Thursday, August 19, 2010

Clash of the Titans

I rented the new Clash of the Titans. I'm somehow amazed at how bad it was, even though everyone had warned me before I saw it that it was bad. It was terrible. And, I understand that some of the problems were that it was filmed in 2D and the conversion to 3D blah blah blah.

No, that's not my problem. My problem is that basically the screenwriters took huge liberties and made fundamental changes to the basic story. And those changes sucked. So, I was thinking "These writers must be awesome, because the myth of Perseus has only been a crowd pleaser since about forever ago. It's only been retold since before there was Jesus." And I started seriously wondering how old the myth of Perseus was. And it looks like it's pretty old. I looked around wikipedia and the web and the myths were be depicted in artwork around 900 B.C.E. It must have been in the oral tradition for a while before that. So, conservatively, this has been retold from generation to generation, painted from one pot and copied to another, transcribed onto vellum and then copied onto more vellum, etc. for around for 3,000 years and it has successfully entertained people. It's got your pathos, ethos, catharsis, and all the other terms I learned in Comp 101.

Well then, how about the writers of the new movie? They must have some real chops. They must transcend generations with their story telling prowess. They must forge masterworks of true genius from mere ink and paper to think that they could improve on such a classic story. Did they adapt Gone With The Wind? Citizen Kane, perhaps? Or maybe even one of the good Indiana Jones movies?

No. They wrote Tuxedo and some movies that don't have pictures on IMDB. You remember, Tuxedo, where Jackie Chan gets a magic tuxedo and does kung fu and stunts. Obviously a classic. According to IMDB it won two blimp awards (that's an award that Nickelodeon gives out, so sayeth the google). Certainly it's a tale that will be told 3,000 years from now on cybernetic holo synth linkups or whatever medium they're using in the future. So, with your wealth of expertise, go ahead. Rearrange Perseus's family tree. Add a new pointless character. Change his love interest, the entire kingdom of Mycenae won't mind. It'll just spontaneously generate or something since you split up its parents.

Idiots.

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