The Semi Large Show - Movie News and Reviews

Welcome one and welcome all to The Semi Large Show. The Semi Large Show is your one stop shop for everything and anything that is coming up in Hollywood. We spend a lot of our time learning about the newest projects that Hollywood is working on and, well, tell you what's good and what's bad.

The current topic at hang going on in our Semi Large world is how bad was Hollywood affected by the writer's strike? It seems that the only films that are currently coming out are either A) remakes B) sequels or C) "rewritten" stories. A good example of C would be Scarface. They took an old film about bootlegging and updated it to cocaine with Al Pacino. Not that there is anything wrong with this style of movie making, but you do have to realize that many of us who go to the movies have seen so many by now that watching something that views a lot like something else is a waste of our time and money. A prime example of this would be Never Back Down, which is basically a remake of The Karate Kid.

Hollywood has become very lazy in their approach to tackling new projects. They seem to be using "create your own movie script" templates similar to what many internet marketers do nowadays when creating a sales page. They type in the name of the characters, the love interest, the antagonist to the story, and hit submit and bam, they have themseles a new movie.

As for sequels, sequels are barely ever as good as the original. There are a few exceptions here and there Aliens and Terminator 2 being examples of that, but for the most part the sequel is never as good as the original. Look at Die Hard 2, it's the worst one in the series.

Staying true to topic I've decided to rant about the current bandwagon scripts that are popping up all over. Examples of this would include Never Back Down (the MMA movie) and the variety of films that have popped up about poker. Hollywood seems to see a trend coming and says "Hey, people like watching it on TV so why wouldn't they like seeing a movie about it?" And then the writer hammers out some quick script during his morning coffee and presto we have ourselves a new film out. And, of course, it does well on opening weekend as all of us bandwagoners shuffel ourselves into the theater to get a peak at the latest new trendy movie. Thankfully movie reviewers are around to tell us how terrible these films are so the movie quickly bombs the next weekend and is out of theaters by week three. Although, the new trend seems to be going straight to DVD.

Ever wonder what happened to Dolph Lundren, Seagal, Van Damme, or Wesley Snipes? Check your local video rental place and you'll find all their newest films. The same is happening with many of these bandwagon films. People go to their local rental spot and see some new movie about <insert popular activity here> and they pick it up as a rental. That's what happened to me with Never Back Down. I like MMA and thought hey why not so I picked it up.