Sunday, February 13, 2005

I Can Save Hollywood

The last post I put up on the review of Alien vs. Predator just wasn't enough. It is really starting to grate on me. I have a proposition to Hollywood movie makers. Let me review the film BEFORE you put it out. Most fans always have that one thing they can't stand about the movie overtake the rest of the movie. Well, let's look at those one things before the movie gets out.

What good is it to have Roger Ebert or me trash your movie afterwards? Both Roger Ebert and I have a varied taste in movies. Roger Ebert loved the Rugrats movies when it would be really easy for a critic to not even bother with a Nickelodeon cartoon movie. I love movies I wouldn't like to admit to, like Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando. (Come to find out, years later, the screenplay for Commando was done by Jeph Loeb, one of my favorite comic authors. But I digress...)

This all started when I saw a few years ago a movie I was really looking forward to. Dungeons & Dragons starring Jeremy Irons. It was "all right," another one of those movies that you shrugged your shoulders and just thought of it as a pleasant way to waste two hours. What really got to me were the DVD extras. On the DVD, it has deleted scenes with director commentary. When I watched one cut scene, where two of the characters are getting told what to do inside a magical place, the director said they couldn't finish the movie due to budget but most importantly TIME constraints. That scene made the movie completely click into place for me. I thought it was so integral that I was absolutely disgusted that they couldn't finish it due to time constraints. Excuse me? Isn't it more important to put out the best product possible? Apparently not.

Then there was the Star Wars prequel debacle. I was so psyched up for this movie, going to the midnight show and everything. I had been looking forward to this movie for EIGHTEEN years. Talk about high expectations. And then George Lucas had to muck it all up. My biggest complaint? Those stupid midicholorians. They quantified the Force. They put a Star Trek explanation onto the cosmic way of life, religion, life force, call it whatever. You need a technical manual for Star Trek; you do not need a technical manual for Star Wars. Putting a number on your Force-parasites or whatever the hell they are, just takes any of the magic away. With the first movies, as a boy, you could pretend to stretch out for the lightsaber at home just in time to hack at the Wampa beast. Now you have to have a certain midicholorian count to even think about it. And there were some other plot things I would have loved to talk over with the producers.

And now Alien Vs. Predator comes out and if they had just had me sit there, watch it, and then talk about it with them for an hour, I feel that some of the inconsistencies or slightly underdone aspects to the movie would have been at least looked at. I just saw that the director of AVP was the same as the screenplay writer and story writer. Maybe he was too closely attached, as they teach us in writing class. I feel that he thought whatever he wrote was golden and just couldn't cut anything or add to anything. When a writer knows the characters, he still has to express it to the audience. We don't know everything that the director knows. Even if the producers talked with me and said, "Well, this is why we did this..." I could give in or help them tie in to other factors. I just think the TALK is what is required.

So I propose to Hollywood, especially for fanboy movies, that I get a preliminary screening before you are done with the movie. We just need to talk about it for an hour or two. Some of the loopholes will be closed before the harsh critics get to it. That's all I want.

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