Oh my stars! I found this on the weekend, shame on me for not sharing sooner!
Please Hollywood make this film. No really, the next time you get the urge to make another one of those awful parody films do this instead. I guarantee it won’t do worse than that crap you’ve produced.
Do you know why that is truly brilliant? The comic is written by 5 year old Malachai Nicolle and drawn by his 29 year old brother Ethan. Learn more and read the comic at Axe Cop.
There’s this amazingly funny movie called Death At A Funeral that came out in 2007. So, Hollywood decided they could do better than director Frank Oz (The Muppets Take Manhattan, Little Shop of Horrors, Bowfinger, What About Bob?) and remake it. Oh, aside from all those movies Frank Oz directed, he was basically Jim Henson’s partner for 27 years. The man knows something about entertainment.
What the original 2007 movie lacks is the Hollywood cliché of STAR POWER! Thus, they’ve taken the original and threw a bunch of stars at it. Since the movie is barely 3 years old, watching the trailer just makes me think CollegeHumor or SNL did a parody trailer. Look, they put Martin Lawrence in a suit and a pair of glasses, he must be playing the successful brother. How rich.
You’re saying, “Chris, what’s the big deal? Nothing is original.”
While I agree that there is much imitation in art, this remake is practically a carbon copy. They are so lazy that they’ve cast the same guy as the little person. There has to be more little people actors, right? Obviously, Hollywood has decided to go for the African American box office money, so why not get Tony Cox from Bad Santa and all those awful parody movies like Epic Movie.
To me, this movie is the poster child for everything that is wrong with the industry. The only motivation for this film is cash money. They’ve rehashed a script, at least one actor and probably the original score just to throw it at a demographic. This is not your tongue in cheek remake of The Brady Bunch or a tween reboot of Star Trek. It is not re-imagined in 3D with robots or cute woodland creatures. While all that stuff may be more gimmicks to make cash, there are still creative things happening somewhere in the production. Good or bad adapting the story, characters & iconic imagery for a new audience is at least, a bit artistic.
If you’d like to compare, the original movie’s trailer. According to BoxOfficeMojo the original film’s budget was $9 mil and worldwide it grossed $46,686,101.
And while I am bitching about remakes, why can’t they make a Robin Hood movie with someone below the age of 50 playing Robin Hood? Truthfully, a guy running around in tights who is a bad ass with a bow & arrow is quite dated and boring. Yet, it would seem like easy Hollywood money if you put Michael Bay at the helm with Shia LeBeouf & Megan Fox in it.
Now if you’re lucky burdenday will swoop in within the next hour and post a remake of this rant.
When I was a senior in film school we used to joke about how many freshman projects started with the shot of an alarm clock and someone waking up. At one point, I toyed with the idea of making a how-to video for student filmmakers featuring this and other cliché techniques.
Thanks to this montage by Rich over at fourfour, you can see Hollywood relies pretty heavy on the same plot device over and over.
As one of them viral marketing schemes for some Hollywood formula romantic comedy, Anna Faris made this fun video. Frankly she could be in an OSHA video and I would watch it, she’s so adorable. I might have watched a Wayans film on television just because she was in it. Afterwords I forced myself to throw up & cried in the shower because I felt so abused and filthy, but that had nothing to do with her.