Fri Jul 22, 2005
Cinema SEQUELS
COMING TO ANOTHER THEATRE NEAR YOU: Dammit!! This is the summer of our sequel, “Semper Sequel!!”. Julius. Sequel, sequitur, non-sequitur. A never ending stream of the same old thing. No thing is too bland…SOS….’same old shit’
And this week it’s the Bad News Bears, wherein Billy Bob Thornton takes on the drunken bum Buttermaker role made famous by the incomparable Walter Matthau seventy-six years ago. The older version was funny despite the improbability of the plot because (1) Mr. Matthau possessed perfect comedic timing and (2) the kids were believable. I have not seen this second version but I refer to an article I wrote a few weeks ago when WAR OF THE WORLDS was being touted in the media as God’s gift to the movie going public.
I don’t like cinema remakes as a rule and won’t walk across the street to see one. Rarely do they live up to either their hype or the greatness of the original. The result is almost always a truly, insipid vanilla disappointment.
A good analogy is what happened when some idiot decided to take a fling at an updated LITTLE RASCALS, complete with a neo-Spanky, a neo-Alfalfa, and a neo-Darla. It has to rank as one of the worst movies ever made. Transplanting the he man woman haters from the depression to the terminus of the century, removing the gang from the harsh reality of an impoverished, pre-war sociology ripped the heart from the idea and left the viewer with nothing but a bunch of uninspired little kids play acting as if on the stage of a church basement. It was a meaningless exercise in cutsie-pootsie that was a total waste of time and money.
I have no idea how good or bad the Cruise movie is/ I may never find out unless it hits the tube some night and I have nothing whatsoever else to do. No, I’m not curious. And I didn’t even care about the original. I did, however, liked the book set in the sceptered isle more than a century ago. Movies rarely improve the written word. (And television never does).
Where are the intelligent movie makers? They may still be around somewhere, but as long as Hollywood remains convinced that the public can’t handle nuance and carefully crafted plot and sequence, preferring to inject it’s output with purely gratuitous sex and violence, things will only get worse.
I suspect that Billy Bob Thornton should have stayed with sling blades
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THE PARKING LOT
It looks like a smudge on the tar of a Kroger parking lot.
Like somebody dropped off a few shovels-full of sand on a patch of ice.
Except this is Macon in Georgia, and the heat index all week as been over 104 degrees. This parking lot hasn’t see ice in a decade or more.
So we had to look a little more closely. Sand, yes, strewn by the shovel-full, yes, in the middle a dark crimson stain, yes. But we had to look carefully.
Outside the swatch of sand, six more traces of dried stain, smaller, no effort being made to hide what they were.
For the ugly red, sun-baked splotches were blood. Human blood. The blood of two women shot in that busy shopping hub, a quarter mile from our house. One of the women died of her wounds; the other remains in ‘stable condition’ in a local hospital. Both women were students at a strip mall Beauty School. The shooter? They had him in jail after a five (according to the media) or seven (according to a police source) siege by the local SWAT guys.
Grisley.
By the time I witnessed the crime scene this morning, the yellow tape had been removed and all trace evidence of the crime carefully packaged up for the Crime Lab.
Except the angry patch of blood. It will take some time for the evening thunder boomers to erase this entirely from sight. Maybe some of it will be licked up by the abandoned dogs so often left in this parking lot by the morons who won’t spay or neuter. Poor animals doomed to slow death by starvation or a quicker one at the merciful hands of a county animal control who gas ninety-three percent of the creatures committed to their care.
A senior citizen lead two small boys to the area. Wide eyed, they were full of questions which the old man did his best to answer. He tried to explain about the human tragedy that had been played out here, but they were only interested in the clotted gouts, the number of shots, caliber of the weapon, and could they find any shell casings which would make great souvenirs to show off to the neighborhood gang.
They walked away heading up a small hill, the boys talking excitedly about what they had seen and what they would have done had they witnessed the actual murder. The old fellow said nothing, obviously lost in private world of his own thoughts, trying, most likely, to reconcile his long years of life and experience with the quick, violent, and senseless death of a young women full of life and the promise thereof.
Me? I, too, walked away entering the Kroger to ask the young officer stationed there some questions. He could tell me ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘who’, but had no clue as to ‘why’.
Doubt if we shall ever know. Life is a cheap commodity to so many in modern America. Hell, in the modern world. It is probably no different in the twenty-first century than it was in days of yore. Man is a creature full of rage and violence and jealousy and blind, blood lust.
See what six thousand years of civilizing have done for us?
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