Sunday, August 24, 2008

Again with the disappointment

Disappointment.
That's really about the size of how I feel about movies these days.
It's more about the money than the story these days, and, lately, directors and producers are ruining what used to be well loved movie franchises by offering a steaming heap of crap as new 2hr installments in their series.
None of the new offerings have any of the feel or the fun of the old ones, and everything seems forced.
Need some examples? Look around. We have Rambo IV, wittily titled "Rambo", where, instead of furthering any of the story put down in the first three movies, I think the point was to see how much wooden acting and over-exposed bloodshed we could take.
And then, my favorite two film franchises of all time decided to get into the act as well.
Lucas and Spielberg reunited with Harrison Ford to create the craptacular waste of time known as Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls, wherein I think the writers watched an X-Files marathon before writing. Whereas the first three films dealt with the location and recovery of mystical religious artifacts, ostensibly to be displayed in a museum and used for the presumed betterment of all peoples, this installment deals with aliens and their past and present manipulations of the human race and influences on it's history. AND they had wooden acting, horrid dialogue, and some terrible CGI work. Terrible because CGI has no place in an Indiana Jones movie, and Indy's survival of impossible situations in this one leaves me flabbergasted and pissed off. Seriously, surviving a nuclear bomb by locking yourself in a refrigerator? This ISN'T the Mummy series, after all. The only part DID enjoy was the nods to two of the other Indy films scattered throughout the movie. Lastly, and perhaps the largest disappointment of all, is George Lucas' monster flophouse destruction of the Star Wars series. The original trilogy was amazing. The Prequels I was able to force myself to stomach, but this latest embarrassment, The Clone Wars, is horrid. It starts out with a re-worked version of the classic theme made famous by John Williams, but this one sounds like the Meco version.....except worse. The entire plot is iffy, the dialogue is slanted toward those viewers under 10, the graphics on the mechanicals are amazing, I'll grant you, but the CHARACTERS look terrible. The music through this "movie" doesn't match anything else in the series, and then, the actors trying to voice the main characters try to hard, and end up sounding like Monty Python's Flying Circus attempting "Evita".
I want me money and those hours of my life back, but, more realistically, or maybe not, I want Hollywood to give us more originality. The art is dying, long live the dollar, is all they seem to say these days.

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