movies - CoupleDumb

I was born in Southern California. When people talk of the tourist industry, I usually don’t see why anyone would visit Southern California. Sure, it’s beautiful, the weather is usually perfect, there are a billion things to see and do but this is my home, no big deal. I thought I had seen everything that L.A. County had to offer. Sure, everyone who grows up here at some point in their lives had met or knew of many people who were in the film industry. In fact, when I was in college at Loyola, most of my friends aspired to a career in the film industry. So there was little mystery to that whole part of L.A. for me. Remember, I did voice over work for “It’s Alive 3: Island of the Alive” (1987) for pizza and beer.

So when I was invited to do the Deluxe Warner Brothers Studio Tour I thought, “big whoop”. I’ve seen it and done it all here. Well, I was wrong. The Warner Brother’s Studio Deluxe Tour was more than a back lot tour. They literally let us see behind the curtain and experience a working studio. We saw sets of current television shows, props used in the most famous films in history and museum pieces of the Harry Potter series of films and the most famous cars in movies and TV. The lunch at the Commissary Fine Dining Room, which was included in the price, and the museum were worth the price of admission.

I must admit that I am a huge Harry Potter fan and totally geeked out in the museum whose entire second floor was dedicated to Harry Potter props, costumes and cool stuff. You can even get sorted!!! I must complain at this point since I was sorted into Slytherin and treated like a Malfoy I think due to my blonde hair. Aside from the very cool Potter stuff, I did get to see some costumes from my favorite show (Fringe), along with the bell from William Bell’s office and the piano from Casablanca.

This is a must see tour for anyone who loves movies and is ready to see how they make the magic. The Warner Brother’s Deluxe Tour is worth every penny.

Thanks to Warner Brother’s Studios Tours for this amazing opportunity. Sure, they gave me the ticket but all opinions are mine.

clue cast And next year they release the remake of Slumdog Millionaire

This celebrity smackdown will not be focusing on one person but the entire industry. We realize we don’t see many films anymore unless they are animated. We also realize that the capital needed to produce a movie nowadays is the Gross National Product of a medium sized nation and the risk of a film is ameliorated if you bank on a sure thing. But our question is, where is the creativity, innovation and pizzazz of Hollywood? So our smackdown is directed to all you movie moguls who think that redoing Smokey and the Bandit is a good idea.

Lee says: Movies in the old days were inspired by books and the only remakes were from movies you were too young to know about. Spielberg and Lucas were inspired by Kurosawa and the films were bold and deep. Now Hollywood has taken recycling to the extreme and is going through IMDb files looking for its next story.

They have remade TV shows to minor success. I must admit, I stood in line to see the ‘Brady Bunch Movie’ because it was one of my faves as a kid. They did a parody of it and that’s why those movies worked (ie. ‘Charlie’s Angels’). There were gritty interpretations of Mod Squad minus the large afro and from their success, we were subjected to ‘Starsky and Hutch’ and ‘Dukes of Hazard’. Now you tell me why we needed to be punished like that?

In the eighties they decided to steal ideas from foreign countries. That was fine because we’re Imperialistic Americans and we do shit like that. Rape another country’s creativity and pass it off as your art is just fine by our standards. This is how we got gems like ‘Three Men and a Baby’. But now, you’ve run out of foreign countries to pillage, in addition to any original thought and are sodomizing our own films. Not only are thy remaking, they aren’t even waiting a respectable amount of time.

Case in point, they are remaking ‘Clue’. I remember this film really well and saw all the alternate endings in the theatre. Now they are going to ruin it by having the current crop of stars do roles originated by the greats like Madeline Kahn!! Who’s playing Mrs. White? Madonna? What, did they stop making movies in Italy and France or are they recycling too?

At $10 for a matinee, the least a movie mogul can do is put a little effort into it and stop rehashing the same stories we’ve already seen. These movies aren’t winning the awards or breaking records, they are the pabulum that clog our theatres and fill up our Netflix order when there isn’t anything else to see. We hope it approximates the original, which it never does, and lament our choices after they suck another 100 minutes of our lives. There are some good writers out there looking for a break and some of them have ideas other than redoing ‘My Mother the Car’. If not, I have a great treatment for a remake of ‘The Matrix’ with no special effects and it’s done with only two characters; kind of like ‘Waiting for Godot’ but not as funny.

Paul says: I love the movie Clue. It’s one of my favorites but I do not understand the logic on redoing a perfect movie for an audience that has never heard of the board game. In this video game world, the only children that play Clue are homeschooled, Amish invalids. Now, if they made a ‘Tak and the Power of Juju movie, that would make sense. Note: for those of you who are not on the cutting edge of society like me, Tak was a video game that they made into a TV cartoon. It stars Hal Sparks, the guy from Queer as Folk, but Tak doesn’t take anything up the bum.