If we're adding to the noise... (Or Movie sequels, prequels and other such assinine ideas)

History is doomed to repeat itself, just like we're all doomed to turn into some reincarnation of our parents. This is all tied up in the fact that no high-grossing box office hit will escape from some form of sequel or future remake. Don't mistake me, I own Shrek 1 and 2 and plan to buy 3 at some point in the future and the same goes for the Spiderman movies. Superhero movies like Spiderman cry out for a sequel; they are the movie versions of the badly adjusted women in our lives who can't stand to be single for five minutes. I'm as excited as the next guy (unless the next guy is my little sister, who is even more excited) for "Dark Knight" the next Batman movie. I'm thrilled that Hellboy is getting a sequel simply because the main problem with the first one was that the technology wasn't advanced enough to do it justice, so I think that this new one will be much richer and more believable. I am constantly amazed, however, at which movies get sequels and which don't. Thank God that most romantic comedies get to run single. Think of how awful a "you've got mail 2" would be. It makes me want to cry when I go see sequels that make me like the first movie less. The sequels to "Pirates of the Carribbean" have left such a bad taste in my mouth that I have to make a concious choice to forget about them when I rewatch the first one. The same applies to the Matrix so-called trilogy. I can summarize each movie in one sentence. Matrix 2 consists of a car chase scene. Matrix 3 is entirely Neo fighting agent Smith in the rain while some dude shoots an unreal amount of ammo at squidlike robots. That's it. Screw the Matrix trilogy and go watch "Equilibrium," which is a shoot-em-up dystopia starring sexy Christian Bale to boot. Thank God that didn't get a sequel.

Damn Star Wars Special Effects

I can trace the implosion of the Matrix trilogy, and the subsequent failure of most recent Sci-fi movies to the post-apocolyptic-like effects of the ideology behind the special effects departments of the Star Wars prequels. Other people have already addressed this ad nauseum, so I won't bore you with the details except to say that the strength of the original Star Wars movies was not the jaw dropping special effects or the ability to create digital races of aliens and robots. The Star Wars movies, especially New Hope, blew people away with its story and the characters. Yes, the Star Wars universe is pretty awesome and I was pretty obsessed with it for a while (I usually pretended to be a female version of Han Solo when we played Star Wars as kids. Who wants to be a princess when you can be a space pirate?) but the universe would lose its meaning without the flesh and blood people who inhabit it. Thus, the reason why the prequels suck and I lack respect for ANYONE who thinks that they're better than the originals, is because they got so wrapped up in special effects that they lost the story. And by the time they realized what they had done, all they could do was create more special effects to distract us from the lack of story. ("Hey, hey, look over here at this really huge fish!")
Addendum: I am a sucker for the second movie, for which I beat myself regularly.

Beautiful Mess

I know that blogs are a dime a dozen, so I won't even discuss that. A professor once told me that having a blog is a really good idea for a writer, so I suppose this is long overdue. It's beyond me who would read it, but who am I to be self-deprecating?

So thought for the day: I cannot ever live in Rockford. Not in peace, anyway. Here's why:

Human beings are messy. People are messy. From what I can tell, nature can tick on pretty well by itself, most animals don't need us (unless they're cockroaches who have migrated to Chicago) in fact, when we whine and complain about nature, it's not about nature itself, nature is fine, it's us whining about us. We're the ones destroying the environment, we're the ones making animals go extinct (to a certain degree, natural disasters also do this, so keep that in mind.) Overall, people are messy. And I'm messy, very messy. I think people spend as much time making messes in their lives as they spend on damage control, depending on the ratio of how messy one is, of course and how much time we have to clean. In fact, we can't fix our messes completely. We can mop them up and sweep them under the rug, but ultimately our greatest fear is that other people will discover how messy we really are. Isn't that why so much of the church seems so artificial? It's because we're messy people trying to pretend that we're not.

Yuck. This leads me to why I cannot live in Rockford. Beloit, Rockford and Janesville are the three major cities closest to me. I would rather not live in Beloit (and technically I don't, I live in Turtle township) but I would live in Beloit because there is something gritty but honest about Beloit. B-towners know exactly how crappy Beloit is, and they don't try to hide it or make apologies for it. We are what we are. Janesville, on the other hand, is very nice and they know they are very nice and they are cool with becoming nicer and expanding and knowing that they have things they ought to fix and change like everyone else, but at least overall they're very nice. Rockford, however, is a strange hybrid of the two. Rockford is two-faced. On one side of the river, they're very nice, oh, they're better than nice. They have everything your little heart might desire. But on the other side of the river. Eew. But that's still Rockford. In fact, that's original Rockford. No matter how hard I squint while I'm looking at the corporate, upscale half of Rockford, I can't avoid seeing the Rockford on the other side. Rockford is messy, and they pretend that they aren't, and I can't stand that.

This messiness is something that I will probably be thinking about for a while, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, if you're thinking about moving to Rockford. Don't.