Posts Tagged ‘resolutions’
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That’s kind of a gross image to end the year with, isn’t it? Some old white guy wiping his ass with stationary? I thought I could do better than that, but really – I can’t.
At any rate, please enjoy this sketch for the new year.
For what it’s worth, this has been a terrible year for movies and I think most of you would agree. Even when I talk to my friends that aren’t hard-core into cinema like I am, I hear the same sentiment. "Man, there just hasn’t been any good movies this year, has there?" I die a little inside when I’m forced to confirm their suspicions.
I’m pretty sure there is some kind of statistic floating around out there that spells out just how awful this year has been. I think if you add up the number of crappy sequels, pointless remakes and movies made from lame televisions shows, it would have to be upwords of 80% of Hollywood’s total output this year.
You could accuse Hollywood of having run out of ideas. But fundimentally, we’ve been gathering around the proverbial campfire listening to the same stories of horror, drama, romance and comedy since mankind developed spoken language. In other words – Has everything else been done before? The answer is a resounding "YES." So what I’m saying is, don’t get mad because there’s been a lack of new ideas on screen.
What Hollywood has FAILED to do is find a way to say new things about old ideas. I can’t imagine anything more insulting to a thinking person’s sensibilities than to take a television show that aired 50 years ago like The Honeymooners, retool it with black actors, film it and dump it into theaters and claim that you’ve done something original. I choke at the thought that anyone felt strongly enough to make Cheaper By The Dozen 2 and then said, "We really don’t have a plot for this. Let’s just rip off that old John Candy movie The Great Outdoors. That’ll do."
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know and I hate to look at the glass as being half-empty. Will 2006 be a better year? I don’t know. But I guess the fun is trying to figure that out, isn’t it? After all, it’s why we keep going back. Or at least why I keep going back.
It’s funny. People (and by "people," I mean me) bitch and moan about the state of things, but yet keep filing back into the theaters. As angry as I get watching bad movies from time to time, I can’t imagine ever seeing something so awful that I would write off watching movies entirely. Because for every Herbie: Fully Loaded, there will be a Walk the Line. And as your tastes refine, the challenge becomes weaving your way through the traffic and finding that one piece of film that communicates with you directly and reflects something about yourself you never considered.
That’s what good art does. It helps you grow as a person. Who would turn their back on that?
I have some more thoughts regarding the end of the year, but I kind of like the tenor of this post, so I’ll leave it at that. I’ll be back later in the day with more thoughts relating to 2005, Theater Hopper and our direction for 2006.
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Before you start sending me e-mails, yes, I know I screwed up the last panel in today’s comic. Everything looks right at 1:00 in the morning. I’ll fix it when I get home tonight.
Here’s hoping that everyone had a safe and happy new year celebration. If you’re reading this, I have to assume that’s the case.
Our New Year’s celebration was decidedly white, suburban and boring. Cami and I took Henry to Applebee’s at about 5:00 at night for dinner. We came home, put him to bed and watched a rerun of Saturday Night Live in the ’90’s on NBC until 9:00 PM. Henry is teething again and was up crying the night before, so Cami was exhausted and went to bed around 9:30. I stayed up because I felt I should, but only lasted until about 11:00 before I went to bed. Oh, well. At least we were together when the clock struck midnight.
That sounds bad. It sounds like we had a boring New Year’s because of Henry. That’s not true. We had an awesome New Year’s. I guess I just called it “boring” because to an outsider, that’s probably what it looks like. Truthfully, I probably wouldn’t have done anything different even if we didn’t have Henry. I went to see the ball drop in Times Square when 2003 rolled over into 2004. Since then, I haven’t really cared about celebrating the occasion.
Once you’ve partied with EVERYBODY, you don’t want to party with ANYBODY.
As you know, I live in Iowa and tomorrow is the big caucus. Cami and I have both decided to caucus for Barack Obama. It’ll be our first time caucusing, but we felt it was too important to pass up. I vote in every election, but I’ve been more proactive this time around. I’m tired of sitting on my ass assuming things are going to shake out the way I hope they will.
Odd that we would get a babysitter so we could sit in a church and argue with people about politics on a Thursday night, but not get a babysitter so we could go out and ring in the new year. But something tells me this caucus is a little more important.
We actually went to an Obama rally here in Des Moines yesterday. We took Henry and he behaved great. I felt like I was doing something good for him. It was a good time.
I know none of this has anything to do with the comic or with movies, but now that the new year has begun, prestige pictures have all evaporated from the landscape. There’s certainly some catching up I have to do in terms of what I’ve seen and what I haven’t. But if the goal here is to be timely, I’m not going to talk about Atonement, three weeks past it’s release date in favor of uncovering the intricacies of the cell phone horror movie One Last Call.
A couple of guys that NEVER miss a movie are my good friends Gordon McAplin from Multiplex and Joe Dunn from Joe Loves Crappy Movies. After taking the holiday week off, the three of us are getting back together tonight for a live broadcast of The Triple Feature talkcast at Talkshoe, 9:00 PM CST. Tonight we’ll be talking about all the great holiday movies we’ve seen. So set your alarm and be sure to join us tonight at 9:00 PM CST! See you there!
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