Why Not Just Stick a Barrel Over Your Head For Two Hours?

I notice today that Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is about to hit cinemas. On the other side of the Atlantic it's probably done so already. On the bright side, I suppose, at least if they scrape the barrel any further they’re bound to break through into clean air. How desperate for ideas can film studios possibly be? To actually pump tens of millions of dollars and thousands of man hours into an idea that wouldn’t excite me enough to turn the telly on if it was broadcast let alone actually go out to the cinema and pay real money to see? I’d rather give the money to charity and stick a barrel over my head for two hours since I’d be seeing the exact same thing.

Considering the amount of pointless remakes of TV series, cartoons and films in the last few years you’d think by chance alone a few would be decent. But I can’t think of any. Most are simply vehicles for CGI effects, which is somewhat bewildering when you think about it; considering the vast literature of science fiction, horror, action and other genres that we now have the technology to cinematise why do filmmakers spend vast resources on silly crap that was probably only commissioned because of budget and technical restrictions in the first place? I know the answer is obvious: that remakes are a safe bet with familiar characters and a ready made audience and are just the right intellectual level for your average movie going moron. Still, considering that the original fans are usually the ones who hate the remake most, and that the remakes never get any critical acclaim and never do much more than average at the box office either, is it really worth it when all those thousands of hours spent creating CGI effects could have gone into making some really amazing scifi epic from any number of authors or screenwriters. I mean, there are six billion people on the planet for Christ’s sake! Some of them must be able to come up with an idea for a good movie.

How about this; a movie director gets so bored with movie studios asking him to do crappy remakes he murders the studio bosses and makes a film about it. As a (not very) witty twist the movie bombs but a remake is a huge success.

Crap as this idea is, it’s still better than 99% of the films released in the last ten years.