Pundit Country

or rather, yet another reason why it rocks.

Since we’ve now entered the stage where the most ridiculous films are being re-made for audiences too scared to give new, original films the time of day (i.e. Plan 9 from Outer Space) or studios too profit-driven to experiment with new talent (i.e. having David Cronenberg remake his own 1986 movie, The Fly (itself a remake of the 1958 horror classic)), I’ve compiled a list of films they want to consider for future release. No doubt they’d score big.

1. The Wizard of Oz (dir. Michael Bey)
2. The Great Gatsby (dir. Judd Apatow)
3. Rebecca of Sunny Brook Farm (dir. John Waters)
4. Howard the Duck (dir. James Cameron; if he starts now, he might have a print ready by around 2025)
5. True Grit (dir. Tim Burton)
6. Oklahoma (dir. Oliver Stone)
7. The Godfather (dir. Julie Taymor)
8. Dirty Dancing (dir. Martin Scorsese)
9. Purple Rain (dir. Kevin Smith)
10. There’s Something About Mary   (dir. Michael Mann)

Like this idea? Feel free to add your own in the comments and I’ll keep updating the list.

Related articles

• Rifftrax Live: Plan 9 from Outer Space (tor.com)
• What? Cronenberg’s Rebooting ‘The Fly’!! (cinematical.com)

Please, please don’t suck. This clearly violates my previously stated 3-year rule on sequels by quite a bit, so the odds aren’t with this film.

An article published recently in the New York Times questioned whether the age of the star has faded, meaning do the big names of Hollywood still have what it takes to bring people to the theaters. The common perception was yes, even if the script itself is lacking, people will still pay out big bucks to see the likes of Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, and Denzel Washington among others. Lately, that hasn’t been the case as each star vehicle released in the last few months has disappointed the major studios while the films with few, if any major stars, have been cleaning up at the box office (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Up, and Transformers 2). This led the author of the article to wonder if one of the last major stars with a movie out in the waning days of summer, Brad Pitt, would have better luck with audiences. Not only does the film, Inglorious Bastards, have one of the biggest names in Hollywood behind it, but also one of it’s most popular writer/directors, Quentin Tarintino. Sadly, while Pitt is a hit (sorry about that) in this film, it’s one of Tarantino’s worst.

The film, set primarily in Nazi-occupied France around 1944 has Pitt’s Lt Aldo Raine leading a rag-tag outfit of Jewish-American soldiers into enemy territory for the sole purpose of killing as many Nazi officers as humanly possible. The goal of the mass executions is to terrorize the Nazi high command. It’s Pitt’s southern character of Raine who adopts the name “The Basterds” to start a kind of urban legend about the group. The highlight for the group is a mass attack on a theater full of the Nazi high command, including Hitler, who will be at a movie premiere. Additionally, there is also a subplot about a teenage French-Jewish girl named Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent)  who escapes the slaughter of her family at the hands of vicious Colonel (Hans Landa, played by Christoph Waltz), only to face him a few years later as a young adult when the theater she owns (the same theater The Basterds are planning to attack) is selected as the sight of a movie film premiere by Nazi propagandaist Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth). Shoshanna, who has since changed her name to Emmanuelle Mimieux to avoid detection, decides that her revenge upon Landa (who is serving as the event’s security coordinator) will be to blow up the theater with everyone inside.

As you can probably already tell, Tarantino has taken quite a few liberties with the history of the times. But that really isn’t my problem with the film or it’s rather implausible ending. My problem are with the characters themselves. Other than  Landa and Raines, pretty much everyone else is indistinguishable from one another. Yea, there are about twelve Basterds (I’m guessing a half-hearted reference to The Dirty Dozen), but there isn’t any time spent on them at all, so the audience barely notices their death, let alone cares about it. Furthermore, for a movie that’s supposed to be carried by and centered on Pitt, he really doesn’t spend that much time in it. The story is more focused on Laurent’s story, which is certainly the more compelling one since all Pitt has to do is act Southern and slightly goofy and kill indiscriminately (Tarantino has already done that with the Kill Bill series. I think he realized that going back to that well wasn’t going to work).

So what we’re left with is an alternate history of WWII with a band of killers who kill primarily off screen, an odd love story between a homicidal girl who hates the boy who loves her and is terrified that her secret will be exposed, and a plot that moves along so slowly that I kept glancing at my phone every few minutes to see how far along the movie had progressed. In the end it just wasn’t enough to justify a two and half hour running time.

Director Kevin Smith once commented that no movie should ever go longer than two hours, and if it did, then it was a clear sign that the director was either inexperienced or was too much of an egomaniac to do the cutting. I’d honestly say in Tarantino’s case, it would have to be the latter. This movie could easily have had 45 minutes shaved off it and been a much faster paced, and I would argue, better movie. As it stands, Pitt is largely wasted, a shame since his performance is entertaining, the wooden characters are unremarkable and easily forgettable, and nothing has been added to the WWII genre of films. Perhaps it was because I had set my sights high for this film, but overall, I found it to be a tedious bore and a waste of the viewers time.

Related articles

• A-List Stars Fail To Fill Theaters: Will Brad Pitt Do Better? (huffingtonpost.com)
• John Farr: The Dimming of Star Power in Hollywood (huffingtonpost.com)
• Review: Inglourious Basterds (3.5 stars) (nationalpost.com)
• “Inglourious Basterds” (salon.com)
• Review: Inglourious Basterds (cinematical.com)
• Inglourious Basterds Review (screenrant.com)

ScreenCrave published a little piece about nine movie franchsies that should have stopped while they were ahead. This is a pretty good list overall, but I’d also add few to the list. How about you? What movie franchises should have just left well enough alone?

1) Superman 3 and 4: I’m surprised this didn’t make the list. This is usually the set of sequels movie geeks like me refer to when we talk about films that were a complete waste of time. I have no idea what the studio was thinking when they decided that a comic romp was the way to go after the epic tales that comprised the first two films. For a Superman movie to be good, he has to be pitted against an all-powerful villain. If not, then the don’t bother. It’s a lesson I wish Singer had learned before his take on the legend

2) Star Wars parts 1-3: After fans had been salivating for 20 years at the thought of the sci-fi master going back and re-visiting the universe that make him a millionaire and made geeks out of a whole generation of fans, he delivers three streaming piles of crap that most diehard fans wished had never been made. It takes quite a considerable talent to take nearly 8 hours to tell a story that should have taken three. There was just a whole lotta nothing going on. And on. And on. On top of that, to take one of the most fearsome villains in movie history and turn him into a wimp with mommy issues was just unforgivable. Lucas needs to never go near a camera again.

3) Star Trek 9 and 10 (Insurrection and Nemesis) Proof that you can have too much of a good thing, the franchise hit its highlight with First Contact, the first film featuring the Next Generation cast (without assistance from cast of the classic series), but quickly fizzled in their next two outings, pretty much damning the franchise in the movies until this year when the entire backstory was rebooted for Star Trek (I or XI, depending on which geek you ask). This was a long time coming and hardly a surprise for the fans who had been increasingly critical of each subsequent TV series until fans completely abandoned the final series, Enterprise, claiming that the show’s creators had lost their way with the direction of the franchise and instead relied on cliches and melodrama to get the episodes across. Hopefully Paramount will hold off on bringin the show back to TV for quite some time. Waiting a couple of years is a small price to pay for quality work.

9 Examples of Sequels Ruining Great Franchises.

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