Five Things People Should Not Do With Movies

Here at CinemaSpy we pride ourselves on having our collective fingers on the social networking pulse. Hence, we couldn’t help but notice that a trending hashtag in today’s twits (best not call them ‘tw**ts anymore, in case we infringe on Twitter’s trademarking rights), was #ThingsPeopleShouldNotDo.

That got us thinking about things that today’s moviemakers should avoid. Here are five ideas that randomly popped out of our brains. Feel free to submit your own:

1) Assume that each superhero sequel has to have more supervillains than its predecessor. Failure to observe this simple rule did for the first Batman franchise and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man series. Lets hope Rise doesn’t degrade the Dark Knight saga with it’s multiplicity of nemeses. The Avengers might be immune to this curse given that it would require at least 27 supervillians before they outnumber its superheroes 3:1

2) Make a movie that generates far greater praise then it deserves. J.J. Abrams did that with his Star Trek reboot. Its plot was dafter than the proverbial brush to the point that in places it should have insulted any viewer’s intelligence. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with bonkers writing, of course, but it shouldn’t get five star reviews from supposedly credible film critics. The chances are that the the script for Star Trek, Too will be much better. It’s equally likely that it won’t get as good write-ups ’cause it will be measured against an overrated but inferior yardstick and won’t have the same novelty value.

3) Make a prequel that looks exactly like the original it prefaces and then give it the same title. Everything in the footage of The Thing (2011) that has been released so far makes it look a lot like The Thing (1982) And guess what? We learned today via The Morton Report that the unfortunate people in the Antarctic research station who find an alien life form in the ice, dig it up, thaw it out and run around a camp in the dark while it lurks in the outhouse have to face a test at some point to find out which of them is human. Sound familiar?

Doubts notwithstanding, yours truly (who has seen Carpenter’s original probably 50 times and read the novelization twice) is be going to see it on opening night. As long as I hear “You’ve gotta be f&*%in’ kidding,” I’ll be happy.

4) Make a movie version of Judge Dredd, Biggles or The Magic Roundabout. Look at the evidence. Nuff said.

5) Make a family movie with ImageMoversDigital. Technically and visually the work this crew does looks fantastic. Except for the people in it, who look like waxwork figures with a lisp. We really don’t see the point of trying to make motion capture animation look real. Everyone knows it’s an animated movie so why not either relish the fact or make something that blends realism with something outlandish (like Pan’s Labyrinth).

The Polar Express is still the best film this studio has made and looks the part, especially on Blu-ray 3D. Since that film was released, the animation coming out of Robert Zemeckis’ company hasn’t improved much, mostly because, human figures aside, it was darned impressive to start with. Moreover, it hasn’t made a big return at the box office (clearly Earth didn’t need Mars Need Moms). I’d love to see them do something mature and alien for a lot less money. Maybe even Alien.