R.T. Reviews on LAST HOUSE...

Suddenly, the NY Daily News is now my favorite newspaper for movie reviews. Here's why:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/movies/2009/03/13/2 009-03-13_zero_stars_last_house_on_the_left_remake.html

That's right, zero out of five stars! If only critics were in charge of the studios instead of the idiots they have nowadays.

Exactly. The public are actually saying this right now on the failure of Watchmen. People hate that movie. I do. We've had enough of it already.

And here's why I love my newspaper: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/movies/reviews/63084 95.html

It seems what Hollywood needs to do is better marketing of what they are trying to sell. That and parents need to recall the ratings are there for a reason.

Why is there a big blue naked guy in the movie? Because it was in the graphic novel. Why are two superheroes having sex in an air ship? Because that was in the graphic novel. Point blank, this movie was made with readers of the graphic novel in mind and not many people other than that. The contents of the film are not the problem, the planning and marketing of it was.

See, the graphic novel was 360 pages long. By rule of thumb in screenwriting, the movie would be 6 hours long. No one will pay to sit through that. What should have been done is the movie could have been shot in installments of 3 2-hour long movies or 2 3-hour long movies, or it should have been a TV mini-series for HBO. Another factor was that this is a movie for die-hard comic book fans, and since certain content had to be removed so the movie would fit a decent time frame, some fans were up in arms, while others were just glad the filmmakers tried to keep it as close to the comic as possible. So the movie is no really a failure because it's too arty or too smart, but because Alan Moore was kinda right about the material he wrote was best as a comic book and wouldn't translate well as a movie.

Then there's the rating. Parents need to be like parents again. In the movie trailer, it states right there about what contain in the movie gave it an R-rating. If parents still let their kids go see it, well it's their own fault for their offspringing being mentally messed up in anyway from what they saw. And what is with parents who bring kids from age 6 months to 5 year olds to R-rated movies? Seriously, whatever happened to the concept of babysitters? Are parents that paranoid about pedophiles that they would rather scar their kids mentally by letting them see images they can't cope with yet?

And there's the marketing. Warner Bros. released a DVD of "Watchmen" as a "motion comic", in which they took art straight out of the graphic novel and added limited animation and voice-overs (sure enough, it was 6 hours long thanks to the 360 pages of story). They should have promoted the hell out of this DVD. That way, people would have had an idea what they would be getting themselves into when they entered the theater. Quite simply, this movie was just one fo those adaptation where you HAD to read the original source material to get the concept of what is on the screen.

Should Hollywood stop green-lighting big budget movies with smart and arty undertones? No. They just need to figure out how to sell the product better.