‘Saboteur’, (1942)

How devastated I was! To discover once again the barren wasteland that typifies Hollywood’s creativity bucket. I’m channel flipping and come to the end of a movie on TCM. The hero for some reason is advancing on the bad guy at the top of the Statue of Liberty. He’s got a gun on him, yet when the bad guy falls over the rail and is barely hanging on, our hero tries to save him! Well then why were you holding a gun on him?!

Regardless, you see the coat sleeve of the guy in peril slowly bust its seams, then he falls to his death from atop a national monument. That keen computer-like mind of mine kicks in and I think, “Didn’t Hitchcock do this in ‘North by Northwest’, 1959? Yep. A trip to IMDB reveals he didn’t just do it in Saboteur and North by Northwest, he did it nine other times! Yeah! Hitchcock made the same movie 11 times! Incredible. 11 films of the common man wrongly accused fleeing across the country seeking to clear his name (and falling off various famous landmarks I presume).

Oy. They say an author just keeps writing the same story over and over in different forms. At least Harper Lee (Mockingbird) was honest and just wrote one book. People, and that’s assuming Hollywood types are people, respond to positive reinforcement. The reason Hollywood keeps putting out crap, is they make money at it. If people would quit buying tickets to bad movies, and quit watching bad TV, Hollywood would have to change. Way too many people cannot grasp the concept of “voting” with your wallet.

Here are the flat out remakes and different incarnations of the same character currently at local theaters: Spider-Man, Despicable Me, Planet of the Apes, Wonder Woman, Transformers, Cars, The Beguiled, Guardians of the Galaxy and Pirates of the Caribbean. Goodnight that’s pathetic. Why do people SUPPORT bad? I don’t get it. It’s like in our government, we see an ever-growing  collection of idiots and crooks driving our country into the ground. Here’s an idea, quit electing them! I hate being drug down by a nation of fools. I make enough of my own mistakes, I don’t need yours compounding it.

A check of the local channels replaying old TV shows reveals a similar lack of quality. While they may be “original”, they’re certainly not very good, and definitely didn’t age well 30, 40 and 50 years later. Shows like How I Met Your Mother, Night Court, Doogie Howser, Sanford and Son, 2 1/2 Idiots. Its ridiculous. I think back over the 60 years or so of television and what survived well, and once you get past the westerns and some cop shows, there’s only a handful of shows that stood the test of time. Heat of the Night, Police Story, Leave it to Beaver, Adam-12, Brady Bunch, Gilligan’s Island, It Takes a Thief and a few others are the only ones that come to my mind.

Admittedly, taste is demonstrably generational. I’ve heard reports of younger people that purposely watch Saved by the Bell and Friends. And there are older people that enjoy I Love Lucy, for reasons unknown. Nevertheless, I will forever maintain that there is nothing but a tumbleweed blowing across Hollywood’s collective mind. I suppose that would explain the popularity of the various “reality” TV shows. Shows that took Hollywood out of the “creative process”.

Then there are shows like ‘Ghost Whisperer’ that we’ll probably never know why it was popular.