentially a political thriller with a hint of espionage.

In the second book A life for the stars a young farm boy living near Scranton, Pennsylvania is accidentally caught up in the departure of the former mining city as it leaves for the stars. He survives several desperate and ill managed disasters before being traded along with many other undesirables to the much larger and successful New York.

The third novel follows the adventure of the boy and the city of New York itself as it travels amongst the stars in search of work. Eventually they reencounter the city of Scranton which has devolved into what the Okies call a Bindlestiff: a tramp city that survives by criminal activities rather than honest work. At the climax of the book the residents of New York install spindizzies on a planet in an effort to escape an increasingly hostile Earth based empire. The planet itself is thrown out of the Milky Way towards the Large Magellanic Cloud where it ultimately comes to rest.

The final book A Clash of Cymbals seems to run off at a tangent to the rest of the series. The New Yorkers discover that the universe is coming to an end imminently and they race to be at the epicentre of the collapse before another group in the belief that whoever is present at the exact time and space the universe ends will be able to shape the destiny of the next universe after a big bang. Weird is the only way to describe it.

I think a combination of the two middle books would work best. Have the protagonist wander aboard a city just as it departs for the stars and document his adventures aboard as he struggles against a tyrannical mayor. It’s a simple story with plenty of room for amazing visuals effects: it is a flying city after all. Hopefully a decent screenwriter, director and producer will take up the challenge and create a Sci-Fi masterwork that we can all enjoy, but I’ve got the feeling that if, or when it does come a film version will be a steaming pile of crap.

I can dream though.