Tag: john huston

There Is No Such Thing As A ‘Reboot’

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I saw the new Godzilla yesterday. I enjoyed it a lot, but I’ve been weirded out for months over the fact that I’ve had to call it something I’ve never had to call a Godzilla film. Just like how I recently had to call a Bond film something that, in 50 years of recasting and returning to ground zero, I’ve never had to call a Bond film.

I’m all for specialized vocabulary. Film needs its own exclusive words to describe its own processes, but ‘reboot’ is not such a word. I’ve asked people time and again to define it, and I’ve read about it online—god help me, I’ve even read the Wikipedia page for it. It’s just not a real and distinct concept. It’s a cheap marketing buzzword, that’s all it is. And more than that, the very existence of the term is symptomatic of a rot at the core of contemporary filmmaking.

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10 Movies Nobody Has Seen (Because Nobody Cares About Them)

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Sometime in the year 2000, I went to the movies, and I don’t even remember what I ended up seeing because one of the previews left such a profound mark on me that what followed has been erased from my memory.  The preview was for Under the Tuscan Sun, and when it came on all I could think was, ”who the fuck would ever want to see this movie?”.  That moment crystalized my understanding of the irrelevant.

The movies on this list are not famously bad like Plan 9 From Outer Space.  And they’re not notorious flops like Ishtar and Bonfire of the Vanities.  In fact, there’s nothing remotely memorable about them.  They just sort of exist, but it’s hard to believe they do, because nobody talks about them.  In a way, they’re much worse than awesomely bad triumphs like The Room and Troll 2, because those movies at least found an audience.  These movies are so wholly uninteresting in every way that they aren’t even worth making fun of.

If you’ve seen any of the following movies, please let me know.  You’ll be the first person ever to have seen them, and will be given an award as their respective patient zero.
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An Interview with B-Movie Filmmaker Jack Perez

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You might not have heard of Jack Perez, or his many aliases, but you’ve probably heard of his work.  Jack directed Wild Things 2 for TriStar and the pilot for the popular cult TV show Xena: Warrior Princess. His film Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is a staple of the B-movie resurgence of the last decade.

Jack has one of the rarest jobs on earth—he’s a working director in Hollywood.  The DGA represents just over 14,000 directors.  They say in SAG about 5% of the union is working—I’d probably halve that when talking about the DGA.  And remember, for every one of those 14,000 there is literally thousands upon thousands of people dying to get in.  Directing is an elusive job, everybody knows a director makes a movie but almost nobody—lay people and cinephiles alike—really have any idea about what the job actually entails.
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Always Finish the Goddamn Movie

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I live by a couple of rules in life: the early bird catches the worm, treat others as you would like to be treated, once you go black you never go back, and always finish the movie you started no matter how goddamn horrible it is.
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