Quote:
Originally posted by Fugee
It's been hot here and I've been cooling down in the evenings at the local cheap last-run movie theater.
I had the misfortune to see "Friends With Money" on an evening when I just wanted a light and fluffy chick flick. That movie was baaaaaaaaaad on so many levels. It didn't even have the requisite chick flick feel-good ending.
So Str8, how does a movie end up so lame? Maybe it was the casting -- Jennifer Anniston didn't fit as the loser friend because she didn't seem like she'd be friends with the rest of the women.
Or the lame plot. Do you think it might have started out as a semi-decent script and been rewritten into crap?
This is only one example of the bad movies that get made. Who decides to pour millions into making a bad movie? And why?
There have to be better scripts floating around Hollywood.
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There are certainly lots of terrible movies out there. The ultimate reason is sometimes "too many cooks": The writer's idea gets interpreted by the director, whose vision gets reshaped by the studio. Or in some cases, nobody really has any strong vision whatsoever. The biggest offender of this that I've seen in recent years is the Stepford Wives remake.
Other times, movies get the "greenlight" before a script is even written -- Adam Sandler wants to do Movie X, and wants his friend to write it, and wants his other friend to direct it. Sony will be making and releasing Movie X on 4000 screens.
Still other times, a studio is determined to make a movie based on a book that a certain producer or studio executive likes -- regardless of whether that book can be made into a good movie or not -- and even regardless of whether that book can be adapted into a promising screenplay. This is usually the case where a studio has won a bidding war for rights to this coveted book (Michael Crichton's Timeline comes to mind -- also, there was no way that "Lemony Snicket" was not going to get made -- not saying that that was bad . . . ).
Other times, a movie gets the green light just based on a promising idea, or the fact that it has potential to be a franchise, or could sell lots of merchandise. The upcoming "Transformers" movie was given an early green light, I believe, before anyone had seen a script.
All that said, I thought Friends With Money was pretty good. It rang pretty true -- I identified with a lot of that crap, especially the part where you leave an event and spend the car ride home deconstructing what everyone said and basically gossiping about the other people. My wife and I do that all the time -- I never did that before I lived in LA.
