An Open Letter to Hollywood

Dear Hollywood,

While I know that your first purpose is to make enough cash to fund your lavish, overly manicured, and sordid live, I'm sure you understand that I am your most important customer and that my pleasure comes entirely before that of your own. So, with that understood, I've noticed a few things recently that have disturbed me, and I'd like to offer you a few critiques and suggestions to help you produce better content and be more successful in the future.

1. Stop with the live-action versions of classic cartoons. You do an acceptable job taking comic books and translating them to the screen, probably because of the more realistic style of artwork predominate in that art form, but you've done a largely dismal job with cartoons. While movies like X-Men were passable and Sin City was quite good (with the exception of casting Rory Gilmore as a whore), movies like the Chipmunk movie and Underdog are offensive to the sense of sight for every good child of the 80s and 90s. Cartoons are heavily stylized in their art and rarely come anywhere near realism. Despite this, most cartoons turned into live action seem to aim more for realism and in this ruin the entire movie. People fall in love with cartoons as much for the way the drawings look as for the stories. Probably more so at times. Could you imagine the Simpsons in live action? I don't care how great the script was, the magic is ruined by the real actors. Even if you painted the actors yellow, you're just making them look like they're suffering from liver failure. In the two current examples of this genre, Underdog and Alvin and the Chipmunks, realism is attempted and in both they fail miserably. Underdog doesn't even stand on two legs and instead of being a shoeshine boy is apparently an actual family pet. Lame. The Chipmunks look nothing like the child-sized, tan things of the original and instead look more like large rats. It's more creepy than realistic. They could literally stand on Dave's breakfast plate. Also lame.

It's true that there has been occasional success in this genre. I think the live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas was very true to the original Dr. Seuss vision, but I am just talking about the visual aspects. I've never seen more than a few minutes of the film, but K says they ruined the feel of the story with some of the added gags, but the characters themselves actually look like Dr. Seuss designed them. Hollywood, until you can stay true to the original design as well as the as you did with the Grinch on a regular basis, please stop ruining my childhood.

And Mr. Lee, I love your work with Kevin Smith and in My Name is Earl, but please stop aking crap. It hurts to see you debase yourself this way.

2. The next suggestion isn't so much a complaint as a comment on an obvious missed chance for publicity. Horror movies are huge these days. They're often relatively cheap to produce and bring in reliable box office sales. I don't watch horror movies. My sense of empathy is too well developed to handle anything more gruesome than Silence of the Lambs. I can dig a good psychological thriller, but the gore fest does nothing for me. However, I'm perfectly fine with horror movies being made and being successful. I'm perfectly aware that not everyone shares my taste for mainland Chinese cinema, movies about birthday party clowns being raped, and films about East German rock star emigrants who suffered from botched sex changes. In fact, I like that not everyone shares my taste because it gives me an avenue to feel superior to the average person. I need that. I think everyone does.

The problem here is that the movie industry isn't taking advantage of real life horror stories to promote their product. Serial killers are real. Why aren't studios sponsoring the actual serial killers. Sure, it's bad publicity, but do you think that would actually stop anyone from going to a movie about the slow torture and eventual murder of innocent teens? I don't think so. Instead the media would really blow this thing up and you wouldn't even have to run television ads for this. It'd be featured news daily. Now, I know that serial killers aren't all that easy to find. For one, they really aren't all that common. For another, they typically don't want to be found. I understand that, so I've got a backup plan for when a good serial killer just can't be found to leave cryptic notes taunting the police with ads for your film featured prominently throughout. They do tend to get caught, just like that pig farmer in Canada. Why don't you sponsor the defense for guys like that? Pay them and their lawyers to namedrop the film during press conferences, maybe even get them to wear clothing promoting the film in court if the judge isn't some prude who takes the justice system seriously, anyway. I think you as an industry are really missing out on this one.

3. Finally, I think it's time that Hollywood clears its bad reputation as a liberal hotbed. The truth is, there just aren't that many liberal politicians who once made their living as actors or directors, but there are plenty who ended up in the Republican fold. Ronald Reagan, before he slept through meetings and threw up on foreign dignitaries as the leader of our country, was an actor who once co-starred with a chimpanzee. Arnold Schwarzenegger may not be the prototypical republican, but he does have the membership card in his wallet as he leads Caleeforneeyah. Charlton Heston, before being the leading lobbyist for the right to bear arms used to pretend to be a block of wood in a variety of films. Current Republican candidate Fred Thompson starred in some TV show no one has ever heard of.

Despite this, Hollywood keeps pretending to be liberal and producing films like The Cider House Rules promoting the butchering of unborn babies and movies teaching young girls to give up the happiness brought by being wives and mothers to take up lives of sin and sodomy. And God forbid we have to watch another movie about the plight of poor people. Poor people suck. Sure, we see all these hip stars out protesting for liberal causes, be we never see their ballot, now do we? I say the movie industry give up the pretension of being liberal and start making pro-gun, anti-abortion, and anti-poor people cinema. I can just see a great based-on-a-true-story film about the heroic Minutemen guarding our borders from illegal immigrants. It could be an uplifting story about a young mother choosing not to abort her unwanted child. Her thinly veiled resentment of the child leads him to join the Minutemen and he ends up retiring with the top kill tally of Mexicans since the Mexican-American War. It almost brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.