Monday, June 17, 2013

Lack of Creativity in Hollywood

I was at daughter's place for Father's Day last night, and a number of us were sitting around while my son-in-law, his brother, and my son, were watching a basketball game.  One of the ads was a movie trailer that looked hopelessly predictable: black cop, white cop, learning to work together.  As others were trashing its predictability, I suggested that perhaps someone could come up with a new idea on the buddy cop movie: instead of one black, one white, maybe one vampire, one zombie?  After a bit more discussion, we concluded that to be truly creative, it should be a four man detective team:
  • a vampire
  • a zombie
  • a robot
  • a monkey in a bowtie
At least it would not make you think of Lethal Weapon 19.

5 comments:

  1. There's a lot of validity to this criticism, mostly because Hollywood was in fact stamping those movies. However, it seems like it's possible to repeat oneself, nearly, and still deliver interesting entertainment. I'm talking about anime, of course. For example, there's a subgenre of it, sometimes called "Cute Girls Doing Cute Things", which was pioneered by Azumanga Daioh in 2002. When it came out, it was thought impossible to make 26 episodes about girls doing virtually nothing. Ever since they were making these things. At first I thought they would go creatively bankrupt after Lucky Star. Then, after K-ON. This season, Yuyushiki -- and it's still pretty good. I don't know if we can compare this to popularity of Fast and Furious, now on its 6th installment, because I'm not familiar with Hollywood. But there's a certain lesson in it. Perhaps the "monochrome cop" formula may be made interesting again. Maybe Hollywood is just not trying hard enough?

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  3. I dunno, a zombie and a robot sounds a lot like the Lethal Weapon movies.

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  4. Am I the only one in America who saw the Lethal Weapon movies as personality conflicts rather than racist propaganda?
    Boy, Hollywood just isn't getting through to me!

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  5. I am working on a new series for the History Channel: "Hydraulic Pumps of the Third Reich".

    This 10 part innovative series is the first to use the world's last great untapped copyright-free video treasure: industrial training films.

    Using free intern labor from unemployed Ivy League liberal arts masters program graduates , we take images of technical looking things from these films and intercut them with the standard images of Panzers, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine.

    Unemployable engineers over 50 provide the impressive sounding techno-jargon script copy in a unique expired food-for-service program. We are producing each 1 hour segment for essentially the cost of a 6 cases of 1997 mac and cheese.

    Boffo.


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