And That's My Post

Okay, wait...what?

Didn't Safe Haven come out before this year started? I could have sworn it was released in early- to mid-December, got bad reviews, and grossed an okay 100 million dollars.

Did this not happen? What's going on?

So, like, apparently it doesn't come out until Valentine's Day.

Are you telling me that I still have to deal with this movie's press tour?

Oh God.

Like Your Mother, Very Unnecessary

Some stories can be told in two hours. Actually, most stories can be told in less than that. The thing is, though, with many movies making millions and millions of dollars within a few weeks, some people are inclined to make, like, five sequels after just one (semi) successful movie.

The first Michael Bay-directed Transformers was released in 2007. Starring Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox, the movie got a dismal 57% on Rotten Tomatoes. But it also grossed over 700 million dollars internationally. Soooo, you can guess what happened; Bay pushed out a sequel, and then another one, and soon to be another. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) and Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) got 20% and 36%, respectively (RT). The former grossed over 800 millions dollars while the latter hit over one billion, both internationally. I mean, does the story of the transformer robot things really take seven and a half  hours to tell? Obviously I realize that these movies were made solely for the profit, but it's just completely unnecessary, like the fourth movie, which is planned to be released in 2014.

The 2009 movie, Avatar, was both a critical (83%, RT) and economic (grossing 2.7 billion freaking dollars) hit. Before its release, director James Cameron said that, if successful, he would make sequels of the film. After the almost-three-billion-dollar success, the answer was pretty obvious: there would be a sequel. Actually, earlier, Cameron stated that he had a "trilogy-scaled arc" in mind for the movie.

Do there really need to be two more of this movie? Didn't the first one kind of wrap things all up? (This isn't rhetorical; I really have no idea. I started watching the three hour movie once but, you know, it's three hours.) It's really a gamble for Cameron to try and spread Avatar's success through two more movies, too.

Pirates of the Caribbean was actually made to have sequels. The first movie, PotC: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) was followed by PotC: Dead Man's Chest (2006), and PotC: At World's End (2007). It was all good and stuff. The story finished after the third and, while the critics' rating steadily went down (in order: 79%, 54%, 45%, RT), they grossed over 2.6 billion dollars worldwide. Then, for whatever reason, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides was released in 2011. Well, it was the worst received of the franchise. Buuuut, it wasn't over then. Earlier this year, Disney announced that there would be a fifth freaking movie.

This unnecessary sequel trend is popular with animated movies, too. Like with Cars 2, Finding Nemo 2, Kung Fu Panda 2 and Toy Story Freaking 4, which is just sick. And don't even get me started on Ice Age.

So yeah, how about we just think of some new ways to make billions of dollars other than squeezing the juice out of the orange until it's just a little lump of pulp and peel even though we all know the juice in the cup has been enough for a while.

Just Call Me James Cameron

(Blogger's note: Except for please don't.)

So I had absolutely no idea what to write about today. Then, as I was lying awake in my bed last night, well I didn't think of something to write about, but I somehow got this idea into my mind and it morphed and evolved and all of a sudden I had a whole plot to what seemed like an awesome movie in my mind.

This seems to happen a lot. In a state of half-consciousness my mind goes everywhere at once and I come up with an idea for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.

It's happened while I slept too. The weirdest dreams that don't even make sense when you speak them could be potentially huge blockbusters. You know, once you get past the confusing characters, huge plot holes, and copyright issues, my dreams could be the next Avatar.

After this one dream I had January 2012 (because I keep an effing log, bitches), I immediately thought, This would be a great movie. I don't know why, considering I didn't even know what was going on whilst writing it down. I'll shorten it up to save you the time and utter confusion.

Last night I had a really long dream. I was like, in my furnace room (which wasn't supposed to be the furnace room) and I had to go through this weird obstacle course thing. I skipped the first step, then finished it, but had to do it because I didn't do the first part. The first step was something really difficult that I couldn't accomplish, but somehow got past it.

Then I was finishing the rest when I ended up in the attic of some weird barn. This was at the end of the obstacle course; I couldn't leave, though, because there was air coming up from the ledge of the exit (which was a known fact, that you couldn't leave then).

Anyway, I was like, "How are we going to get out now?" And then Joseph Gordon-Levitt was kind of being a dumb ass and jumped off the thing all like, "I can go through!" Well, he couldn't go through and died. I was like, "I'll say he died a hero: trying to save us."

Bailey grabbed me and we jumped through the doorway of the barn. She told me that, since she skipped the first steps, she was able to break the barrier of the door that killed Joseph Gordon-Levitt and go through.

It all made sense in my head.

(This is where the copyright problem kicks in.) So we got out of the obstacle course and were now in this field and all the Harry Potter characters were frozen in time, but they were all hugging so I assumed it was right after the defeat of Voldemort. I then realized that that was why we had to complete the obstacle course: to save the characters from being frozen in time forever, and we failed.

My friend posted something on her Tumblr a while ago about something similar, although she referred to it as “New-York-Times Bestseller Potential”. (And that's where we stand. Me, movies. Her, books.)

“So I had a dream last night...There was mystery. There was drama. There was romance. Some guy was out killing people, and I was working with these two other guys on the case. I don’t remember anything except that last five minutes of it, where we’re in the morgue—and the tall guy, the smart one who was in charge—-is having an epiphany on who the killer is. He leans forward, savagly over the dead body and tells us the body is a fake, that the real “victim” is actually alive—because his eyes are fake or something. He’s still staring intensely at the fake eyes and he opens his mouth to tell us who the killer was, where the real victim is, how it all occured—and in the preternatural, third person [omniscient] way, I knew that it was all going to be brilliant, intelligent, thrilling—-and then my fucking alarm went off.”

Why is it when we're in lesser states of consciousness, do we weave what seem to us like the best ideas for movies/books. I mean, even Ernest Hemingway wrote his best work drunk off of his ass. And can we really believe that some crazy ass shit like Inception or Fight Club were first thought of by someone who was sober or awake or even sane?

DreamWorks the Understated

(Blogger's note: Feel free to not even read this post. But seriously. I just gave up. It's Super Bowl Sunday and I sort of put off just this one post, which I don't like very much, but now I want to go and eat delicious food whilst watching burly men pummel each other and maybe there will be another commercial with Betty White in it. Anyway, I just hit word three hundred and five so I'm done here.)

Chances are, no matter how old you are, you’ve heard of the film studio DreamWorks. One division most are familiar with’s technical name is DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. (wait. Okay, so Wikipedia just informed me that it’s actually owned by independent businesses now, which totally doesn’t even make any sense, but okay), which releases only, you guessed it, animated films. It’s the one with the opening that has the little guy sitting on the moon and fishing. Yeah, that. It’s also the second highest grossing animation studio, right behind Pixar.

Anyway, I started to look into DreamWorks because I had recently watched some of their animated movies whilst babysitting and thought I saw a weird theme in a good number of them. As I started a post, though, I realized that some of the movies I was using weren’t actually DreamWorks (damn you, Universal), but still figured that I could pull a semi-decent post out of my ass, which is what this is.

Most people think that Pixar is, like, the best animation studio because of its (usually) super creative and funny and also a little bit morbid movies, because, well, it is. I think that DreamWorks has a lot of really good movies, though, smushed between its big-earning franchises, like The Road to El Dorado and The Prince of Egypt.

So yeah that's this post for you thanks for reading please don't throw those tomatoes.