The Movie Industry

So about ten years ago my husband and I had the pleasure to see this wonderful Asian film called Internal Affairs. It was a movie about an undercover police man who discovers that there is a mole for the drug lord working on the police force. Each man is worried that they will be discovered and it becomes a race of who can find the other first.


Sound at all familiar? Try an award winning movie starring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DeCaprio, Matt, Damon, Martin Sheen, and Mark Walberg. Yep, you guessed it. The Departed.

Imagine my surprise 35 minutes into this new American movie, with an all star cast, that is nominated for several awards including Best Picture, Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Film Editing and Best Adapted, to find out that I had already seen this movie. According to Reelviews.net (Retrieved 2009-10-17), critic James Berardinelli awarded the film four stars out of four, praising it as "an American epic tragedy." He went on to compare the film favorably to the onslaught of banality offered by American studios in recent years. "The movies have been in the doldrums lately. The Departed is a much needed tonic," he wrote.

The problem I had was not with the movie being remade, it was that little credit was given to the original and that Scorsese got credit for originality, though the movie was identical to the Asian masterpiece, minus the Asians.From the blocking to the wardrobe the film was nearly identical. Unfortunately the liberties taken such as texting to communicate in The Departed verses Morse Code in Internal Affairs, deflated the quality of the movie.

Without changing the screenplay, it did not have the same affect in translation as the moving, thrilling, Asian version. Disappointed I barely was able to finish the movie, which was adapted from one of my favorite movies.

While perusing the channels late night, just a year after I discovered Internal Affairs, I stumbled across another foreign work of art, a French movie called Le dîner de cons or known as The Dinner Game or Dinner for Idiots. It was the funniest comedy I had ever seen. It was about a man who met a savant, who built landmark sculptures from matchsticks, and invites him to a dinner, The dinner is a contest of who can bring the biggest idiot. Everything that can go wrong does and the comedy runs rampant.

Sound familiar? Yes, you got it. Steve Carell is playing the unwitting idiot in this summers big film Dinner for Schmucks. Did you realize this was a remake? They are not publicizing it, Again I am disappointed in the lack of credit, but have not yet seen this film to say how similar it is to its French parent or if it is even worthy of comparison.

Topping my list of disappointments is the fact that the film industry has had almost no original ideas. I got a flyer advertising the summer’s upcoming block buster’s as the list was:

 Little Fockers (a sequel)

 Shrek Forever After (a sequel)

 Iron Man 2 (a sequel)

 The A Team (an adaptation)

 Sex in the City 2 (a sequel)



Worse, here are the upcoming movies this year:

 Batman 3 (a sequel)

 Eclipse Movie (a sequel)

 Harry Potter 7 (a sequel)

 Last Airbender (an adaptation)

 National Treasure 3 (a sequel)

 Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (a sequel)

 Resident Evil 4 (a sequel)

 Transformers 3 (a sequel)

 Tron Legacy (a remake)

They also plan to reboot several other movies such as Spider Man and Superman. They seem to be just milking us to make a profit. It is so sad that all America is contributing to the great art of filmmaking now is copies. Imagine a world where every painter only painted the Mona Lisa, but in their own interpretation.

This is not about foreign films being better than American, though they are definitely more original. This is about the creative people in the world wanting a chance to make art, while instead the money is used to create Terminator 43 or Baywatch Returns. This is about directors, actors and movie companies rehashing old, unoriginal material, again and again.

PS: If a movie based on Baywatch comes out, remember it I called it here first.

My Inroduction and 1st topic: Phishing

Today, I was reading about blogging on my home page. Little did I know, until this afternoon, I had not truly understood this web phenomenon. After reading the article, I decided that I, as a writer, may genuinely enjoy this activity and as a writer, others may too.

The plan for this blog that I am constructing is to open a fair and friendly forum for topics of our culture, no matter how frivolous, that plague our minds, disrupt our days, bond us together, and generally make us a society. These can be negative or positive because as everyone knows we enjoy, whether we admit it or not, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We appreciate sharing tears of joy as much as we revel in tears of sorrow.

I will say right off that I am a mother, but will promise not to dwell simply on parenting; there are plenty of those sites already. Generating a venting session is also not part of my vision for this blog. I am not necessarily world traveled and ingenious, but I feel I can bring an interesting perspective from the general public (or…maybe, I just have too much time on my hands).

Fair warning I also love playing devil’s advocate, because I believe that more than one perspective should be revealed, therefore my blogs may not always be my own view. Remember I said my goal was to create a ‘fair’ platform of ideas.

Now on to my first topic: Phishing scams. We have had email for the better portion of 25 years now and the internet for even longer. In this wonderful age of technology information travels incomprehensibly fast. Almost upon birth of our ability to contact virtually the entire world via cyberspace the revelation for a new type of con was also born. The level of anonymity that could be achieved had been unmatched previously and when the ability to transfer funds electronically arrived, well, crooks celebrated.

Alternately, word of such conduct spread almost as quick and security procedures and tools spawned from the rampant crime scene. Not only were people alerted and educated against such villainous schemes, ever-evolving technology was designed to block or track offenders and laws then developed which prosecuted acts of stealing (i.e. identity theft) via the web.

This was all several years ago, I understand, but do these dishonest people really think that we have forgotten their shenanigans? My spam box still receives at least 10 emails a day from people claiming they are employed by a foreign bank that has some incredible amount of money for me, for whatever crazy reason, and that all I have to do is send them a few bits of personal information to receive my fortune.

I must admit they have gotten wiser. My emails now come from Dr. Robert Water, Andrew Tweedie, UPS, or even the FBI, but the content is still the same scam. Usually not only are they obviously unrealistic, they have grammatical and spelling errors galore.

Though the scams may have been exposed a decade ago, our defenses against such attacks are still in place and our awareness has not subsided. In fact, there are now paid advertisements on television about identity theft and everything financial from insurance to credit cards come with privacy statements.

We know our rights and I find it hard to believe that this is a lucrative scheme these days. I suspect that anyone desperate enough to fall for this has to be desperately low on funds already, thus not allowing much thievery to take place.

In closing, my question is not why do these criminals still even bother, because obviously they must still score at least intermittently, but why, with all of the afore mentioned advancements, are they still able to try? Also, why would we, knowing that the internet has the potential to render us vulnerable, enter such a realm without arming ourselves with at least information?