Monday, January 24, 2011

I'm bothered

So, I'm not going to review any media today, though I think if you haven't seen the PBS/BBC series "Sherlock," you definitely should. Today I'm going to talk about one of my pet peeves.

I like to read entertainment blogs. I enjoy ew.com, popcandy.usatoday.com, tvline.com, aintitcool.com and other sites. One thing I've noticed is that several blogs like to have the occasional articles about why certain things are not popular with the movie going public. Some examples include "Why don't people watch westerns anymore?" "Why aren't people going to see star-driven movies?" "Are comic book movies on their way out?" etc. Then they go on to say that people aren't going to see these types of movies because of the genre or because they are played out.

I saw one the other day that posited, "Is America ready for second-tier superheroes?" It drove me crazy. America is ready for good movies. People went and saw "Iron Man" because it was a good movie. People didn't go and see "Daredevil" and "Electra" because those movies sucked. People stopped going to westerns because Hollywood stopped making good ones. People stopped going to Batman movies in the nineties because "Batman and Robin" was awful, not because people were tired of Batman. They came back to the theater once Christopher Nolan made some good Batman movies.

Now to be fair, plenty of good movies make no money. But never do I see those movies as examples in these articles. It's always "Sex and the City 2" didn't make any money, so American women must not want to watch movies made for them.... NOO. It's because (from what I hear) the movie sucked hard. Women will go see "women movies" if they are good.

People went to see a western in droves recently. The new "True Grit" is one of the highest grossing westerns of all time. Why did people suddenly want to watch westerns? Because the Coen bros. made a good one.

Here's another example, bloggers always ask, "Do people not want to watch sci-fi on tv? They watched "Lost" but they didn't stick with "Heroes" or "FlashForward" or whatever the sci-fi show of the moment is. NO, people love sci-fi. Look at the top grossing movies of all time. Most of them are sci-fi/fantasy. It's because "Lost" was good and those other shows weren't.

So, sorry to go off on this rant. But I just find it so lame that these articles keep finding their way on to the Internet. Are there any blog topics that infuriate you? Perhaps ones that go off on pointless rants...