The Trail(ers) Of Tears

Movie trailers are, in my humble opinion, the best part of going to the movies.  I have always loved getting to the theater early, especially when I was younger, so that I could find the best seat, get comfortable and watch the up coming movie previews.  Of course, when I was younger, the movie previews were things like Tron, Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi, All of the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, both Terminator movies, the Rambo and Rocky movies and others like Runaway (if you can remember that one), the Explorers, any James Bond film.  There weren't many "independent" movie trailers like AC/DC's Let There Be Rock or  The Rocky Horror Picture Show or any independent animation studio other than Disney at the time.  The trailers were fun, they didn't give much away and were generally just cheesy.  That is until the 90's hit and the studios realized that the more movies they could put out, the more money they could make (in theory) and we got drowned in a sea of shitty movies like My Mother The Car, Car 54, Where Are You? any MtV movie and anything with Dolph Lundgren in it.

The 90's brought us tons of movies like I said and that meant tons of trailers.  The problem is, the picture industry also decided at this point to let us know how great these movies were by basically giving us the whole movie condensed into a 3 minute montage.  Some studios decided that they weren't going to go that direction with their big budget movies (Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Titanic, even Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) because the directors attached to these bigger pics had control over what the trailers showed.  It's a teaser, it's supposed to tease and entice people into going to see the movie (see what I did there?).  

But it doesn't tease and entice.  It tells us the whole movie and the movie is garbage anyways.  This is a multi billion dollar business and they continue to make and remake and reboot and redo movies.  Michael Bay is responsible for at least 4 remakes 2 of them the Texas Chainsaw Massacre - what kind of crap is this? Every week there is news of a new movie coming out and the chances of that movie being a reboot has to be like 93.532 percent or so it seems.  There are multiple TV commercials for Iron Man (comes out Friday) including 4 trailers and the "special" Super Bowl (TM) segment and they've pretty much given the whole film away.  They just can't help themselves.  On the other side of the fence, there's the Star Trek movie trailers and they haven't given away shit and makes me want to go see the movie even more than Iron Man.  

The more information we're given from the movie trailers, the less faith the picture companies have in said movie - with few exceptions. It's also getting old.  If you don't have faith in the movie, then don't greenlight it in the first place.  It's not going to be good and it's not going to do anything but cost 50million to make.  It's time for a little change in the studio "system" as it is and I normally like to rant about that.  For the time being I'm just on about movie trailers.  The easiest way to fix this issue is 1 thing.  Learn from the past, watch the great movies from the distant and near past and see what made them great.  The secret is -it's a compelling story.  That's all it is.

Now - go make compelling stories and maybe I'll be less of an asshat when reviewing it... maybe.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Dredd And The Fugitive Mike

                                                                       I AM THE LAW!

When I saw the trailer and posters for Dredd last year at about this time, I couldn't wait to see it, then all of a sudden it disappeared.  I think it was in theaters for a total of 2 weeks.  Total bullshit, as it wasn't "performing" as well as the studios had hoped. so I didn't get to watch the movie in theaters.  Oh poor me. The trailers I saw showed it to be a centralized action piece with Dredd and Anderson in a huge shoot out.  Perfect popcorn movie, even if it was like the Stallone crapfest Judge Dredd.

Now, I'm a fan of movies, but it has gotten to the point in the past few years where we have just accepted the shit that we're being force fed and it's getting old.  It's been written and talked about for years and I don't need to repeat what everyone else is saying, save for the fact that the idea factory is bankrupt.  With few exceptions.  Dredd being one of them.

This movie is excellent.  Everyone plays their part well and the action is fast paced and the story is good.  It's not drawn out, it keeps you interested and doesn't throw out schlocky slapsticky comedy like the previous Dredd movie. This movie delivers on a large scale and it's pathetic that it didn't do better.

From the setup to the final pay off, this movie should have gotten more recognition than it received in theaters.  Then it came out on DVD and performed as it should have.  I'm hoping that the DVD sales results in a sequel.

I guess what I'm getting at is this -
The studio system is just pounding us with reboots and remakes and little in the way of original movies.  We all know that "it's been done before" but stories are out there to be told.  I don't need to see another Spiderman origin story or Batman or whatever else is available out there for reboots (there are tons of them, I'm too lazy to research them right now...) or remakes.  I would like to see modern day updates to tons of movies - Bullit, The Detective (which is technically the first "Die Hard" story) Saturn 5 or even Arsenic and Old Lace.  It would be cool to see takes on those types of movies. How about an update on Smokey and the Bandit? But who would play Big Enos and Little Enos?

With the way that everything is established, studios go for the easy pay off.and little risk. It's a problem with the system in and of itself - independent movies are locked out where they could find an audience, good movies aren't given enough life in the theaters to build an audience and bad movies continually make money (Scary Movie 4/5, Epic Movie anyone).  I don't know if we're conditioned just to accept this stuff and laugh at the lame jokes or if we're so starved for something good we're willing to sit through the crap for the nuggets of gold.  I think it's the latter.