Movie Moan

These days everything Hollywood churns out seems to be a remake, sequel, comic book movie or based on a toy line from over a decade ago. So without an original idea on the horizon we the audience can expect to put up with this until every comic book and toy line has been bled dry, remade and rebooted until our eyes bleed. And since all the good or well known comic book characters have already been adapted into movies e.g Spiderman, Superman, Batman, Ironman they've moved on to the lesser known titles. With a Lego movie in the pipeline the end is in sight, nothing will be safe as we can expect movies based on cleaning products such as the Jerry Bruckheimer produced Mr Muscle or perhaps the big summer family movie will be the CGI epic Toilet Duck.

Some of the new movies coming out are based on comic books and graphic novels that are pretty obscure; the general public aren't going to know they're based on a comic book. Take the new Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, most people I have spoken to have no idea it's based on a comic book. Come on, credit where credits due. You would have thought Hollywood would have learnt its lesson making movies based on lesser known comics with less mass market appeal. For example the Watchman movie, while it was a good movie, finacially it didn't do too well as the studios hoped. One thing that really bugged me about that movie was the trailer tag line, "from the visionary director of 300". By no stretch of the imagination is Zach Snyder a visionary. He directed a remake of Dawn Of The Dead, 300..... and thats it. A remake and a movie that uses similar filming techniques as Sin City. How this 'body of work' would grant someone the title visionary is beyond me. What's next, "from the revolutionary director of the rush hour trilogy" in the trailer for the next Brett Ratner movie? I wouldn't be surprised.

Without original ideas that challenge us as an audience, what are we to do? With the industries interests lying in financial gain and big box office weekends, studios are producing movies designed to make big money, so I look to Independent and world cinema for innovation; films that operate outside the Hollywood studio movie system. I remember being blown away by film makers like Larry Clark(Kids) and Park Chan-Wook(Old Boy/Revenge Trilogy), who can genuinely surprise you with their work as long as you can handle your underage sex and drug use, with some incest thrown in for good measure. It's the taboo subjects that make these movies so interesting and while Hollywood shuns the darker sides of human nature by hiding in the corner, independent and world cinema embrace them, giving the audience the chance to see something original.

Something I'm finding increasingly common with movies is how predictable they are. Within 15 minutes of watching a movie you can see who will fall in love with who, who's the bad guy, good guy, it's all laid out in paint by numbers, you know exactly where you'll end up before you've even set off. It's very rare to come across a story or plot that's fresh, something you haven't seen before. I find I spend a great deal of effort when I watch a movie to not piece the whole thing together too quick.

Although new is good, I do find myself drawn to shiny production values, big name actors and safe predictable story lines with happy endings. Indie and world cinema offer new ideas and although they're often bleak as hell, giving us a grim and dare I say it "realistic" view on life, it's this that stirs the imagination. Lets face it, if I wanted to see real life i'd open my curtain and look outside or just pick up a newspaper and feel depressed about the state of the world. When I select a movie more often than not I'll select something that I've seen over a dozen times and has a budget of at least 700 million dollars. Why? Because most of the time when I feel like watching a movie, I want to relax and turn my brain off. Try watching Gasper Noé's Irreversible for a nice relaxing evening, better yet get a lady friend round and you can both sit there together and endure a 9 minute, single camera shot rape scene and a man getting his face smashed in with a fire extinguisher with no cut-aways or angle changes, and just to top it off for the first half of the movie the soundtrack is low frequency sound that makes you feel disoriented. See if that gets you any lady action.