Watch Good Movies

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I’m giving the new Mad Max movie a complete miss, and I really don’t care how good it is.

The same goes for the new Terminator, and Fantastic Four films. I’d like to get behind Insurgent, and the last Hunger Games movie since they’re based on books, but the earlier films in both franchises didn’t impress me. At all.

I probably will see Jurassic World, and I’ve been told we’re going to see the new Star Wars, but these are sequels rather than reboots.

Still, I’d like to see fewer sequels, too.

What’s my problem? Hollywood needs to get back to making more new stories not just remaking the same ones over and over again.

Which isn’t an entirely fair statement. There are plenty of original movies still being made, but they’re being made by smaller studios with smaller marketing budgets and frequently with limited releases. They don’t get to stand on even footing with the quarter-billion dollar plus budget blockbusters. And those are mostly reboots, rehashes, and recycles.

The only vote movie watchers get is by buying tickets, but those tickets aren’t often the full slate of what should be available for genre cinema. If things go on, if we don’t support the one-off, original films, or can’t, then by the time I’m thinking about taking my grandchildren to the theatre, my choices are going to be Transformers XVII and TMNT: The Next Reguritation.

Just think about last year. The biggest genre movies were Amazing Spider-Man 2 (a sequel to a reboot), Big Hero 6, Captain America 2, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (a sequel to a reboot) Divergent, Godzilla (a reboot), Guardians of the Galaxy, Hunger Games 3, Interstellar, Robocop (a reboot), TMNT (a reboot), Transformers 4, and X-Men 5. How many of those were actually worth watching, much less paying for? I count 2.5 (Big Hero 6, Guardians, and half of Interstellar.)

But did you see Earth to Echo, Edge of Tomorrow, Lucy, Mr. Peabody and Sherman, or Transcendence? Not enough of us did for any of them. And at least three of them were good. The other two were better than almost everything in the blockbuster list, most of which have already been scheduled for a sequel.

I think it’s imperative that we mostly skip what Hollywood thinks we want see and instead go for the second tier and indy films with good stories. Or potentially good stories. If they came to a theatre near you early this year, you should have gone to see Vice, Toxin, Robot Overlords, Jupiter Ascending, and Chappie, no matter how good you think they weren’t. And the last two in that list were pretty good. (Yes, my opinion. Your mileage may vary.)

My want-to-see genre film list for the rest of 2015 includes things like Ex Machina, Tomorrow Land, Absolutely Anything, Ant Man, Pixels, Self/less, The Lobster, The Martian, Aimy In a Cage, and Time Lapse. Think I’m most looking forward to Absolutely Anything, but I love Simon Pegg. It doesn’t hurt that the Python crew voice the aliens and Robin Williams voices his dog (no, it’s not an animated film, but there is some CGI).

Be well, everyone. And watch good movies.

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