The Audience Is Paying Attention

According to the Independent:

In Hollywood, 2003 is rapidly becoming known as the year of the failed blockbuster, and the industry now thinks it knows why.

No, the executives are not blaming such bombs as The Hulk, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle or Gigli on poor quality, lack of originality, or general failure to entertain. There's absolutely nothing new about that.

The problem, they say, is teenagers who instant message their friends with their verdict on new films - sometimes while they are still in the cinema watching - and so scuppering carefully crafted marketing campaigns designed to lure audiences out to a big movie on its opening weekend.

The throughly unpleasant fact of reality is that Hollywood is run by a bunch of uninmaginative twerps, the kind of people that Ayn Rand used to call Second Handers. It's the kind of mentality that wants to maximize profits but is unwilling to try something distinctly new or different. Thus the glut of sequels and the ongoing cinemisation of the sucessful television series. Even if the project is not a sequel or a series adaptation, the Second Handers still attempt to reduce risk by only combining elements that appeared to have worked in the past. Thus "The Adventures of Pluto Nash," an movie that combines the elements of Eddie Murphy, Computer Generated Imagery, and the Sci-Fi enviroment, still turns out to be an unwatchable piece of crap. (When I saw the trailer at the 2002 Convergence, my thought was, oh its "Moon Zero Two: The Next Generation.")

Another problem: Realism.

While certain liberties can be taken with space operas, films set in the real world (including 2001: A Space Odyssey) should be as realistic as possible as permitted by the film's budget. My own personal BS alarm went off when I saw the trailer for the second "Charlie's Angels" flick. It showed a scene where the main rotor on a helecopter gunship began to self-deploy. A mechanism for moving rotor blades from the storage position to the operational position would add weight to the aircraft. This is a bad thing in military aircraft.

And if the additional weight wasn't an issue a self-deploy system would still be useless in the operation context for one very good reason.

Every helecopter operated by an air force or army aviation unit comes with something called a ground crew. A bunch of guys whose job is to open, close, fold, and unfold components and perform maintainance on the aircraft.

Pardon me for being a bit long winded here, but when I see a BS element in an advertisment for a movie, I as a rule usually tend to avoid seeing it.

And then there is the issue of personal aesthetics.

While a brain-dead bimbo with obviously fake hair, eyebrows, lips, and breasts may be attractive to the urban pimp and his clientele, As I have said else where, I find such creatures to be repulsive. something about such such females just says "STAY AWAY" in big ugly letters. I absolutely refuse to see anything with Angolina Jolie in it, even for free. That's how put off by cosmetological fakery I am.

To make a long rant short (too late) I think that any Second Hand mentality who mindlessly copies the elements that others have used in their films really deserves to receive a financial kick in the face.

Not that the dumb bastards would learn from it.