Hollywood 451

In the previous entry, I posed the question "has Hollywood officially lost its collective mind?"

This go around, I'm hoping I haven't gotten an answer to that question.

Frank Darabont, the man with the plan where Stephen King is concerned, is the latest in a long line of those trying to get Fahrenheit 451 made for a modern audience, and he's
facing a problem. Here's his quote as found on both Mania and Shock Til You Drop.

I actually had a studio head read that script and say: "Wow, that's the best and smartest script that I've read since running this studio but I can't possibly greenlight it." I asked why and he says "How am I going to get 13-year-olds to show up at the theater?" And I said "Well, lets make a good movie and I bet that will take care of itself." But that argument cut absolutely no ice. The movie was basically too smart for this person, too metaphorical, etc., etc. It's a bit of a battle you've got to fight.

Is this a common problem in Hollywood? I sure as hell hope not, even though I worry its more prevalent than it seems, especially when I consider all the popcorn movie fluff that really gets executives all hot and bothered.

Now I'm not stupid enough to believe that Hollywood should just drop all the fluff and focus on "art movies" or serious dramas. Hell the latest movie I bought on DVD was "Jimmy Neutron - Boy Genius." I wouldn't call that a hard hitting expose on the lives of children.

But I also don't want every executive thinking "how can I get 13 year olds in to see this movie?"

All those that are joining in the conversation at Mania, myself included, are laughing at the apparent idiocy of a guy more concerned with getting 13 year olds into a movie they'd have no appreciation of.

Is this really the golden rule of Hollywood? You can't go forward without the approval of a PG-13 MPAA rating?

Screw that.

And does every movie have to be friendly to as many people as possible to get little Johnny away from his Wii to have more CGI monsters and robots thrown at him just to get him to buy more toys?

Absolutely not.

We're heavily into the PG-13 generation: it's too naughty to be PG, it's not naughty enough to be R, and we can get as many heads to be numbed down as possible in theaters across the country.

I sure as hell can't imagine American Pie being watered down to a PG-13 rating. We're getting horror\thriller movies that have the look of R movies yet are safe enough to take little Billy too.

And the notion of it being "too smart" really pisses me off, as I've encountered quite a number of people that don't want to be talked down to, that need more of a competent story than the ones we're getting more and more of these days.

We are smarter than this. We are better than this. We're all for pure entertaining fluff, but you can only have fast food movies so often. There are feasts out there to be had as well, and we want to dine upon them just as much.

We also want to be engaged. We're not all suffering from ADD, and in fact we can fight off those symptoms quite easily when needed.

Let's face it - executives both underestimate and overestimate us at the same time. Abram's Trek reboot was highly successful while also having the shoddiest story ever to come out of a word processor. Transformers is all spectacle and is nothing more than an over priced commercial for a line of toys. Up remains the best example of storytelling I've seen this year so far.

I simply don't want to be presented with the notion of "too smart" when I make it out west. I also don't want to be defined by the limitations of not having 13 year olds in the theaters. What's the point of telling stories, any stories at all, if you can't make it as it should be and not have it defined by it's imagined limitations?

Has Hollywood (Officially) Lost Its Mind?

My friend Jarrod, the big shot news editor over at Mania, has posted an article saying a new Roy Rogers trilogy of films are in the pipeline.

And some of us are wondering why.

Hollywood is now no longer scraping the bottom of the barrel, they've broken through and started digging down into the barren earth below the barrel.

Come on guys, it's time for some fresh blood and ideas. And I don't simply mean me, I mean the whole way of going about storytelling and how you view past properties.

Wish I Could Fly...Among Other Things

I'm dealing with a somewhat dry spot in my brainstorming recently, and though I've a few ideas sketched out, I really don't know what to do next.

This past Sunday, I took myself to visit a friend, and presented three options to her as I needed to shake out the doldrums and such.

The first option was to visit Fort Smith, but we've literally been there and done that a million times. Xmart, Books A Million, Hastings, and Best Buy have revealed all their secrets. There's nothing new in that town.

The second option was to head west into Oklahoma, and visit what we refer to as "The Vortex," as it is a local supernatural hotspot that local mystics have stated will be only one of the few places that survives "when the world ends."

We visited that place once, and I must admit I was hoping to experience these things. I didn't.

The third option was one that displayed how truly bored I am: let's go to Fayetteville. And so we did. There were caves to explore, Barnes And Noble's high prices to decry, and so on.

The visit to northern towns helped...a little.

But inspiration is still a tricky thing to find.

I was cleaning yesterday, and just happened to place my favorite Roxette CD in the disc player and the song "Wish I Could Fly" begin to flow through the room, and it made me think for a moment while I was resting.

I heard the lead singer declare how she wished she could fly (and so on) and then I begin to consider the notion once stated "if man was meant to fly he'd have been born with wings."

Okay...so I considered that very notion.

A deformed child, born with wings upon his or her back. The child grows up, hiding said wings under oversized clothing on through their teenage years. Maybe he or she can fly, and maybe he or she cannot.

It's unclear right now.

But the point is, this would be taken in a dramatically different fashion than, say, the Angel character as seen in X-Men 3, which was just trash. I'm thinking more introspective, less heroics (actually no heroics at all), and so on.

There's two other stories I'm considering, which are (as usual) somewhat supernatural in nature: "Storm Front," and "Ghost Town."

So far "Storm Front" is more interesting as it deals with mysterious happenings that go on during thunderstorms as two people battle it out using the very forces of nature, yet they only appear which the skies turn active with rain, wind, and lightning.

This story was strengthened when I found a reprint of a wood carving that showed witches stirring up a cauldron to induce rain back in the 15'th or 16'th Centuries. I just have no real intention to include witches in it somehow. Think of it as a misplaced "X-File."

Maybe I should go revisit those caves, or head further north.

Or maybe I should plop myself down in some small overpriced cafe with a pen and paper to see what comes out, if anything.

Final Fantasy Advent Children

Who knew a last ditch effort to save a gaming company decades ago would bring about one of the most successful gaming franchises, plus a movie that I truly cannot seem to get enough of.

Final Fantasy really was that, the company's final effort to keep their fantasy life alive. Then FF debuted on the Nintendo, and history was made.

Today, Final Fantasy Advent Children dawns on Blu-Ray.

FF-AC is a movie people would possibly suspect I wouldn't like, but it is one I do not seem capable of growing weary of.

Some things will just never make sense, and you'll never know what it is I will or won't like. As proof of this just examine my 500+ album collection, and those are just the CDs, not the countless LP's I've accumulated.

So here's to you Cloud Strife, may you now be seen in all your 1080 beauty...and hopefully very soon here in my own home. I'm sure Maelstrom will have his own copy before the day is over.