It’s hard to take the wind out of the sails of a remake quite as comprehensively as casting Adrien Brody as the lead in a Predator remake (I can’t remember for sure whether it’s a Predator remake, prequel, sequel or reboot… but frankly who really cares. Are there really people worried about canon in the Aliens universe?). Now Adrien Brody can play evil, something few people know. He did it really well in Oxygen as a serial killer, a movie few saw. But the remake of Predator already has Topher Grace on board to play an accountant slash serial killer. I suspect Topher Grace, who’s a better actor than most people give him credit for, could do it, but that’s not the point.

Predator wasn’t about an alien from space hunting serial killers, that wasn’t even Predator 2. It was about some of the toughest men in a unit going up against a virtually invincible monster from outer space, who could be invisible, who could follow them and kill them one by one. And who could think as well as them. It was about the question of who is the real predator. Man or alien. Now does anyone really think that Adrien Brody as the lead is going to help answer that question? I don’t think so.

Predator was about about testosterone and killing, but Robert Rodriguez seems to have assembled a cast that would play better in a remake of Anaconda. Adrien Brody, Alice Braga and Topher Grace as key figures are not going to make this a movie in which the toughest guys Earth has to offer take on an alien hunter. Instead it seems to be more of the same nonsense that killed the Aliens vs Predator movies. Robert Rodriguez should have been able to get this right, but instead what he’s done is like remaking Commando with John Krasinski or remaking Rambo with Paul Giamatti. Some choices not only won’t work, but also completely miss the point.

And you know they were expecting it to be so upbeat and cheerful too.

To be fair, it’s a David Mamet project, and the man can do dark and intense. But this is also the man who wrote and directed The Winslow Boy, itself a definitive proof that he can frame a work in the proper context. The marriage of Disney and the Diary of Anne Frank always seemed an odd one. It brings to mind an old Saturday Night Live cartoon (well old by the standards of 2009 anyway) that showed what a Disney animated version would look like, complete with Whoopi Goldberg doing the voices. It also seems well, redundant.

The Diary of Anne Frank has been made into a movie, a TV movie, a broadway production and a whole bunch of other things. David Mamet clearly wanted a more contemporary relevant take on it, by tying it to modern day suicide bombings and modern day Anne Franks. And that takes it into the realm of controversy and modern politics, not a place that Disney is comfortable with.

The reason Disney was probably interested in The Diary of Anne Frank in the first place is because it was a known quantity. A story that had been retold over and over again, and sanitized, first by her father and then by generations of movie and TV executives. What David Mamet was probably going for was a lot rawer and riskier, less cheerful and upbeat, less about the power of hope or any other such treacle, but about what human beings do to other human beings. In other words he was taking a safe product and making it unsafe. Is it any wonder Disney put it in turnaround?

You don’t? You would rather see Nicholas Cage do 50 more Japanese rice commercials than do another Ghost Rider? Well too bad, because a Ghost Rider sequel is coming anyway. Marvel and Disney have created an unholy union, and determined that Ghost Rider 2 will come, no matter what you think about it. Marvel, unlike DC, has never seemed to quite grasp that average moviegoers are not interested in movies about their less famous superheroes.

To make that magic 9 figure sum happen at the box office, you need to bring in say 20 million or so people, which means finding 20 million or so people who know who your superhero is and want to see a movie about him. For Spider-Man, who has his own newspaper strip and is Marvel’s most famous hero, that’s easy enough. The X-Men can pass too. But Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Thor or whatever else Marvel wants to roll out, will keep on falling short of the 100 million mark domestic. And to top it off, these characters are a little hard to sell in the first place, especially when your movie is being helmed by Mark Steven Johnson, whose only previous directing experience was making Simon Birch, a movie that John Irving hated rabidly.

A Peter Jackson or a Jon Favreau might be able to make a crowd pleasing movie that will transcend the source material. That’s what happened with Iron Man, but a man in a metal suit who fights bad guys is a lot easier to sell audiences on, than Ghost Rider. Frankly just about anything is easier to sell than Ghost Rider, except maybe Thor. That’s because your summer popcorn audience thinks comic books should be about guys in capes or shiny suits fighting bad guys. And another Ghost Rider movie is another ride down a long dark road to nowhere.

At the end of June, Abrams’ Star Trek is the oldest movie in the Top 10. It has made almost 250 million dollars, a number it will probably pass in the 4th of July weekend. But while the fresh take and the big budget played a role in that, the movie also got very lucky.

When Star Trek Nemesis was released, it came out the weekend before The Two Towers. Without that Nemesis would still not have broken the bank, but the poorly timed release made it underperform a good deal more than it would have otherwise. This time around, Star Trek was released in the spring, a competitive time, made much less competitive by the fortunate coincidence of Star Trek’s key cinema competitors tanking badly.

If Nemesis went up against the unstoppable juggernaut of The Two Towers, Abrams’ Star Trek reboot’s two main competitors, Wolverine and Terminator Salvation, were critical and commercial failures. Not only did Wolverine’s print leak early onto the internet, but the movie itself was terrible. Its failure helped pave the way for Star Trek’s success next weekend. Meanwhile Terminator Salvation, which should have put more of a dent in Star Trek, flopped after its opening weekend. Audiences hated both movies and it showed. And while Star Trek is still racking up millions in the top 10, Terminator Salvation has fallen to number 13 with barely a 1 million to its name last weekend, and Wolverine is way down on number 20 in the low six figures, without being anywhere the 200 million dollar mark.

Star Trek’s reboot got lucky. Very lucky. But it’s worth remembering that luck fades. Competitor studios underestimated Star Trek’s appeal. They won’t do that again. And the freshness seal is off now, and a sequel will have to work twice as hard to bring in audiences, and it won’t be able to count on the proximate comic book and SciFi franchise movies opening around it self-destructing as effectively as Wolverine and Terminator Salvation did.

While GI Joe the Rise of Cobra had a fairly strong opening, leading a lot of people to call it a hit, six weeks in now it’s out of the top 10 and it has only grossed 144 million domestic. Which might not sound that bad, except its actual budget was 175 million dollars. Which means that even with DVD sales, GI Joe the Rise of Cobra is probably not going to make back its budget domestically. The movie did make enough money abroad to double its take, so GI Joe the Rise of Cobra won’t actually lose money, but neither is it the kind of megahit that Hasbro or Paramount might have been hoping for. By contrast the Star Trek reboot, Paramount’s other big spring-screen summer hit, had a heavy 150 million dollar budget, pulled in nearly 260 million dollars domestic. And while its foreign revenues were slightly smaller than GI Joe the Rise of Cobra, the overall take was over a 100 million dollars bigger for a movie with a smaller budget. The difference lies in that Star Trek was a dumbed down version of a franchise, but still fun, while GI Joe the Rise of Cobra had no content at all. The Rotten Tomatoes index reflects the difference in perception. A sequel will no doubt still happen, but Paramount might want to rethink its approach to making another Gi Joe movie, because audiences were not all that enthusiastic about the first one. And while bad American movies continue to do well overseas, see Terminator 4, the overseas market can’t always be counted on as the ace in the Hollywood hole.

No it’s not a joke, it’s Sam Worthington’s claim that Cameron brilliantly made the Avatar trailer suck, so people would go see it in theaters in 3D. Confused? That’s okay, you’re obviously not brilliant enough to get how blowing the marketing on a 237 million dollar movie, the third most expensive film ever made, is actually a cunning plan to get people into movie theaters again. Sam also misses addressing the bottom line that plenty of people who did see it in 3D are also not happy with the whole Dances with Thundersmurfs thing. Cameron promised photorealism that would be impossible to tell apart from real life, a new generation of 3D and an epic moviegoing experience, so far we’re seeing Delgo 2 with cartoonish graphics that aren’t that far ahead of Final Fantasy the Spirits Within, and a predictable Dances with Wolves storyline. At this point Avatar is dancing around the Waterworld, Postman rim. I’m sure Avatar will still have a big opening and pull in money, but it will be a battle to even make back its budget domestically, because Avatar may use 3D better, but it’s nothing all that special. Oh and someone ask Sam Worthington whether Terminator Salvation sucked on purpose too.

Funny People, Apatow’s third directed film, which feels more like his 200th because his fingerprints have been on so many other movies, is set to slip out of the top 20 by next weekend with a take of 50 million dollars. That’s 25 million below its budget, which is confusingly too much for a movie that consists of the main cast hanging around rooms and making dick jokes, but a lot of that was probably Sandler, Apatow and Rogen’s piece of the pie. And so Funny People is a disaster for Sandler, whose career has been slipping into Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy territory, and for Apatow who was supposed to be a sure thing. The marketing for Funny People, with a bland poster that made it look like a romantic comedy didn’t help. But Apatow’s success was based on low budget and gross out appeal to teens. Funny People has everything that makes it toxic to that crowd, a serious story, middle aged whining about the meaning of life that feels like it should star Albert Brooks, and on top of that it cost way too much. If Zohan, Apatow and Sandler’s last collaboration, at least made some effort to pander to its audience, Funny People expects them to show up for the jokes while sitting through Spanglish 2. And it was never going to happen.

For some people Avatar was that mysterious amazing project that was supposed to change film-making as we know it. Unlike District 9, the hype didn’t seem quite as empty, since after all it was James Cameron’s long delayed comeback, and the man is impressive on the technical side of things. Well after long last, the Avatar trailer is here and on the technical side, it looks like a bunch of video game cut scenes, on the story side, it kinda looks like a video game with the plot of Dances with Wolves in space. The moment I saw all the “evil” military technocrats blowing stuff up vs the natives, who will naturally turn out to have more land centered spiritual values to offer the main character, I groaned internally, because I realized that all Cameron had done, was remake Dances with Wolves in outer space, something more than a few reviewers are likely to mention too. And while Avatar might be shiny in 3D, the aliens themselves look like CGI, which is to say shiny, artificial and basically unreal. If Avatar hadn’t been hyped as such a gamechanger, the reaction might not be as bad, but this is not the trailer for a gamechanger movie, it’s just another trailer for another movie.

Though John Hughes died in 2009, his public presence as a filmmaker would end after the failure of Curly Sue. Curly Sue was itself the last in a series of Hughes directed movies that were no longer about angst ridden teens trying to grow up and become adults. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the movie John Hughes is most remembered for, was also his last High School movie. Instead he made a stab at moving beyond High School with She’s Having a Baby, and then dished out generic comedy family fare with movies starring SNL and Second City Alumni like Uncle Buck, Planes, Trains and Airplanes and finally the riskier Curly Sue.

It is ironic that the movies John Hughes is now being most remembered for, are the movies he left behind. It had been 5 years since he had done a teen movie, when Curly Sue came out. Had Hughes chosen to direct the entertaining, but also failed, Career Opportunities, his career might have been remembered differently. Career Opportunities had all the staples of the Hughes formula on the page but not behind the camera. Already widely disliked within the industry, Curly Sue’s failure marked the end of Hughes’ career as a director. But not the end of his impact on American and world popular culture.

Hughes’ scripts still made for wildly popular family entertainment, from Home Alone to Beethoven to 101 Dalmatians. This seemed like a legitimate step for Hughes whose own directing work had moved toward the family centered and away from teenage angst. Only Reach the Rock was anything like the Hughes of old, and it too went mostly ignored. Most recently New Port South seemed to reflect a lot of the Hughes people remembered, except that it lacked Hughes on the page or behind the camera. Still with John Hughes dead, he remains remembered for the movies he left behind, for the teen angst and wildness of The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Just as Doyle remains remembered for Sherlock Holmes and Spielberg for a giant shark rising out of the water. The public’s taste and memory being the one thing that no artist or writer can outrun.

Take a look at the second trailer for Robert Roudriguez’s Shorts, a movie that seems like a good return to Spy Kids territory for him. The first trailer was clumsy, but set up the story. The clips whetted your appetite. And then comes along the second trailer to show you the entire movie. What movie studios often don’t seem to get is that in their own eagerness to overawe you with a trailer that packs in every single major moment in the movie, they are playing “Watch this movie in 30 seconds” instead. And what that does is kill your anticipation to see the actual movie. The second Shorts trailer is a prime example of how not to make a trailer, not because it’s a bad trailer, but because once you’ve seen it, it feels like you’ve seen the whole movie. And then why bother going to see it at all?

So the Red Dawn remake is going forward with a Russian and Chinese invasion, though the Russians probably are not Communist, unless it’s taking place in the future or an alternate universe. But Communism wasn’t that important to the plot of Red Dawn. Just about any totalitarian occupation force would have done the same things and made for a similar story. Last time around the forces were Russian and Latin American Marxist. The scenario will have to be rejiggered, but at least MGM didn’t set up the bad guys as being Blackwater mercs answering to neo-cons who took over America, see Jericho or 24. I suspect the main reason for that is Obama’s victory. If McCain was in office, we’d be rolling on Blackwater for a movie no one would want to see. Why the Chinese this time around? The obvious answer is that China’s aggressive censorship and trade bans of American movies have made China bashing a safe proposition for Hollywood again, see Dark Knight. When a country says no to pretty much any movie that doesn’t star Will Smith or a cartoon panda, there’s no down side to kicking it in the face.

The one thing Roland Emmerich can do really well is blow stuff up. Want to smash a hole through a bunch of midtown skyscrapers? Sure. Want to freeze half the planet? Doable. How about having aliens blow up the White House with a giant energy beam? Done and done. Now how about the Mayan calendar destroying the Earth? Easy as pie.

But of course it isn’t Emmerich doing the exploding, but the FX department. Which raises the question of what exactly Emmerich contributes to the process, except close up shots of bad actors pretending to care about explosions that will show up on the green screen behind them when the whole mess vomits up into theaters. The thing is though that the appeal of Roland Emmerich disaster movies has declined with each phase. Sure part of the problem is that finding stuff to make the world go boom is getting harder. From the pretty straightforward aliens to Godzilla, we wound up with global freezing and the Mayan calendar. Oh no run! The Mayan calendar is coming to get you! (I’m pretty sure I made that joke before, so just chalk it up to a Critic “Cruise Control” moment.

But audiences are easy enough to bore by tossing the same bunch of special effects at them, with a different cause and better texture modeling. So can we stop blowing things up now and actually try to tell a story?

It has a 19 percent Rotten Tomatoes meter rating. Its star announced that it would take a genius to understand the script which makes no sense at all. It runs for a drawn out 144 minutes, which makes for slower audience turnover and fewer showings. It’s also been named the most blooper laden film of 2009. And we’re not even mentioning the racist gap toothed robots or the wrecking balls.

And it also made almost 300 million dollars in only 2 weeks. So far it’s the highest grossing movie of 2009. Depressingly enough it’s going to take a serious amount of work for any challenger to topple it. It has the biggest Wednesday opening ever. It only barely lost out to Dark Knight for the five day record. And it’s completely retarded. With a script from Orci and Kurtzman who view plot as a four letter word, and directed by Michael Bay, Transformers 2 Revenge of the Fallen, is big, loud and senseless. Which is why it might be making all that money.

You don’t need a brain to watch Transformers 2. You don’t need to worry about whether you’ll like it or not. There’s nothing there to like. There are attractive people running around the screen. Lowest Common Denominator jokes. Lots of special effects and stuff exploding. Sure no one bothered to put the whole thing into a movie, but as Transformers 2 shows, you don’t need to go to all that trouble. Just toss the basic elements out there, hype the whole thing like mad, and make sure you’ve got everything for someone. Robots for the kids, Megan Fox for the teenage boys, wrecking balls for retarded people and air conditioning and a chance to turn off their brains for everyone else. It’s really that simple.

1. The concept of a Terminator movie is pretty simple. Take one John Connor. Add a Terminator looking to kill him. Throw in a Terminator looking to protect him, though this one is optional. Do not make a Terminator movie without an ongoing Terminator antagonist looking to kill John Connor. That’s like making a James Bond movie without a James Bond villain. The movie will fail. And so will you.

2. If John Connor is in the future, then he is the leader of the human resistance. It’s that simple. The human resistance does not have A-10’s. It is not living in a Mad Max future. It does have futuristic technology at its disposal, including energy weapons and time travel. If you try to make a really expensive version of a Mad Max movie with none of these things, what you will get is a really expensive Mad Max movie that everyone hates.

3. John Connor is American. Yes I know you got away with it in Dark Knight, and people are still cracking jokes about Bale’s voice. But Batman is an iconic figure. Connor is a person. You actually pay attention to him as a human being, more than just an animated statue. If he sounds like a British actor with a throat problem, he distracts you from noticing how terrible the rest of the movie is. Note, this may actually be a good thing.

4. Terminators do not think they’re human. Terminators do not need human beating hearts. The Resistance does not use magnetic mines, which would blow up anyone with an artificial leg or carrying an assault rifle, but dogs to spot Terminators. Skynet was not looking to create human Terminators before Judgment Day. Skynet does not know about Kyle Reese. Skynet does not need to take human form to talk to a Terminator. It can just swap out his chip and reprogram him. I would go on but my head is starting to hurt from the sheer stupidity of it.

5. Do not, and this is very important, use a post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel where nothing really matters and everyone is miserable, as a guideline for creating a tentpole SciFi franchise action movie. This will make audiences miserable and make your movie fail. It will not get you taken more seriously as a director. Trust me, it won’t.

That will be all for now.

What do Adventureland, I Love Beth Cooper and 500 Days of Summer all have in common? They were all billed as smarter and better teen, twenty something movies. And they all bombed at the box office. Badly. Adventureland barely scraped together 16 million. I Love You Beth Cooper barely has 15 million to its name. 500 Days of Summer couldn’t even manage 7 million. And while you could blame 500 Days of Summer’s failure on a first time director, I Love You Beth Cooper was helmed by Chris Columbus who had directed such hits as Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire. Adventureland was written and directed by Greg Motolla, who had scored with the Judd Apatow written Superbad.

So what went wrong here? Overthinking the movie might have been part of the problem. With its surreal visuals, 500 Days of Summer was a music video playing a movie, and a little too over the top for most people. Adventureland and I Love You Beth Cooper had recognizable female leads, and unrecognizable male leads. A problem that 500 Days of Summer suffered less from, but still did suffer from. That might be a symptom of Hollywood relegating the girl to the second spot in mainstream movies, which might also be a mistake.

But maybe the whole nostalgia for the 80’s movie that both Adventureland and I Love You Beth Cooper reflect, their longing for the days of John Hughes so much so that in places both play out as pastiches of his movies, that can’t relate to their target audience. I Love You Beth Cooper’s soundtrack alone is loaded with Alice Cooper, The Hives and the Scorpions, a combination that screams “middle aged making a high school movie”. Adventureland exists in a world similarly out of time. 500 Days of Summer moves a little forward, but hardly all that much. And the final sad truth is that there’s enough overthinking going on, that there’s very little entertainment to be had.

The Alice in Wonderland trailer is probably the latest and best argument for why Tim Burton and Johnny Depp should call it quits and go do other movies. Johnny Depp is a talented actor and can seem to open any movie big, so long as it doesn’t have the name Tim Burton before the title. Meanwhile Alice in Wonderland was doing well on the buzz for its first bits of art, until the trailer came out dominated by Johnny Depp playing the Mad Hatter as a transsexual escapee from Cirque du Soleil. The Mad Hatter isn’t meant to be the star of Alice in Wonderland, and Johnny Depp has once again made a freaky acting choice that backfired. Depp’s weird acting choices can pay off, The Pirates of the Caribbean movies are the best example. But then there was Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake that most people have already forgotten, where Depp decided to model Willie Wonka on Michael Jackson. This time out he seems to have gone one better, or worse. The thing is that Tim Burton’s movies need grounding, and Depp is not the guy to ground a movie, instead he’s the guy to make it that much crazier.

The viral marketing is here. The posters are up. And it’s all set to go. And yet somehow I don’t give a damn. Maybe it’s because Neil Blomkamp has been endlessly hyped as the next big thing, since Peter Jackson adopted him and along with Microsoft tried to find a studio willing to blow 150 million on a first time director. There’s no doubt he’s a decent set person and animator, but District 9’s trailers have done nothing to convince me that he can do a movie. And they’ve done nothing to convince me that I should care about the movie itself. From the shaky cam uber-reality to the rejiggered Alien Nation premise that doesn’t seem to go anywhere interesting, District 9 seems like an obsessive exercise in South Africa trying to deal with its social problems through a trite alien metaphor, rather than an interesting story. I’m sure plenty of Europeans have said the same thing about American movies, and they’re probably right. But District 9 still has no appeal for me. And I suspect it won’t do well in American markets either.

Sure Warner Brothers executives won’t be going without their yachts, at least not unless they decide to greenlight “Body of Lies 2: Now With More Lying and Extra Fat Crowe”, but the Harry Potter movies may be sinking. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince only took a week to fall out of the top spot, with the added indignity of losing to a bunch of animated hamsters. Sure a 200 some million consolation prize isn’t bad, and records have been set. But “one week and you’re outta here four eyes” isn’t what the trends were predicting. Of course Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince fell victim to Warner Brothers determination to squeeze as much juice out of the boy wizard by slicing and dicing the final movies up into so many pieces, that it would be safe to greenlight “Body of Lies 3: Crowe Gets Even Fatter”, but between the squeezed budget and the burden of being a movie version of a franchise that the author has already ended, Harry Potter isn’t doing as well as it should. This should also carry a warning to Warner Brothers’ attempt to cash in on The Hobbit by turning it into two whole movies.

And the seas wept blood, and the oceans vomited up fire, and most everyone involved in the first two Scream movies is headed right back to make Scream 4, long after the teen horror movie trend it helped resurrect died, and the teens who did see it, have their own kids already. Yes Scream 4. Sure no one went to see Scream 3, but that’s not going to stop Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson from making Scream 4 anyway. Both men saw their careers kick into high gear with Scream, only to waste that juice. Kevin Williamson at least managed to keep it together until Teaching Mrs. Tingle tore it all apart. Wes Craven didn’t even seem to bother, trying for one stab at the mainstream with a Meryl Streep movie, then giving up and just letting anyone remake his classic movies.

Meanwhile Courtney Cox and David Arquette have run out of enough things to do, to make them head right back to the project too. No word on whether Neve Campbell has so little dignity as to follow suit. At least most of the rest of cast can be thankful their characters are dead. The original Scream was a successfully funny and even scary movie. Each sequel drained away the funny and the scary, instead going lamer and lamer, and the teens that would have once watched Scream are too busy with the Saw movies.

And the shame of it is that the original Scream was actually a good movie. The first time Wes Craven came in and ran that opening reel with Drew Barrymore for us, it was obvious that he had a winner. And the reason Scream worked was that it did a good job of balancing the kind of direct horror you see these days in movies like Vacancy or The Strangers, with humor and decently rendered supporting characters, and a mystery with a twist. No monster, no retarded boy, no deformities, just bored kids with a vicious grudge and no trace of morals. The same kids who today go to Saw screenings, and terrorize random strangers on the internet who annoy them.

There can’t be a Scream 4, because it’s no longer relevant. After the first few Scream murders, it’s all too obvious that we’re already living in a Scream world.

It has a 19 percent Rotten Tomatoes meter rating. Its star announced that it would take a genius to understand the script which makes no sense at all. It runs for a drawn out 144 minutes, which makes for slower audience turnover and fewer showings. It’s also been named the most blooper laden film of 2009. And we’re not even mentioning the racist gap toothed robots or the wrecking balls.

And it also made almost 300 million dollars in only 2 weeks. So far it’s the highest grossing movie of 2009. Depressingly enough it’s going to take a serious amount of work for any challenger to topple it. It has the biggest Wednesday opening ever. It only barely lost out to Dark Knight for the five day record. And it’s completely retarded. With a script from Orci and Kurtzman who view plot as a four letter word, and directed by Michael Bay, Transformers 2 Revenge of the Fallen, is big, loud and senseless. Which is why it might be making all that money.

You don’t need a brain to watch Transformers 2. You don’t need to worry about whether you’ll like it or not. There’s nothing there to like. There are attractive people running around the screen. Lowest Common Denominator jokes. Lots of special effects and stuff exploding. Sure no one bothered to put the whole thing into a movie, but as Transformers 2 shows, you don’t need to go to all that trouble. Just toss the basic elements out there, hype the whole thing like mad, and make sure you’ve got everything for someone. Robots for the kids, Megan Fox for the teenage boys, wrecking balls for retarded people and air conditioning and a chance to turn off their brains for everyone else. It’s really that simple.