How many times have we all uttered that phrase when we hear of the next reboot or remake coming out of Hollywood? An American Werewolf in London; Short Circuit; Poltergeist, Logan’s Run…how many more of our treasured memories are they going to destroy? I know I’ve been guilty of saying such things more than once on Starbase 66, and in ‘real’ life, but I’m starting to think that we are aiming our vitriol in the wrong direction.
When we interviewed Herb and Harrison Solow last year they both said something that took a while to sink in. In both conversations the question of the apparent addiction to crap in Hollywood was brought up, and they both pointed out that if people wouldn’t buy tickets to such things, then film makers would stop making them. We are like the bloated, stuffed to bursting patron of the all-you-can-eat buffet who, after gorging himself, shouts insults at the chef on his way out to his minivan. We decry the multi-million dollar detritus being foisted upon us by Tinsel Town, yet line up like the sheep we are every time Michael Bay or James Cameron squeezes out another formulaic blockbuster.
We go to the Megasuperultrascreenorama, herded like cattle waiting for the stun gun, pay far too much for stale popcorn and watered down soda, bleat our disapproval of the self-important asshat who can’t go ninety minutes without answering fifteen phone calls from his ‘peeps’ (really his mother telling him to make sure to pick up his little brother at baseball or he’ll be grounded) and then sit there slack-jawed as the cinematic crud spools out before us. We watch, we eat, and afterward we delight in telling everyone we know how awful it was. Oh, sure, the rabble liked it, but we cognoscenti saw beyond the splashy special effects and sexy superstars, and we decree it’s shittitude to our friends, families, twitter, Facebook, forums, random strangers, head tilting house pets, anyone who will stand still long enough for us to get a full head of self-righteous indignation going over paying nearly eight whole dollars to watch this celluloid craptacular.
The irony is that when you handed over your hard earned sheckles to the gum chewing teenager behind the box office glass, you voted your approval in the only voice heard in the boardrooms of the companies that fork out the billions of dollars that are the mother’s milk of the film industry. And even if you don’t go to the cinema, if you rent that flick when it hits NetFlix, or Blockbuster, or buy it from the ‘we can’t give this shit away’ bin at Wal-Mart, you are still telling the producers that you’ll gladly swallow any swill that spews from their cameras. I encourage you to look up George Lucas’s recent appearance on The Daily Show. It was crystal clear that from the top of his mountain of money he couldn’t give a pair of dingo’s kidneys what you, or I think about Jar-Jar Binks. Nor should he. I paid to see all three of the Star Wars prequels, even though I should have known better after The Phantom Menace. Every now and then a true Indie films slips through and shows us that there is still art being made in the film industry, but for every Moon or District 9 there are dozens of Day the Earth Stood Stills and Poseidon Adventures.
So before you trot down to the theater near you, just remember that Hollywood only cares about what’s in your wallet, and so long as you show up and pay out, whether at the cinema or the rental house, they’ll keep on making the cheapest, fastest, crappiest films the market will handle. And until we as a species lose our insatiable appetite for garbage, that’s exactly what they’ll continue to feed us.
Peace, y’all.
Marius
