Hollywood, I Knew Him, Horatio

Published October 23, 2007

On The Decline of Film

By Ben Silverman

Hollywood, is it something I’ve done? Did I insult you someway? Every time I step out of a theatre I feel like I just got the kiss of death. I want to demand my money back but am too weak even to cause a scene. Hollywood, we use to be friends. I wasted my childhood staring at your idiot box for days without end. Something has happened.

Everything these days is a sequel, prequel, remake, reboot, or based on a book or actual events. Every story is of an athlete or dancer (or stomp the yarder) who tries against impossible odds to achieve his or her (but mostly his) dreams.
Or maybe a cautionary story about how some punk starts from nothing, works his way up the specified ladder, becomes corrupted by the power, then either ends up dea / in jail or all of his friends think he’s a tool. Or an action movie with terrorists— that’s real relevant. Nothing is original.

This was easily one of the worst summer movie seasons on record. It started with a bang, the highest grossing movie ever and also one the biggest pieces of tripe ever. Spiderman 3 is the equivalent of very old Swiss cheese: interesting colors to look at but full of holes and bad in taste.

Didn’t even bother seeing Shrek 3. Had to gnaw off my leg during Fantastic Four 2. Transformers was passable but had more filler than a cheese Danish. If you put an infinite number of pirates in a room, with an infinite number of quills, and an infinite supply of rum they still would not be able to make bow or stern out of Pirates of the Caribbean 3. I spent half my time covering my ears, and the climactic sea battle at the end was nowhere near mind blowing enough to warrant all that nonsense.

I’ve just seen the raciest trollop of The Kingdom and finally understood why terrorists want to kill us, so that we’ll stop making masochistic nightmares like that.

Of course, people defended these travesties by saying that you just have to turn your brain off to enjoy it. Well some of us can’t do that! Are we so used to Hollywood’s miscarriages that we can just write off terrible movies as business as usual?

They should be spending that $200 million budget on a script worth filming, instead of on more special effects than The O’Reilly Factor. We need to better our standards, else all we’ll ever get is more X-Men 3’s and Norbits.

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