Tag: movies

Done 2 Death – Taking movies one sequel too far

Imagine taking the last known copy of a precious book, ripping it to pieces, spitting on it and throwing it on the floor, then reading the bits that you can see. That is what rehashed, “long-awaited” Hollywood sequels do to the artistic process.

Artistic ideas are fantastic because they are original. They can be chopped and shaped to the will of the imagination of the artist. In movies characters can be formed and situations developed, all to the specifications of one or a few creative individuals. So when, in the interest of nothing other than profit, companies vie to pump out sequel after sequel of half-baked hogswash just to vacuum up the pretty green it gets frustrating. It kills the unique idea that went before, and hurls any beauty of the original predecessor into the dank and murky mires of forgotten film.

Half the cast for the poker scene have agreed to be paid in the glasses of whiskey that are presented in front of them for “Raging Bull 2”. Image courtesy of complex.com, click for link.

Raging Bull 2 is fast approaching Continue reading “Done 2 Death – Taking movies one sequel too far”

Nostalgia for New York 2: Referencing reality

At the end of last year I wrote a piece called Nostalgia for New York, which essentially looked at the idea of nostalgia that I was able to associate with a place that I had never been to. While writing that piece I was unaware that I would be in New York four months afterward, but circumstance and chance conspired and I found myself spending some time in the grand metropolis of the east coast of the USA recently, and this gave me the opportunity to rethink some of the topics I had originally looked at regarding New York.

It’s not that I had tried to write about New York specifically when writing the original piece – I was more tinkering with a popular culture model of the city; looking at how New York was portrayed and how this portrayal changed as I grew up. So one of the striking things I then found about actually hitting New York City was recognising all of these places that I had seen before in movies, TV shows or video games. Everything seemed bizarrely familiar – it wasn’t quite deja-vu, but more like borrowing another person’s memory to make sense of something that I was seeing Continue reading “Nostalgia for New York 2: Referencing reality”