I wanted to segregate this rant since it’s rather lengthy and drawn out. If you don’t feel like reading a long rant, there’s nothing else here to read. Also, if you haven’t seen War of the Worlds and are offended by people ruining movies you haven’t seen, do not read further.
<lj-cut text=”Introduction”>So I just got back from seeing War of the Worlds with Sharon and Vim. I have to admit that the movie exceeded my expectations but, since they were fairly low to begin with, I guess that doesn’t say much. On an absolute scale, I thought the movie was decent. It’s not the great movie I’ve heard everyone talk about, but it wasn’t a stinker either. However, the movie could have been so much better had the producers not done some really stupid, and really typical, things. Furthermore, not only does Hollywood make their movies the same way, but now they release what are essentialy the same damn movies again, hoping that their dirth of original and creative ideas can be made up for with the same crappy ideas they already made. Now the MPAA blames the lackluster box office performance of this year to people stealing movies rather than looking at themselves to find the root of the problem.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text=”How they made War of the Worlds worse.”>I have many issues with War of the Worlds that I have with almost every movie I see nowadays. First of all, I understand that no movie is going to be perfect. However, when they make a big deal about the aliens releasing EMPs across cities, you would expect to not see some guy with a digital movie camera filming the alien ships after one of these EMPs has gone off. That’s just common sense, something that most movies lack. Just because moviegoers are supposed to suspend disbelief shouldn’t mean we leave our intelligence at the door. Though now that they have put out movie trailers that ruin the ends of movies, I guess they don’t give the audience much credit for intelligence.
In addition, you know how the movie is going to turn out about thirty minutes into it. Their whole objective in the movie is to reach Boston and reunite with the rest of the family. Of course, they all make it to Boston alive. And, of course, the rest of the family appears to be in the best of shape, no worse for wear. The ending does a great job in ruining the movie, since it goes against not only the original ending in Wells’ book, but also an ending that one would expect. After all of that mayhem, catastrophe, death, and so on, is it plausible to expect the storybook, fairy-tale ending that the movie presents us? No, that’s incredibly ridiculous. To take a perfectly good story and conclude it with that obscenely contrived ending just to psychologically please the audience will only serve to gradually upset more and more people regarding the movies they see in theatres.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text=”The Xerox approach to moviemaking.”>Not only do the movies individually resemble each other in their formulaic, tedious approach to storytelling, but now the studios literally release the same movies again as sequels to try and repeat the success of the original. And they don’t restrict themselves to current movies either. They made a sequel to The Mask, Meet the Parents, Analyze This, The Whole Nine Yards, Bad Boys, Bridget Jones’ Diary, Princess Diaries, Mortal Kombat, and Santa Clause. The sequel to Deuce Bigalow will also be out soon for your viewing pleasure. A very notable exception to the horrific sequels trend is Batman Begins. That movie was great because it was well-written, well-shot, well-directed, and didn’t succumb to any mainstream movie storytelling formulae (pardon the faulty parallelism). Hollywood takes a movie, runs it through a photo-copier, slaps a “2″ in the title, and releases as a new movie, irrespective of how good the original was. I can’t believe there were actually talks of a Battlefield: Earth sequel, but Warner Brothers tried for a while to make one.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text=”Why go to a theater when it will come out on DVD three months later?”>To further exacerbate the displeasure generated by many movies, theaters are now charging over $10 to see one movie! One time! That’s insane. For twenty bucks, I can go buy a DVD of a movie released in theatres three months ago, bring it home for eight people to watch on a home theater with 5.1 surround sound and digital quality, and then put the movie in my collections so I can watch it as many times as I want for the live of the DVD (decades). Hell, I can get unlimited movies from Netflix for $18 per month. So why should I go see a movie with a friend every weekend and blow money on inflated ticket prices and outrageous food prices when I can go to the local video rental store or my mailbox, along with a quick trip to the supermarket for some cheap snacks, invite all my friends over, and watch an equally good or better movie of similar video and sound quality? People are realizing this and now they are showing by not going to the movies and getting Netflix accounts instead.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text=”Piracy and the MPAA.”>Instead of recognizing this trend and attempting to do something about it, the MPAA has decided to blame sagging box office numbers on movie pirates. The vast majority of moviegoers are not computer-saavy enough to know how to find copies of new theatrical releases on the net. And the copies that are released are really bad screeners (tape recordings made in a theatre) with video and sound quality far below that of a beat-up VHS tape. These stolen movies are not the reason that box office revenue is declining. It’s because that the quality of movies released by the studios is decreasing while the price-point to see a movie in theatres is increasing. Basic economics states that in a rational market, people will buy the higher-quality product when it’s available for less money than the lesser-quality product. If they admit there own problems instead of following the same terrible strategy that the RIAA employs, they would then put themselves in a position to restore revenue growth to at least a nonnegative number.</lj-cut>
<lj-cut text=”Conclusion”>To conclude, I have only scratched the surface on the topics I have discussed above. One could easily go into more in-depth arguments with numerous examples and figures demonstrating my assertions to be true. To say that I’ve become pissed off at the movie industry is an understatement. I just want to see movies that don’t insult my intelligence, that tell good stories in interesting ways, and that don’t cost me a fortune for one viewing. And I doubt I’m the only one.</lj-cut>