August's Morons of the Month

First a correction: Last month, I mistakenly identified Toronto Councillor Doug Ford (the brother of Mayor Rob Ford) as the Deputy Mayor. In actuality, he's just a close cohort.

ANYWAY...

• The Republicans/Tea Party for blaming Barack Obama for America's band-aid solution to the debt ceiling crisis, when the right wing went out of their way to obstruct Obama's more constructive plan, OUT OF SPITE.


• Toronto Councillor George Mammoliti for vowing publicly to hunt down all "communists" in the city. Yes, I'm serious.


• London Police for allegedly shooting dead an unarmed man, planting evidence to claim that he had shot at them first, regularly harassing and abusing coloured people and the lower class, and then wondering why the city rioted.


• London Anarchists for hijacking a major protest and using it as an excuse to burn everything to the ground, just for kicks.


• Michelle Bachmann for proclaiming that women must submit to their husbands (and people wonder why I compare the Christian Right to the Taliban), and being such an idiot that she thought that August 16 was Elvis' birthday... when it was actually the day that he died. (I'm not an expert on American pop culture either, but if I were running for president... I would look this shit up!!!)


• Hollywood for continuing its mission to remake every single film ever made... by announcing a remake of Dirty Dancing. This is particularly dumb when you consider that this is less than ten years after the sequel Havana Nights came out, which was almost a remake anyway.


• Christie Blatchford, The National Post, Michael Coren, and various conservative trolls for waiting mere hours after the cancer death of NDP/Opposition Leader Jack Layton, before calling him a manipulative opportunist, communist, and pedophile (even with no proof of any of those things), and attacking his family and supporters for having the nerve to grieve for a man who had just died on that morning.

Copy and Paste (Remakes)

From my count, by the end of 2008 there will have been about a dozen remakes. This isn't counting movies that are just adpatations of novels, or what have you. I don't believe that unlucky thirteen is a record year -- that dubious honor probably belongs to 2006 -- but it is very telling that of the approximately 600 remakes that have been filmed over the years, over a third of them were made since 2000. In other words, if you feel like every other movie in the last ten years has been a rip-off of some other picture, it's not just your imagination.

What I really don't understand is why someone thinks that certain remakes are a good idea; why were The Omen and Psycho shot-by-shot copies of their predecessors? Why are Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street being remade, when the existing series still make money? How could they even think of redoing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, especially with the exact same script that the original had? All of this goes way beyond paying homage, it's just plain laziness.

I've known for quite a while that society openly discourages thinking outside the box, but this is ridiculous -- especially considering that remakes are very often embarassments to far superior films. Things have gotten so bad that any day now I expect to hear that Adam Sandler and Eddie Murphy will star in a reimagining of Lethal Weapon, or that Uwe Boll will redo Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill with Pamela Anderson, Carmen Electra, and Lindsay Lohan in lead roles. Should any of this come to pass, we're officially in a peculiar level of Hell.

On a personal note, what sometimes makes this particularly annoying to me is that on the side, I make movies of my own. Original movies -- no sequels, no adaptations, no remakes. But, since they cost practically nothing to make, and are only available on an obscure website, no one knows that they exist, and about as many are interested in buying them. Meanwhile, all that you see commercials for these days is the latest clone to come from the Hollywood cookie-cutter. There's all the proof you need, that companies are trying to control what you think. Enough said.