Cinemaniacal: Attack Of The Killer "B"s

When I was a kid I loved low budget genre movies or "B-Movies" as they are popularly, but inaccurately called. I blame The Great Money Movie, and it's late night sister show, Weird 2, both were TV shows from over the border in Maine, which showed them with the same hyperactive glee as they did the big budget movies from the major studios.

My pop culture diet was heavily larded with regular doses of rubber monsters, spaceships that were made out of parts of toys, and sets where the walls looked like a stiff wind would take them away.

I also became a bit of a "B Movie" history buff, reading everything I could about the people who made these movies, and the often crazy stories behind their making.

It was then that learned just how inaccurate the term "B-Movie" was.  You see the term originated from the old studio system when you gave the guy at the box office your nickel, and in return you got two feature films, a cartoon, a newsreel, and a whupping to keep your mind on your business.

The two movies in the double feature would consist of an "A" picture which had a big budget, big stars, and some sort of classy pedigree. The other feature, the "B" picture would be shorter, cheaper genre movie designed to keep the kids on the balcony interested enough to keep them from tossing their popcorn.

What we usually think of as "B Movies" are in fact independently produced "exploitation" movies, and not studio made "B movies."

But enough of my usual know-it-all-ism, and let me get to the meat of this rant.

I've seen some of today's crop of so-called "B-Movies" and I have found them wanting.

What really bugs me about today's movies has roots in the whole "mockbuster" fad. Now making a low budget rip-off imitation of a big budget studio picture is a tradition that goes all the way back to the silent era.  However, it has become a mini-industry all of itself, and it's actually kind of turning me off the whole thing.

Why?

2 things, their mission and their attitude.

I've always said that the big studios are creating huge gaps in the movie market with their insistence on blockbusters, and that it should be the mission of independent filmmakers to try to fill those gaps with the sorts of stories that the majors are ignoring.

All these mockbusters do is just rehash what the major studios are doing, only doing it with worse stories, worse directing, worse acting, and even worse production values.

I know people say that they're of the campy "so bad they're good" variety, but I just don't see it. I find them as entertaining as getting a root canal.

And I can't appreciate the camp value of these production because they really don't have any, because of their attitude.

There's this whole air of smug ironic detachment behind these movies that bugs me. A "this movie is supposed to be shit, so why bother trying to be original, entertaining, or interesting, just toss in a washed up pop singer or sitcom star with some CGI done on a Commodore 64 and call it a day" sort of attitude.

The thing that made me love the old B-Movies I remember from my childhood is that even though a lot of the movies were laughably bad, there was still a sincere desire behind their making, even if that desire was just to get paid and hopefully another job afterwards. The people making the movie were trying their best, and while their efforts were often thwarted by the limitations of budget, talent, technology, or all of the above, they at least tried.

Many of those old time "B Movie" makers who had serious talent learned to work within their limited resources, breaking new ground in the process, and moved onto bigger and better things.

I don't really see a desire to break new ground with today's movies, just an itch to scratch the surface.

Hollywood Babble On & On #837: Work It Didn't Work

ABC has cancelled it's freshman cross-dressing comedy Bosom Buddies Work It, after just two airings.  Who could have possibly seen that this show was going to be an unmitigated disaster?  Turns out EVERYONE.

But in the spirit of being magnanimous, I'm going to help the ABC Network, out of the goodness of my flinty little heart, with sitcom premise ideas that are better than Work It.

1. THICKE & THINN. Two single girls, one is anorexic (Sadie Thicke), and the other is obese (Beulah Thinn), work as jingle writers for a Madison Avenue ad agency, and look for love in New York City. 

2. CARSON THE ARSON PARSON. A well meaning minister name Carson dispenses advice to his flock while fighting his urge for sexual release through starting racially motivated fires.

3. ARE YOU THERE HEROIN? IT'S ME COURTNEY.  A wacky family hour comedy about the wacky drug fueled antics of young Courtney Love.

4. LUNGERS' LANE.  A heartwarming comedy about a group of optimistic tuberculosis patients quarantined in a sanatorium in the 1870s.... with sexy results.

5. FLEAS COMPANY!  Two slobby single men are having no luck with love, until they start listening to the advice from the sentient fleas that live in their furniture... with sexy results.

6. THE GOLDEN GHOULS. A group of seniors in Miami discover the fountain of youth, eating the flesh of young people... with sexy results. 

7. BOB & THE DEAD HOBO.  Bob Bederbecker is an ordinary family man, but every week a series of wacky coincidences will leave the body of a dead hobo in his bed, and he's got to get rid of it before someone finds it and accuses him of murder... with sexy results.

8. MRS. KRAVITZ & HATCHET HARRY. She's a nosy neighbor living next door to a sadistic serial killer, wackiness ensues!

9. BEST TWEAK EVER!  The lives and loves of happy go lucky methamphetamine addicts trying to keep their addictions fed... with sexy results.

10. FREAKS & FREAKS.  Two clans of circus freaks are seemingly trapped in an endless feud, until the Lobster Girl from one family finds love with the Dog-Faced Boy of another... with sexy results.

If you have any pitches for sitcoms that would have been better than Work It, leave them in the comments so I can steal them and sell them to the idiots at ABC for MILLIONS! BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!

Hollywood Babble On & On #836: Green Arrow Misses The Target.

If you always wanted to know why DC Comics is trailing behind Marvel when it comes to making movie and TV adaptations of their characters this story will explain it to you.

Perpetual baby network, and until recently the home of Smallville, the CW has announced that they're ordering a pilot called Arrow. The show will be based on the long running DC Comics character The Green Arrow, who was also featured as a regular character on Smallville.

Now that little fact alone doesn't explain it, this line from the story will:

I hear that David Nutter will likely direct the project, which takes the comic book character, created by Mort Weisinger and George Papp, and sets him in a new world with an original story that is NOT based on the comics, published by DC Entertainment.*

Yes, that's right, they're going to do Green Arrow, but they're going to get rid of EVERYTHING about the Green Arrow.

Let's see what the character himself thinks about this development:

He doesn't seem too keen about it either.

So why would a TV network go to all the trouble of commissioning a pilot based on a popular comic book character, only to announce that they plan to jettison everything about that character?

It's the same reason why they made a complete dog's breakfast out of the Green Lantern movie.

It's the same reason Warner Bros. wasted 15 years and $50+ million on Superman Returns before a single frame of usable film was shot.

It's the same reason they pissed away millions developing a Wonder Woman TV series with David E. Kelly.

It's the same reason they made that piece of shit Catwoman movie that had nothing to do with the character it was supposed to be based on.

The CW is 50% owned by the Time Warner media empire. This same empire own DC Comics, and all the characters in the DC roster. (There's some complications with Wonder Woman, via the estate of her creator, but I don't have the space to explain its intricacies.)

That's where the trouble begins, and I'll break it down into simple bullet points.

- Warner Bros. is massive operation with multiple levels of management and producers before any project even gets close to someone who can give it a green light.

- Those levels are staffed with people who:

A) Often don't have much in the way of knowledge or appreciation for the source material, and don't really care to learn.

B) Assume that as long as it has the familiar name of a superhero on it, will assume the geeks will buy it, and all the related merchandise like the brainless salivating dogs that they are.

- This leads these executives and producers to assume that they can meddle with the characters any way they want, even if it makes it unrecognizable to the character's core fans. Plus the meddling is a great way for them to justify their existence and their expense accounts whether it's remotely helpful to the franchise or not.

Now it doesn't matter to these people that projects that mangle beloved characters beyond recognition usually fail miserably, and that projects that remain truthful to the source material tend to do well. They will never learn that lesson, because if they did, they might be tempted to NOT meddle, and not meddling is going to pay for their Mercedes Maybach company car.

The only way it seems DC/Warner Bros. can make a decent adaptation is if the project is run by someone with enough testicular fortitude and fan support to stand up to the corporate machine, like Christopher Nolan.

Marvel doesn't have this problem, or at least it didn't until recently. Because they were licensing their characters to the studios, they had the option of raising hell, if the studio bastardized their characters. And since most executives desperately try to avoid trouble, they play along to get along.

DC, which is just a cog in a massive unfeeling and unthinking, machine, doesn't have that option.

Now since Marvel was bought by Disney, and the licensing deals with Fox, Paramount, and Columbia are going to eventually expire, they will probably sink into the same corporate mire that currently makes DC's output so uneven.

-------------------

*Emphasis added by me for those who can't be horrified by the obvious.

Cinemaniacal: A Call To Action

Like anyone who spent their childhood in the 1980s I was big fan of action movies. Lively movies with loads with chases, fights and shoot-outs, each one more elaborate than the last, and plots based around revenge, rescue, good old fashioned evil plot foiling or all of the above.  

Lately I've been thinking about action because the movie channel package I recently got showed a bunch of action movies from the 1970s, and I watched Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite (1974), starring James Caan, and Robert Duvall. It's not Peckinpah's best film, it lacks the elegiac emotional impact of his westerns like The Wild Bunch or Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, and the or the near surreal madness of his hard to classify neo-Western Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, but it's not without its charms.

As I watched it I started thinking about how rare it is when I really enjoy, or even sit all the way through, a non-James Bond action movie that's been made in the last 20 years.  The problem I seem to have is that too many modern action movies, especially the ones dribbling out of Hollywood are either overdone, unoriginal, or both.

Here's how I see it...

OVERDONE: I really shouldn't have to explain this, but if I didn't there would be a blog.  This is where the hero is some sort of unstoppable killing machine, many of them musclebound behemoths sweating creatine and human growth hormone, blasting everything and anything in their path with a seemingly infinite amount of ammunition or some sort of near magical martial arts skill.

There's no real sense of suspense coming from these movies, because they establish from scene 1 that the hero is unstoppable, so should anyone bother trying to stop them.  There are no limits to their abilities, and in the desire to top one another, and somehow compete with the superhero franchises, they, and their antics, become often more outlandish than the superheroes.

When you look at the roots of modern action cinema in the 1960s and 1970s they at least tried to create some element of suspense. They gave the hero limitations, either like in The Killer Elite, by having star James Caan overcome a bum leg, and a bad elbow. Or they could just have them being ordinary people who looked tough, instead of cartoonish, who used what skills and tools they have at hand to survive and eventually overcome the bad guys.

The point is they're not superhuman. So you actually get a sense that they're in danger when they're supposed to be in danger.

UNORIGINAL:  I saw the preview for Steven Soderbergh's Haywire, and basically saw a rehash of the plot just about every American espionage / action movie made since the 1990s.  American spy gets betrayed by his own agency, for reasons that really make no logical sense, leaving him/her to kick the ass of every US government employee in the world until they take down the people who turned on them.

Look at this partial list of recent movies that all have the same plot:

Haywire

Hanna
Salt
Red
The A-Team
Green Zone
The Losers
The Bourne Identity
The Bourne Supremacy
The Bourne Ultimatum
Shooter
Mission: Impossible 1
The Long Kiss Goodnight

No wonder James Bond is the only secret agent out saving the world, the CIA is too busy hunting down their own people for reasons that make sense only to people who live inside the Axis of Ego.

Since all these movies have the same plot, the filmmakers have to make them stand out by... OVERDOING THEM. They crank up the explosions, the gun-play, and the chop-socky fights to levels that make cartoons look realistic.

I know I've harped on this in the past, but damn it, someone has to do something about this. The lack of interesting stories is why Hollywood is losing its audience.

If the movie industry made action movies with real suspense, they wouldn't have to overload them with expensive digital effects, and overwrought stunt work. That's the lesson of the movie Taken, which cost $26 million to make, had a middle aged hero, who was more grimly determined than invincible, and made over $200 million at the box office.

The average movie has to make between 2X to 3X it's production cost to break even.  That movie made 10X it's production costs.

It should make the folks in Hollywood think.

Hollywood Babble On & On #835: Britain, Bucks, & Box Office!

David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, has come under some criticism for saying that the British film industry should use the subsidies provided by the National Lottery to make films with "commercial appeal."

He's being called every sort of Philistine, and it's only a matter of time before one of the smart set calls it "censorship," which it isn't, but like it or loathe it, he has every right do it.

You see Cameron is the man with hands on the purse. He who pays the piper calls the tune. What he's asking for is not censorship, because he's not using the force of law from keeping people from making or exhibiting films, he's just saying that if you want the government's money, you should have at least a chance of getting a return on their investment.

Now Ken Loach, the dean of British social-realist "Damn You Margaret Thatcher" school of film-making has joined the chorus. He declared to the BBC that no one knows if a film is going to be a hit or not, and that this decision would make British films cheap imitations of the crassest product plopped out of the Hollywood studios.

And he, and the other critics, have a point.

But they're also incredibly wrong about the whole thing.

While it's a scientifically proven fact* that no one person, or formula can guarantee that any given project will be a hit, it's also a scientifically proven fact that one cannot predict if any given project will become a great work of art that will be remembered forever.

Remember William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens?

They are considered two of the greatest writers of the English language. Did they do it with no expectation of reward beyond a stipend provided to them by bureaucrats?

No. They wrote what they wrote because they believed that there was an audience out there that would enjoy their work, and pay them money to make more. 

Was it all a gamble?

Yes, all creative endeavors are gambles. Like I said no one can predict the tastes of the public, or whether or not any work of art will enter the cultural zeitgeist.

However, there is basically a smell test one can give a film that says whether or not it has at least a slim chance of winning an audience.

Now a lot of the critics of the decision say that the Oscar winning, $400+ million dollar selling film The King's Speech would never be made under these guidelines. They said a period costume drama about royals and stuttering would never get a greenlight.

Seriously?

Then let's look at the facts of the case.

1. British television costume dramas sell all over the world, scoring big ratings, especially in the USA, who can't seem to get enough of them.

2. It's a story about a little known facet of well known, and beloved historical figures, especially the Queen Mother, with loads of human interest and drama, as it deals with the stress of overcoming problems and becoming a leader during a time of war.  

3. It can be done cheap in comparison to the big Hollywood studio films with a $15 million production budget.

4. It fills a gap in the market place by appealing to adults with disposable income who are being ignored by the Hollywood studios who prefer teens and kids.

What do these cold, businesslike, calculations say?

GREENLIGHT.

Even if it doesn't sell out in theaters, you can at the very least break even, if not profit, with television sales. (Being a period piece, sans dated fashions, with good production values it could be re-sold almost into perpetuity.)

As it turns out the movie made $400 million internationally.  Which is pretty damn sweet return on investment.

Do you see how they got it all backwards?

You see the big cautionary tale is Canada's film industry, or to be more exact, the Canadian English language film industry. It is even more dependent on government handouts than the British industry, because you can't get Canadians to pay to see an English Canadian film.

Why?

Because long ago the audience was taken out of the equation.  Whether or not a film gets made has little or nothing to do with the commercial appeal of the film, or the merits of the project, but on who has the deepest connections with the ruling funding bureaucracy.

The bureaucrats have their little fiefdoms, populated with their favorite filmmakers, and woe betide any interloper who tries to enter these sacred circles without some sort of blessing from the in-crowd.

These filmmakers take taxpayer's money, make their little films, they get a nice screenings and parties at some film festivals, all taxpayer funded, and then film is never seen again.

And if an English Canadian filmmaker actually wants to make a film with broad commercial appeal, they are hampered by the industry's inability to sell it, and the stigma of English Canadian films being a "no audience required" art form.

Now it's not all hopelessness in Canadian film. French language Quebec cinema is a model of robustness compared to its Anglo brother.  They've found a model that works very well for them, making films with broad commercial appeal to help get the more art house projects made.

How does that work?

1. Quebecois buy tickets, DVDs and even related merchandise. A good chunk of these profits are plowed right back into making more movies.

2.  Quebec actually has their equivalent of "stars" among their actors and filmmakers.  Audiences trust them to the point where they will give a more "artsy" film a chance.

Inside Quebec their domestic films often out-perform the big Hollywood pictures. They also export their films to other francophone countries, often to critical and commercial acclaim.

That's the model the British should look at, and not just when it comes to audience/artistic balance, but also production. The Quebec production system is legendarily efficient, allowing them to make films quicker, and cheaper than anywhere else.

Plus, the British have the advantage of a massive English language market, crawling with anglophiles, that they can exploit.  If they play their cards right, they can build an industry that no longer government funding, and then they can make any damn film, any damn way they feel like with their own damn money.

Do you get my point?

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*All scientifically proven facts proven scientifically by the Furious D Institute For The Advancement Of Smug Know-It-Allism & The Lifestyle Of Furious D.

Hollywood Babble On & On #834: Why?

WHY PUT SUCCESS OUT OF REACH?

Disney's upcoming sci-fi adventure John Carter of Mars has to be a record breaking hit if it's to make money after it's $250 million production budget, and upcoming minimum $120+ million P&A outlay.

Now the question I have to ask is...

WHY?

Why was the film's budget allowed to get that obviously out of control especially at the usually cost conscious Disney?

Why are the big Hollywood studios shooting themselves in the foot by making movies cost so much they are going to literally price themselves out of profitability and possibly business?

Sometimes I feel like that guy who ran for governor of New York on the platform that rent in New York City was too damn high...

He's right you know.

WHY REDO A CLASSIC?

AMC has announced plans to develop a TV series based on the events that inspired Martin Scorsese's classic gangster movie Goodfellas. 

 

Now some are you are probably asking...

WHY?

And to that I say...

WHY NOT?

Goodfellas, which was based on series producer Nicholas Pileggi's true crime book Wise-Guy.  In case you don't remember it, it was based on the life of Henry Hill, a half-Irish/half-Sicilian hoodlum who worked the fringes of the Lucchese crime family, and was involved in everything from drug dealing, and arson, to the multi-million dollar 1978 Lufthansa heist.

Goodfellas was a great movie, but it was really a greatly condensed version of the people and events it depicted. A well done TV series could tell a more complete version of the story, including many of the events the movie had to skip.

WHY ARE THEY EVEN THINKING OF THIS?

The Lifetime Channel is reportedly in talks with Lindsay Lohan to play Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor in a biopic about her relationship with Richard Burton.

Now if you have more intelligence and taste than a cow-pat you're probably asking...

WHY

Lifetime thinks that this woman...

...could possibly portray....

...this woman?

I mean Lohan has pretty much burned out any of the talent or charisma she showed as a child star, and is now best known for wooden acting, drug addiction, and unprofessional on set behavior, and that's if you can actually get her on set.  And to play the famously porcelain complected Taylor would probably require an inch thick coating of make-up to cover up the tramp stamps, accidental cigarette burns, and sun damage.

The only rational reason I can think of is that Lifetime knows they have a turkey on their plate and are hoping that making it an attention grabbing complete train wreck will get them some publicity and hopefully ratings.

Hollywood Babble On & On #833: Lionsgate + Summit Sitting In A Tree M-E-R-G-I-N-G!

Well, it looks like it's all done but the signing.  Lionsgate Pictures is reportedly just inches away from signing a deal that will merge them with upstart indie Summit Entertainment.  Some are saying that this is a good deal, especially for Lionsgate, because it will connect them with Summit's expertise in foreign distribution, but I fear the whole thing is a sort of mixed affair.

So let's look at the Pros and Cons of this deal...

PROS:

1. PRICE.  Reports say that the final price will be about $350 million in cash, $50 million in stock, and the assumption of Summit's debt. That's not a bad price for even a mini-movie studio with the all important library Lionsgate needs for its growing television assets. Now the debt is expected to be wiped out by...

2. TWILIGHT FRANCHISE. The epic saga of teen angst, necrophilia, that teaches girls that true love can only be found with a old predator, has sucked hundreds of millions, if not billions, from hysterical tweens and teen girls. The finale of the franchise, which has been chopped into two parts, the last part is forthcoming, is expected to pay off all the debts, and pave the way for Lionsgate's Hunger Games franchise.

3. INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTION. Reports say that Summit has got a lot more knowledge and experience in international sales and distribution than Lionsgate. So anything that eases the way into the increasingly important foreign markets is a plus.

CONS.

1. TWILIGHT FRANCHISE.  With the release of Breaking Dawn Part 2, it's over, done and dusted.  While the final chapter is pretty much guaranteed to make a mint and a half, there are no guarantees that the merged company's follow ups will catch on that big.  Why?....

2. THE FICKLE FINGER OF FRANTIC FEMALES.  The folks at Lionsgate/Summit are counting on The Hunger Games to take up the mantle of Twilight and run with it.

Well, that's really, really risky. There is no sort of fame more dangerous than tween/teen girl fame. When you have it in your hands, it's a license to print money because it is so intense. However, it's like a very fragile bird, hold it too tight, and you can kill it, hold it too loose, and it will fly away to something else. And the problem is that this little bird has an expiration date, and no one knows exactly when that date is.

The one thing people do know is that when that date comes, everything associated with the one time source of such intense hysteria, becomes anathema. That means you can't use that franchise as a selling point beyond its camp value.

3. LIONSGATE'S OVERALL STRATEGY. Lionsgate made its bones on low budget genre movies that the major studios were mostly ignoring.  Lately though its strategy seems to be to imitate the big studios, but to try to do it cheaper.  Now while some may argue the merits of this strategy, I think they're missing the point.  Doing what's already being done by the majors does nothing to fill the huge gaps in the marketplace between the big studio blockbuster movies and the indie-art house films.

Paramount is having success with their micro-budget Insurge division, but since it's a major studio, it's only a matter of time before they screw it up. I'm sure that right now the President of Paramount is looking at the returns from The Devil Inside and thinking: "This film would have had a way bigger weekend if it had a $100 million budget and starred Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts."

4. ONE LESS COMPANY. If you're an independent producer, this merger means one last company available to buy your movies, and it means less competition for the big boys to worry about.

Anyway, those are the facts as I see them.

Cinemaniacal: Something I Saw On TV...

My satellite TV service just added four new channels, all movies all the time. There is an all Warner Bros. Channel, there's an all MGM/UA channel, and one channel dedicated to big blockbusters from other studios, and another dedicated to smaller indie / art house / award monger type movies, all broadcast with a vivid high definition picture.

The scheduling is eclectic, veering between classics created by and starring movie legends, to some real crap-fests, created by and starring hacks. But it reminds me of when I was a kid and stations used to run movies of all stripes, at any time they could cram them in. Now I'd like them to run more black and white flicks, but they maybe coming down the pike once they're more established.

Anyhoo, these channels have been giving my PVR a workout, and have allowed me to catch up on some favorites the way they were meant to be seen by the original filmmakers, and to be honest, they're kind of depressing, especially when you compare it to today's film making.

One such film is the 1974 thriller classic The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3.

The premise is pretty simple, 4 men, led by "Mr Blue" played by Robert Shaw, armed with sub-machine guns take a subway car with 18 passengers hostage. They are demanding $1 million in 1 hour, or they will kill a hostage for every minute they're late.

In the middle of the situation is Lt. Zachary Garber, played by Walter Matthau, of the New York Transit Authority Police.  He's in charge of security for the subways, and it's his job to get the hostages out alive.

The suspense of the film comes from the very simple fact that hijackings and hostage situations were still fairly new in the early 70s, and nobody then was exactly sure how to handle them. "Rescue" operations consisted of storming the occupied building and shooting everything that moved, a strategy that was being rethought in the wake of the disastrous Attica Prison riots of the 1960s.

Add to that New York's status in the 1970s as an "ungovernable" city that was flat broke, overrun with crime, official corruption, and managerial incompetence. Those who actually could do their jobs were hobbled by not only the things I just listed, but by the simple fact that most of the technology they were using was last upgraded during World War 2.

Everyone on the side of the good guys is in way over their head. Lt. Garber is forced to literally make everything up as he goes along. The Mayor is sick with the flu, wildly unpopular, and scared out of his wits to make a decision as illustrated in this scene where the Mayor, his Deputy, and other top city officials debate on whether or not to pay the ransom:

Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle: All right, Al. You've heard from the Three Wise Men. Now what do you say?

Mayor: What are THEY going to say, Warren?

Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle: "They" who?

Mayor: Who? Everybody - the press, the man on the street.

Mayor's wife: He means the voters.

Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle: You know what they're going to say. The Times is going to support you. The News is going to knock you. The Post will take both sides at the same time. The rich will support you, likewise the blacks, and the Puerto Ricans won't give a shit. So come on, Al, quit stalling!

Mayor: Will you stop bullying everybody, Warren? This is supposed to be a democracy!

Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle: Wise up, for chrissake, we're trying to run a city, not a goddamn democracy! Al, quit farting around - we've got to pay!

Mayor: Jessie, Jessie, what do you say?

Mayor's wife: I know a million dollars sounds like a lot of money. But just think what you'll get in return.

Mayor: What?

Mayor's wife: Eighteen sure votes.

Mayor: All right, all right. Warren, Warren, arrange for the payoff!

Deputy Mayor Warren LaSalle: Hallelujah.

Face it, the only people in the film who are not struggling to gain control of their situation is Mr. Blue, the lead hijacker, and Deputy Mayor LaSalle.

Director Joseph Sargent masterfully shows the full scale of the event, and by doing so, ratchets up the tension. While you're watching you know that the whole thing can go all wrong, and people will die, if just one of these people screws up their small part in it. Add to that David Shire's relentlessly driving musical score, clever doses of dark humor, and you've got a thriller with great re-watching value.

Now sadly, something that is re-watchable is something that Hollywood thinks is worth a remake.

They first did it for television in 1998, with Edward James Olmos as the cop and Vincent D'onofrio as Mr. Blue. But that was forgotten before the end credits ran, so I'm going to talk about the 2009 reboot.

Now the world of 1974 is wildly different from the world of 2009 and that's reflected in the remake.  Take for example Mr. Blue, the villain.  In the original played by Robert Shaw.

In the original the character is a professional mercenary. A man with a military background especially with detailed planning, complete disregard for human life, and what he believes to be complete and total control of the situation.  Now he deliberately disguises himself to appear as bland, and innocuous as possible, in fact, every member of the gang wears the same disguise. That's so witnesses would have a hard time describing them.  He's taken every detail into consideration, and his only weakness is his confidence in his own intelligence.

But a villain who proves himself ruthless and dangerous comes in second to a villain who looks like he's dangerous, like they did with the new villain played by John Travolta.

Where the original villain wanted to be a blank slate to facilitate his escape, the new villain telegraphs that he's supposed to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know, who is completely out of control. Of course this time, he's not an unemployed mercenary, he's some Wall Street guy who did time for insider trading and is looking for revenge and money.

Because so many Wall Street guys shoot people.

But that's not the most inane part. Now simply taking hostages for ransom, even one 10X the ransom in the original movie just isn't enough, the villain has to be using the chaos caused by the hostage taking for an elaborate stock scam.

Stop and think about that for a second.  The villain literally puts himself in the line of fire not for money, but to set up the conditions he needs to make money.

That's a scheme from a completely different movie, and completely negates the necessity for Travolta's "Ryder" to be even in the subway car. Other kinds of terrorist attacks, done by other people that are kept at arm's length from him, could have had the same effect. So the writer's attempt to "update" the villain's plot, simply makes the villain pretty stupid. (An obvious reason to get Ryder on the train, would be for the hostage taking to be a cover for a heist using New York's vast underground tunnel network. But studio bosses wouldn't like that because it doesn't let them use the "businessman as villain" cliche they love so much.)

And let's not forget that in the days after 9-11 the doctrine is to assume that any hostage taker is going after mass casualties. Then there's the fact that NYPD has elite officers trained to handle such scenarios by trying to get the hostage takers to talk, to give said elite officers time to get in position to take them out as quickly as possible.

Now let's go to the hero of the story: Garber.  In the original he was played by:

Walter Matthau embodied Garber as an overwhelmed civil servant, uncomfortable in the role of hero, just trying desperately to keep the body count to a minimum while he figured out what the hell to do next.

In the remake Garber was played by Denzel Washington.

Denzel Washington is probably one of the best actors working in Hollywood today. He brings an air of heroic command and manly confidence to any role, and that's why he was wrong for the part. He's too manly, too heroic, and putting some padding around the middle and some glasses on just aren't enough to make him the overwhelmed schlub that Garber is supposed to be in order to amp up the suspense.

The closest comparison to Denzel Washington's casting would be if the producers had cast John Wayne as Garber in the 1974 original. The suspense would be dampened because who could beat John Wayne?

But Hollywood has the feeling that audiences don't have the patience to actually discover a story, so they have to telegraph everything about the movie, including the ending, before the opening credits are done, and that's if they even have opening credits. Then, with the story pretty much spent right at the beginning, they then try to make up for it by tossing in tons of money to pay for lots of over the top action, and hyper-shaky/pseudo-suspenseful camera work and choppy music video style editing.

As I've written about on this blog before, the box office take is down, DVD sales are collapsing, and this are going to keep getting worse, because audiences are going to television, the internet, and older movies available via streaming services like Netflix.

Why? 

Because that's where they're finding stories. 

When it comes to the movies from the major studios, the bigger the picture, the smaller the story.  And what little story they do have has been picked apart by executives saying things solely to justify their existence, market research gurus pulling stuff out of their ass because they really don't have a magic bullet, and stars obsessing about things that have very little to do with the quality of the story.

Hollywood needs to look at its own past, not for remake material, but for lessons about telling stories.

Then maybe its downward slide can be stopped.