“What if they Lived?” is written with such an impression of profundity and grace that it’s hard to imagine it being anything other then such an eloquent piece of speculative non-fiction. “What if They Lived?” is a lengthy tome of work that could have very well been exploitative nonsense as if drummed by the hackiest writers South of TMZ, but with two genuine movie lovers at the helm, “What if they Lived?” results in a four hundred page oath to the rising talent and quickly destroyed stars that were taken from us much too soon. From Jean Harlow, to James Dean, right down to Brandon and Bruce Lee, “What if they Lived?” speaks with experts and historians and examines a life had these talented thespians and ingénues been given just a little more time to shine on and explore their career options rather than fade away in to a sad and often tragic demise.
One of the chapters I skipped to immediately was Brandon Lee a man capable of hitting all of the high notes his father Bruce Lee once did, and while the one real caveat within this chapter is not exactly pin pointing all of the roles he had impending (including a role in “Mortal Kombat” and an inevitable running for a key role in “The Matrix”), we’re able to see much of what he had optioned and what he was capable of.
With “Scream 2” you can pretty much sense Craven and writer Williamson struggling to create a sense of atmosphere that they did with the original. And the movie series that claims to dodge the slasher clichés while also mocking them, eventually became so clustered with attempts to bring audiences a new experience they pretty much relied on clichés and a formula they streamlined in the original. We have someone offed in the beginning, we introduce the old cast, we get to meet a new cast of characters, someone is killing the cast members, Sydney has to find out who or whom is doing the killings, a load of red herrings are thrown at the audience, there’s the obligatory thought that perhaps one of the original three cast members are behind it, and then there is the grand stand off in the climax where we’re given a bunch of “gotchas!” Officers and all authorities are also immensely useless.
In the past three years there has been a boom in versus films. And that’s primarily attributed to the boom of the direct to DVD industry that relies solely on gimmicks and plagiarism to fuel its economy and one of the primary cash cows of the market is the versus gimmick. We’ve seen every monster fight every warrior this side of folklore and what we see with “Battle Los Angeles” is pretty much soldiers versus aliens. In fact with less money and star power, Jonathan Liebesman’s film could very well have been titled “Aliens vs. Soldiers,” a roughneck balls to the wall action science fiction film that just doesn’t try too hard to bring us in close to its characters.