I have a beef. Of course, when I start Landsharking, I normally have some sort of a beef. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. And neither should you.

I love movies. So much of my commentary focuses on the media in our world that it pretty much goes without saying. One of my first real memories was going to see The Black Cauldron in the theater with my parents. Since then, I’ve amassed a pretty sizeable collection of flicks.

And if you’ve been reading this baby for a reasonable period of time, you should know that I have a fond respect for originality in all forms of art and entertainment. There’s just something beautiful about an original idea that takes shape and develops into a full-fledged medium. I truly love that process.

Having said that, it should be duly noted (and quite obvious) that I have a deep-seated loathing for unoriginality. Especially in the form of plagiarism.

Now let’s not get plagiarism confused with inspiration. There is a difference. When George Lucas borrows the opening title sequence to every Star Wars movie from a sci-fi serial he used to watch as a kid, that’s inspiration. When Paul Auster makes references to William Wilson in The New York Trilogy, that’s an homage to Edgar Allen Poe’s character of the same name. And when Bruce Campbell is given the magic words “klaatu, barada, nikto” in Army Of Darkness, that’s a sly reference to the words used to control Gort in The Day The Earth Stood Still.

That, my friends, is a kindly tip of the hat to one’s predecessors. Nothing more.

However, plagiarism, outright copying a film’s core premise is, to me, an inexcusable crime.

A crime that Dreamworks SKG has violated for the last time, in my eyes.

Why, you ask? OK, here are four films released by Dreamworks in the last six years. All film descriptions are courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.

Deep Impact. Original Release Date: May 8, 1998. Unless a comet can be destroyed before colliding with Earth, only those allowed into shelters will survive. Which people will survive?

Saving Private Ryan. Original Release Date: July 24, 1998. Based on a World War II drama. US soldiers try to save their comrade, paratrooper Private Ryan, who's stationed behind enemy lines.

Antz. Original Release Date: October 2, 1998. A rather neurotic ant tries to break from his totalitarian society while trying to win the affection of the princess he loves.

Shark Tale. Original Release Date: October 1, 2004. The sea underworld is shaken up when the son of the shark mob boss is found dead and a young fish named Oscar is found at the scene...

Now, compare the above to the following four films, all released by different production companies…

Armageddon. Original Release Date: July 1, 1998 (released by Touchstone Pictures). When an asteroid the size of Texas is headed for Earth the world's best deep core drilling team is sent to nuke the rock from the inside.

The Thin Red Line. Original Release Date: December 25, 1998 (released by Twentieth Century Fox). Director Terrence Malick's adaptation of James Jones' autobiographical 1962 novel, focusing on the conflict at Guadalcanal during the second World War.

A Bug’s Life. Original Release Date: November 25, 1998 (released by Walt Disney Pictures). A misfit ant, looking for warriors to save his colony from grasshoppers, recruits a group of bugs that turn out to be an inept circus troupe.

Finding Nemo. Original Release Date: May 30, 2004 (released by Walt Disney/Pixar). A father-son underwater adventure featuring Nemo, a boy clownfish, stolen from his coral reef home. His timid father must then search the ocean to find him.

Now, just stop and think for a second. Here we have four films by Dreamworks: a disaster movie, a war epic, a CGI kids’ film about bugs, and a CGI kids’ film about fish.

The remaining four films are: a disaster movie, a war epic, a CGI kids’ film about bugs, and a CGI kids’ film about fish.

Notice a pattern, here?

Before you jump to conclusions, yes, I am accusing Dreamworks SKG of stealing general ideas and pillaging them into their own creations. You’ll notice that in all the cases except for the Nemo/Shark situation, Dreamworks has trumped the competition by releasing their film as much as six months earlier. And even with the 18-month hiatus between Nemo and Shark, Nemo was such a huge hit that the memory still lingers fresh in the minds of most children.

I could excuse Saving Private Ryan, as war epics are plentiful. Besides, Ryan was a much better film than Line, and with Spielberg at the helm, you’d be hard-pressed to question his standard genius.

Well, except for A.I. We’d like to forget that. Forever.

But then we have two disaster movies. Well, even that may be a coincidence. Hell, Universal and Fox released Dante’s Peak and Volcano respectively within months of each other. Competition is hot amongst production companies, and disaster films are typically strong box office draws.

But now you have two kids movies that, in the general premise and atmosphere, are practically identical. This really pisses me off.

What pisses me off more than how blatantly Dreamworks has ripped off Disney and Pixar in this instance is the fact that these two films pretty much confirm the nasty truth that everyone in Hollywood is in it for the money. Why? Because these films are guaranteed to be modest to huge hits and they will draw kids in by the droves.

And what really irks me is the fact that this company was founded by three very prolific, creative guys in entertainment. Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. You would think that with those founding fathers, the firm would have more innovative material coming out of the woodwork.

But no. What we get is just some very generic rehash. And that may really be the saddest part of all of this.

Creative juices wasted on someone else’s pre-existing ideas.

Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

With all my recent frustrations and rants over the state of the nation and the FCC have led me to write beyond the scope of my beloved blog. I'm still not 100% sure where I'm going with this, but I have a general layout (and purpose) with the root of the following excerpt. I hope to complete it sometime within the next couple of years, and I intend on making it a full novel. Not just a short story or novella this time. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, and if you're good little seamonkeys, I might just put some more snippets up here for you.

Bon apetit...

After getting out of college, I was anxious to try and bring the Morning Wood Experience to another outlet. It was relatively easy to get a radio show back at old Dormsike, you just had to be persistent. Sooner or later they were gonna have to acknowledge you unless you were batting a double digit IQ and/or had rotten musical taste. And even then your odds were decent.

At any rate, I wanted to test the waters, see what I was worth. So when I made the trip from college to grad school, I made a beeline for station tryouts. Due to my class schedule, I could only stay in training classes for half the allotted time, but I did make a connection with the station manager, Gil Loeb. I’ll never be sure how impressed he was, if at all, since his expression never changed. He was an older fella, probably in his mid 50s, with a full head of white and a sizeable paunch. He never removed his sport coat, not once, even during the residual summer humidity of early September. Had he ever peeled that second skin of a jacket from his torso, you would’ve seen a button-down shirt that was unable to hide his belly jutting over his beltline.

Herein laid the key difference between WCCH and New Haven College’s WNHC. My old stomping grounds had been run by the students. This strange new world was also run by the students.

But supervised by the faculty. Even a eunuch would’ve wound up in the fetal position after this boot to the junk.

So here I am, trying to play down my beloved A.M. antics to Gargantuan Gil Loeb. I felt like I was about to spar with a boxing champion. It was a feeling I would become very familiar with after grad school, when going on job interviews.

“So,” he started. “You obviously have a great deal of experience, having done four years at college. To be truthful, we don’t often get grad students trying out for the station… We like to reserve on-air slots for undergraduates.”

“I assumed that was the typical scenario, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to give it a shot.”

“You’re going for your MBA in… what was it now, finance?” Not even close.

“Marketing, actually.”

“Oh, right. Marketing. And you’re a full time student, correct?”

“Yep, three classes a week from 5:30 to 8:30 at night.”

“And you commute from Waterbury? What is that, about a half-hour drive?”

“Forty-five minutes with evening traffic.”

“Hmm.” Gil had this way of analyzing and contemplating every response you offered. “Hmm” would’ve been his response if I answered a question on what color my socks were.

They were white, for the record.

“Quite a hike to do a radio show, isn’t it?” he pried. This made me uncomfortable. The question was borderline accusatory, and I felt like this went from a purportedly casual chat to an interrogation. I realized it sounded a little outlandish, driving nearly an hour to do a simple radio show, but Gil made me feel like I was bound for Bellevue, padded cell and all. I did my best to hide the sinking feeling in my gut and just shrugged with a grin.

“I loved doing radio. It’s something I want to keep up with, if possible.”

“Hmm.” This particular monosyllabic pondering segued into Gil reviewing my show proposal. Every instinct was telling me that this was now officially a lost cause and I should bolt to the door. A word of advice, true believer: in any interview situation, whenever someone pauses from a line of questioning to review anything written on paper, it is not a good sign. Proceed with caution. “Your show was pretty risqué, no?” My mental Magic 8-Ball was reading “Outlook Not Good” by now. I could offer Gil the Holy Grail at this point and it wouldn’t have made a different.

“It was harmless fun. College students like a good laugh or two while getting ready for an 8:00 AM class.” This comment didn’t even warrant the requisite “Hmm.” Gil went right for the jugular.

“You are familiar with station policy in compliance with FCC regulations, correct?” The FCC. This was my first run-in with those three cursed consonants. While WCCH was legally bound to their regulations, it was still easy to get away with murder on the air (especially between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM; safe harbor hours). Every new DJ viewed those letters while skimming the station rules, but no one at the station ever made a fuss over it. Why would a great white like the FCC bother with a guppy like WCCH? Or WNHC for that matter? To Gil’s query, I simply nodded. “Because of the prevalence of so-called ‘shock jocks,’ the FCC has strict laws regarding on-air content, and we make it a point to abide by these laws. I am very concerned about what is broadcast on my station. I don’t even want to hear the word ‘sucks’ on my station.”

I bit my tongue, trying to keep my jaw in place and not hit the floor. How in the hell do you ban such a timid word? I mean, don’t misunderstand me, I know full well the origin of the word. To say “this sucks” is an abbreviation of the derogatory phrase “this sucks dick.” Or “cock,” whichever tickles your fancy. But I mean, despite where the term derives from, we are talking about 2002 here. The twenty-first century, new millennium and all that. By this point in time, hell by the mid 90’s, “sucks’ had become so distilled through extensive use that its suggestive origins had been all but forgotten by the general public. In fact, the phrase had pretty much been fully assimilated by the vernacular lexicon of our culture.

To this day, I wonder if Gil ever felt that Prohibition was still a good idea.

I also wonder if he knew the fact that the word “jerk” was originally used to describe someone who masturbated too much. Or that a “geek” really meant someone who bit the heads off of chickens. That was where the words started, but where they finished was an altogether different story, much like “sucks.” Kurtz and I had had several discussions over the English language, and how sooner or later, there would be no such thing as a truly taboo word. By this time, “damn,” “hell,” “ass,” and “bitch” had already become acceptable on most television and radio broadcasts, which were the two mediums that were and still are largely unregulated in terms of content. After all, a 12-year-old can get turned away at an R-rated movie, but there’s no authority figure with the exception of parents to bar them from turning the channel to a program that’s rated TV-MA. And by the turn of the century, anything rated TV-MA got a little extra dose of freedom in terms of content. Shows like “Playmakers” and “NYPD Blue” were freely exposing bare bottoms and dropping the word “shit” freely. In fact, “South Park” got away with saying “shit” more than 150 times in one episode without a single bleep. Granted, the geniuses that Trey Parker and Matt Stone are, they did so to prove a point. But nonetheless, it was evident that the reigns of censorship were being gradually loosened by this time in history.

“Words are just words,” Kurtz once said to me. “They mean different things to different people and always will. For you, ‘happiness’ might mean a good job, a loving wife, a nice house and two kids. For me, ‘happiness’ might be a good porno movie that inspires a round of wondrous masturbatory antics. It’s all relative. One day swears will be relative, too. They’re halfway there already. ‘Shit’ could mean a pile of feces or a mere synonym for ‘stuff.’ Trust me when I tell you there will come a point in time where they just won’t be regarded as forbidden.”

“Fuckin’ A,” I remember responding. But as much as I agreed with the good Colonel’s reasoning, I very quickly realized that there would be no convincing Gil that “sucks” was perfectly kosher. Because no matter how much the public had accepted the term, it wasn’t the public’s station. It was Gil’s. If he didn’t want to hear it, he didn’t want to hear it, end of story. He was sitting before me, leaning forward as much as his hefty frame would allow him to without his gut being restricted by his desk. I nodded, fingers in a steeple following his restrictive edict. “Well Gil, it’s your station.” What passed for a smile crossed his face. I had acknowledged his illusion of power, and that had made him happy. It was an in. Maybe not a big one, but an in nonetheless. I could use that to my advantage if I wanted to. I could kiss his ass until a tube of Chapstick the size of Ron Jeremy’s legendary penis would be needed to cure my parched lips. I could still get to do a toned down version of my show, despite the traffic and invisible watchdogs keeping an eye on me at all times. I could swing it.

“Well, then,” Gil began. “Would you be interested in recording a demo?” His entire demeanor had changed. He was no longer hunched forward. He had leaned back, seeming very comfortable and proud of himself as his weight caused the seat to creak loudly. My in grew larger; there was an offer on the table.

“Hmm,” I said as I now leaned back. I rested my elbows on the armrests and folded my hands, looking down at the cluttered desk and nodding to myself. After a few seconds I got up from the chair, shook Gil’s hand, and turned promptly around toward the door. Standing in the doorway, I looked over my shoulder and uttered what have got to be the greatest lie and the greatest truth I have ever told consecutively: “You’re a nice guy Gil, but your policy sucks.”

I’m going on damn near two years I’ve been ranting on this thing, and I think everyone can agree that one common theme throughout the bulk of my writings would be the general stupidity of people. I mean, it never ceases to fascinate me how truly idiotic most humanoids actually are. In one respect, I suppose it’s amusing in a sad, bizarre way. But in another respect, it is freakin’ heart breaking to realize that the overwhelming majority of us hairless apes out there are batting double digit IQs.

And I’m talking beyond everyday stupidity. I’m talking beyond the feeling you get when you’re killing time at the office by playing checkers online and the cat you’re sparring with leaves such a blatantly obvious triple-jump/”king me” situation open, your jaw can’t help but drop in sheer disbelief.

OK, so maybe I take my in-office procrastination habits a little too seriously (and believe me, you would too if you had my job), but you get the picture. Sometimes people just don’t make any apologies for their idiocy. It’s like playing Texas Hold’Em with a rounder and grinning when you’re dealt a pair of bullets. You don’t leave yourself open! You put your best poker face on and let him scratch his head.

OK, I’ve already churned out two tangential analogies, so you’re probably wondering where I’m going. Well, in this instance, I’m going to Wichita. No, wait… I meant Florida. ‘Cause I cannot fathom the sheer incompetence of people who decide, “Yeah, Florida seems like a good place to set up camp.”

You dolts.

Now, let’s clear the air right now. I’m not bashing America’s geographical shlong because of old people, obscene humidity, the cost of living, crappy drivers, rednecks, recounts, or even Bubba the Love Sponge.

You people get too many fuckin’ hurricanes.

When are you simpletons gonna finally realize that your house has been without a roof for the last two weeks because you’ve been double-teamed by Category 4s. Sakes. I mean, let’s be practical, kids. When two major storms nail your home state in as many weeks, and a third is on the way, you really should consider getting the fuck outta there. Charley, Frances and Ivan just don’t make great neighbors, so doesn’t it make sense to book before they move into that condo you call Miami and tear the place a new one?

And I don’t know about the rest of my fellow bipeds, but I am getting sick and tired of all the support that is going to you people just because you’re too simple to pack a friggin’ suitcase. For the love of Bruce Campbell, show some common sense for once. Evacuate the area permanently and take an express flight to Vermont or something. I have never condoned the concept of rewarding people for their shortcomings, especially when they make the same mistake over and over despite always obtaining an identical end result.

So, in conclusion, while Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Mother Nature all take turns playing with the nation’s wang, I am more than content to be resting comfortably in the nipple region, relatively safe from any and all such masturbatory catastrophes. You really should join me.

Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

I’m well aware that I’ve been out of the loop with ye olde blog, and with good reason, I might add. Before you get all huffy puffy with li’l ol’ moi, I’d just like to say in my defense that I have been in and out of jobs, continually on the prowl for employment.

Baby, it’s a friggin’ jungle out there. I hate to resort to clichés, but it’s the damned truth. I didn’t believe it either until I jumped in headfirst to start swimming with the sharks. Of course, when you’re constantly dog-paddling, trying to get adjusted to the water, those big-ass great whites are either A) waiting to devour your ass, or B) disregarding you because you’re way too miniscule for their time.

The job market is desperate right now. I could go on and on about who’s to blame, but I would just be spinning my wheels. The bottom line is that it’s ugly right now. Any of you who have just recently graduated know this. Hell, some of you who graduated a couple years ago (like myself) know this as well. And I’m one of the select that has gone on to pursue a postgraduate education. I have a Bachelor of Arts in English with a focus in Creative Writing and a minor in Business, and a Masters in Business Administration in Marketing.

And I’m only working part time.

I haven’t been here for that long. Just shy of a month, in fact. My first job out of the box was essentially a sales position (although the company was billed as a “promotional marketing firm”). Long story short, I was driving 45 minutes from Waterbury to Hartford to be in the office by 7:30 AM, and then after an hour and a half of meetings, workshops, and the like, it was off to Greenfield, MA; more than an hour northward of the office. I was doing this five days a week. I trained for one week, and then did it by myself for one week. At the end of that fortnight stint, I called it quits. I wasn’t even paid for my training, which I was lied to about.

So why did I take this job? Well, chalk it up to naïve optimism, as I was promised everything from a six-figure income in six months to running my own business in a year. I am not exaggerating, that is what was set on the table in only my second interview. When you’re 23, fresh out of school and having never worked a full time job before, that sounds pretty tempting. Well, needless to say I took the bait, and boy, did I pay for it. I never claimed to know it all, and I am more than willing to admit my shortcomings and mistakes. This, needless to say, was a big one. One that, in all honesty, I have yet to get over.

I won’t go into the gory details of my two-week-stint, but I will say that it set me back about a month for various reasons. And in the weeks that followed that month, I began to realize how bone dry the well is.

Now when I went for my MBA, I was fully aware of the difficulties in the job market, and the contemporary economic state. I figured that by the time I finished my studies, the market would have shown some significant signs of improvement. I wish I could have a definitive yes or no to my presumption, but all I can say is that if it has improved, it’s been by baby steps rather than the leaps and bounds I’d prayed for.

At the rate things are going in this nation, the amount of education a young person will have to have in order to get a reasonable entry level job will take the individual well into his or her early 30’s. I simply can’t fathom that. We put so much pressure on ourselves as a nation and as a people to succeed that we feel the need to push one another and ourselves to the furthest imaginable limits in order attain that level of accomplishment. And personally, I think it’s getting more than a little bit out of control. My cousin and I are the only two in the family that have our MBAs, and we have had several conversations about how nowadays, such a degree is being regarded as the bare minimum one needs to get a decent job. In another fifteen or twenty years, the bar will be raised up to a Ph. D.

I feel like we just push ourselves, and our children way too hard. I mean, my old grammar school has computers now. Shee-it, back in the early 80s, we did it with a pencil and paper. What are these schools trying to do? Ensure that all of our future doctors will have crappy writing by never making them use a writing utensil? Kids should be kids. Let them roam free and have fun, the rest will come in due time.

Perfect example: I have a cousin living in the Dominican Republic with his wife and one-year-old son. The kid isn’t even out of diapers yet and he’s already being tossed headfirst into school. He already has language and music lessons lined up for him on a weekly basis. Language and music lessons at a year old? Whatever happened to playtime, naptime, recess, that stuff? Did that just get tossed out the window? At what point did we say, “Our children don’t deserve to appreciate their childhood like we did, so let’s deprive them of fun and shove them straight into school”?

My parents often bust my stones for being a big kid at heart, but I can’t help it. I wish I could go back to my youth. That’s why I write about so much “kiddy” stuff here. That’s why I still watch cartoons, read comic books and play video games. I really don’t think that’s a crime.

Look, I’m all for education, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a fine line that is very slowly being crossed. There’s another aspect to life. It’s called “living.” You should try it, and you should encourage your kids to try it, too. There is plenty of time for education, work, and all that business, trust me. Let them enjoy their childhood, for Pete’s sake. It’s only fair to them.

Personally, I like George Carlin’s philosophy on children: “I think that every child should be allowed three hours a day of daydreaming. That’s all, just daydreaming. And you could probably use some, yourself. Just turn off the video games, the TV, the stereo, and just sit and look at a fucking tree for a little while.”

And on that note, I’m gonna neglect the rest of my duties at the office for the remainder of the day so I can stare out the window.

Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Y’know, believe it or not, sci-fi once referred to potentially thought-provoking sociopolitical commentary layered under an imaginary high-tech blanket. There used to be pretty serious points to these films, often of a controversial nature. In fact, one of the reasons that Rod Serling opted to make The Twilight Zone as weird as he did was the fact that he would be able to cloak his Aesop-esque messages in a veil of the unknown. It worked astonishingly well, and serves as a perfect example of how the genre can actually offer quite a bit in terms of serious filmmaking.

But alas, it would seem that the intentions of writers and pioneers like Phillip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov have been tragically lost in a sea of John Woos and Jerry Bruckheimers. Like just about anything else, science fiction has been engulfed, digested, and crapped out by Hollywood.

I recently read an article claiming that nowadays it’s nigh impossible to actually make an intensely thoughtful sci-fi flick. Meaning that unless there’s about half a dozen explosions in the first fifteen minutes, replete with the latest, greatest state of the art CGI aliens, it’s simply not good enough for Hollywood.

I’ll give you a perfect example: I recently took in a viewing of I, Robot, which was, for all intents and purposes, fair at best. I’ve seen better, I’ve seen worse. The effects were solid, but y’know something? After seeing utterly mind-blowing special effects in literally every other movie at the box office (thank God for M. Night Shyamalan), I’ve become more than jaded to Hollywood’s high tech muscles, regardless of how often they are blatantly flaunted.

The film makes an attempt at conveying a serious message. It’s pretty much the same woe that’s illustrated in at least half of all sci-fi romps these days: the threat of man’s over-reliance on technology. Yeah, the robots, while subservient for half the movie, ultimately develop a conscience and go hunting us humans. Been there, done that, Cameron did it better in The Terminator. Fact of the matter is that Asimov’s original book I, Robot, which was a series of short stories (none of which bared any close resemblance to the film’s storylines), was actually a commentary on mankind’s inhumanity. Asimov achieved this by providing us with humans so sleazy and distrustful, that the robots come off as being more civil than us carbon-based life forms. Simple, but effective. But for whatever reason, Hollywood decided to reverse this plot point and doll it up with some big time effects. The end result is another typically “eh” movie that leaves the moviegoer feeling as if the $5 bag of popcorn is half empty as opposed to half full.

Now granted, sometimes even the most sophisticated connoisseur of sci-fi craves a balls-to-the-wall action flick. I mean, hey, I’m totally psyched about Alien Vs. Predator, and the damn thing’s not even rated R. But what I’m trying to say is that the film industry has methodically distilled the genre into a subdivision of action movies, whereas it should stand on its own unique pedestal.

I guess it was inevitable. I mean, in a genre where there are few limits, it only make sense that a lot of people would want to make it larger than life. Things really took a swerve in the 80s following the end of the Star Wars Trilogy (which, for the record, is more science fantasy than science fiction). From there, the public was inundated with big budget sci-fi flicks in rapid succession. The Terminator, Aliens, Predator, Robocop. And those four movies are in just a three year timeframe from ’84 to ’87. And of course, we can’t forget the inevitable sequels, only one of which managed to match if not surpass its predecessor (Terminator 2: Judgment Day). But the rest were made solely to nab a profit, and it’s pretty obvious.

In fact, the concept of sequels is perhaps the worst thing that could ever happen to science fiction. I mean, how can you duplicate something special? It’s not easy to do. Take Escape From New York, for example. At the time (1981), a very original plot with solid action and a definite anti-government undertone. A well-done flick. But it’s sequel, Escape From L.A., might as well have been a carbon copy of the original. In fact, with the exception of the setting, characters, and obvious advances in special effects, it’s the exact same film, I shit you not. And that’s pretty unfortunate.

And if you think sequels are bad enough, remakes are even more stomach churning. Only in Hollywood could the original Planet Of The Apes, which was a surprisingly heavy commentary on all of mankind’s cornerstones: social status, politics, religion, race, nothing was safe. And it was well acted to boot. At the end of the film you felt both proud and guilty to be human. The remake was standard issue schlock, completely devoid of any real purpose other than to showcase Mark Whalberg’s six pack. Over the top, erratic, and sloppy. And don’t even get me started on The Stepford Wives. What was originally a creepily paranoid sci-fi thriller somehow wound up becoming a dark comedy. Huh? Even worse, the plot twist from the original movie (the fact that wives are being replicated into clean cut cookie cutter versions of themselves who are practically perfect in every depraved husband’s eye) is given away in the goddamned commercials! In the original film, all the audience knew was that something was dreadfully amiss in Stepford, and that was it. This would be the equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock letting everyone know that Norman Bates is actually “Mother.” Who greenlighted this project and what are Oscar winners doing in it? I swear, Paramount Pictures must have sprung its collective brain to think this was a good idea. I guess I should be happy that Logan’s Run is being remade by an intelligent and competent filmmaker in Bryan Singer. I guess.

And forget trying to translate a book into film. That’s a tough enough process as it is, but when you’re trying to turn sci-fi literature into sci-fi film, that’s an even bigger gauntlet to tackle. This is why Dune is a literary classic and not a film classic. Sometimes you just can’t make that transition. And when filmmakers do try to make the transition, the end result is, more often than not, so different from the original source that the filmmakers will actually say that the movie was inspired by the book, rather than adapted. Aside from I, Robot, another good example of this is Blade Runner. Now this is one of those funky cases where the movie maintains a certain intellectual charm, as it raises major questions of being (is Deckard a replicant?) and humanity (Roy Batty’s final monologue to Deckard). However, there is so much more in the original source, Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, that to make a truly accurate recreation of the book would be to make an entirely different movie. In addition to the above questions, racism and religion are also among the many, many topics touched upon in this fine book. It’s downright astounding that some of the dialogue in the film is actually taken word-for-word from the book. Some treatments are even triter in their “inspiration.” For example, The Time Machine may as well have been a quasi-original creation that was merely influenced by a prior work (kind of in the way that Apocalypse, Now draws brief, modernized parallels with Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness). Taking all this into account, it’s no surprise that Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park went from a case study in chaos theory to a Spielberg extravaganza.

So where does this leave sci-fi in the world of big budget blockbusters? To be truthful, I’m not sure. I’m not so sure that a movie like 2001: A Space Odyssey could be made nowadays without completely flopping. I mean, recent films that have actually offered the spice of classic sci-fi, replete with serious underlying messages and thought-provoking plotlines (Contact, Minority Report) have been met with lukewarm reactions by both audiences and critics alike. I would like to think that there is still hope for the genre. As I said, it offers so much freedom. The limits are only as strong as the writer allows them to be… In many cases, the creator may even feel free to tamper with the linearity of the world he or she creates. It’s things like this that make pure science fiction a truly marvelous genre. It’s just a pity that Hollywood can’t see that point.

Goodnight, and have a pleasant tomorrow.