Thursday 2 July 2009

Hollywood Babble On & On #317: Miscellaneous Movie Musings...

1. ASTEROIDS? WTF?

Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura, is taking time off from carrying Paramount, to go to Universal to adapt a big screen live action version of the Atari video game Asteroids.

For those of you under 35 who don't remember Asteroids, you basically control a little trial, that flies around the screen, blasting strangely geometric "asteroids" with you mighty pixel cannon. Take a look at this picture to bask in its amazing eye-popping graphics.

Now I am not the type to think video game adaptations are all that great an idea, even when the games have a story, but I'm positively gobsmacked that someone thinks they can make a movie from the video game with even less narrative content than Pac-Man.

In fact, I think Universal got conned.

Face it, if you want to make a sci-fi action adventure with asteroids, slap together a script about rivalry among outer space miners, toss in a love interest, a disaster, and some pirates, aliens, or alien-pirates, after their booty, and call it Asteroids. It's just that easy.

There was no reason for them to go to Atari and spend good money to buy the movie rights to a game that's been mostly forgotten by even the people who made the high score screen. Asteroids is a common word, used all the time, and unless you're going to cast a bunch of geometric shapes, any story would be different from the complete non-story of the video game. But someone must have made one hell of a sales pitch, using terms like synergy, and paradigms, and other shit, and Universal fell for it like country rubes chugging snake oil.

I salute the people who sold Universal Asteroids as a movie, you truly are magnificent bastards.

2. HARVEY WEINSTEIN, CRITIC AT LARGE

Harvey Weinstein, the founder and destroyer of flailing failing indie TWC, recently posted his first official movie review at web-site The Daily Beast. Now if Harvey decides to keep doing movie reviews for a living, because he's certainly not making anything as a producer, he's going to need the sort of blurbs that will get his name onto movie posters again. So here are a few for him, gratis, because I know he's broke:

-"A brilliant independent movie, I could sit on it for years."

-"This film sucked so hard, I was looking for my name in the credits."

-"This is the sort of praiseworthy film I would crush with one of my multi-million dollar Oscar campaigns."

-"I passed on this script, so you know it must be good."

I hope you can find a use for them Harvey.

3. IN DEFENSE OF GWYNETH

Poor Gwyneth Paltrow, she's being attacked again for unfavorably comparing the USA, the nation of her birth, and the cradle of her career, to another country, this time Spain.

Well, I've decided to not attack Gwyneth for these statements. In fact, I think she has a good reason for making them.

This is a woman who has spent her life surrounded by rich people, and rich show-biz people. She has no idea what it's like for the people who live with incomes under seven figures, and it shows.

Her upbringing is the wealthy equivalent of being raised in the woods by inbred hillbillies who ain't got no knowing of dem dere folks who live in dem dere towns and cities and ain't got no hankerin' to learn about dem either. Except instead of a shack in a holler, it's a house in the Hamptons, or Beverly Hills, and the only Americans she knew who aren't rich are usually the servants, and they're only allowed to speak when spoken to, and even then it's strictly "Yes Mistress."

She's not a pretentious twat who hates her country, she only knows rich America. Blame them for the bad impression, not her for her ignorance.

1 comment:

  1. WTF! I'm now expecting a PAC MAN film with Zac Efron as Pac Man and costarring Ashley Tisdale as Ms Pacman.

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