Back to blogging, and the first thing I do is complain about something? (Guess that shouldn't really come as a surprise, huh?)
So I'm reading this month's Premiere magazine and it's their 2005 Movie Preview issue. There are, of course, several movies I'm looking forward to seeing… Batman Begins (DESPITE the boring batmobile and because it's about time they revisit the bat and rinse the taste of Batman & Robin from our mouths), Episode III ('cause I'm a sucker for punishment, I guess), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hey, the last one was REALLY good!), Fantastic Four (I'm detecting a theme here), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (ok, so I'm a sucker for the fantastic!) and this week's Elektra.
And, up until I read the preview, I was looking forward to The Legend of Zorro.
After all, what's not to like? I thought The Mask of Zorro was great fun, it's got Antonio Banderas & Catherine Zeta-Jones and the same director, Martin Campbell (who did a great job on this AND Goldeneye)… how can they possibly screw it up?
Well, how about the seeming inexplicable tendency for directors of this type of adventure film to feel the need to insert an annoying precocious child into their sequels! I cannot understand this. What, they thought it worked so well for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? (EASILY the weakest of the Indy movies.) They didn't learn from watching The Mummy Returns? (A movie I told everyone would suck as soon as I saw the annoying child in the trailers.)
What IS the idea here? (Even the preview in Premiere pointed out that they seem to be looking to sitcoms for inspiration with this idea.) Not that I'm blaming the kid in these films. It just seems that once they put a kid in, they dumb everything down to take into account, I guess, the child audience supposedly flocking to see a hero they can relate to. (I guess we could make an argument for the romance angle… there's a lot of romancing going on in both Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Mummy. So a kid would be a natural progression? Except, of course, that Temple of Doom is a prequel and there's a different love interest. Aside from that, it makes perfect sense.)
So this time we get Zorro, ready to hang up his spurs and be dad, when trouble rears its ugly head. And Elena, worrying about what effect this swashbuckling is going to have on their child, leaves him so we can get all kinds of "wacky hi-jinks" about Zorro as a bad dad and getting drunk… god, the more I write about this, the worse it sounds!
AH well, maybe it won't suck. Stranger things have happened, right? I mean, Aliens had a precocious kid in it and THEY pulled it off, right? So how bad could it be?
Somehow, I think REALLY bad is going to be the answer.
So I'm reading this month's Premiere magazine and it's their 2005 Movie Preview issue. There are, of course, several movies I'm looking forward to seeing… Batman Begins (DESPITE the boring batmobile and because it's about time they revisit the bat and rinse the taste of Batman & Robin from our mouths), Episode III ('cause I'm a sucker for punishment, I guess), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hey, the last one was REALLY good!), Fantastic Four (I'm detecting a theme here), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (ok, so I'm a sucker for the fantastic!) and this week's Elektra.
And, up until I read the preview, I was looking forward to The Legend of Zorro.
After all, what's not to like? I thought The Mask of Zorro was great fun, it's got Antonio Banderas & Catherine Zeta-Jones and the same director, Martin Campbell (who did a great job on this AND Goldeneye)… how can they possibly screw it up?
Well, how about the seeming inexplicable tendency for directors of this type of adventure film to feel the need to insert an annoying precocious child into their sequels! I cannot understand this. What, they thought it worked so well for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? (EASILY the weakest of the Indy movies.) They didn't learn from watching The Mummy Returns? (A movie I told everyone would suck as soon as I saw the annoying child in the trailers.)
What IS the idea here? (Even the preview in Premiere pointed out that they seem to be looking to sitcoms for inspiration with this idea.) Not that I'm blaming the kid in these films. It just seems that once they put a kid in, they dumb everything down to take into account, I guess, the child audience supposedly flocking to see a hero they can relate to. (I guess we could make an argument for the romance angle… there's a lot of romancing going on in both Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Mummy. So a kid would be a natural progression? Except, of course, that Temple of Doom is a prequel and there's a different love interest. Aside from that, it makes perfect sense.)
So this time we get Zorro, ready to hang up his spurs and be dad, when trouble rears its ugly head. And Elena, worrying about what effect this swashbuckling is going to have on their child, leaves him so we can get all kinds of "wacky hi-jinks" about Zorro as a bad dad and getting drunk… god, the more I write about this, the worse it sounds!
AH well, maybe it won't suck. Stranger things have happened, right? I mean, Aliens had a precocious kid in it and THEY pulled it off, right? So how bad could it be?
Somehow, I think REALLY bad is going to be the answer.
Comments
sucker.
Q