Directors Ruining Hollywood

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As a movie lover and one time wannabe filmmaker, I’m a picky person, and as a person who appreciates the fine are of filmmaking or what was once known as filmmaking, it’s very hard to find a good director these days in this cultural wasteland and utterly creatively challenged industry, but among the rare good visionary directors, there are plenty of bad directors whom are basically ruining the art of filmmaking under their siege. Here are a list of directors that are tarnishing filmmaking.

With this article, I ask to them, stop. Stop what you’re doing and go away.

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Comfort and Joi [Paperback]

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ComfortA dissection of film theaters which are compared to airport terminals, general disillusionment with movie-going and how the magic is gone, musings on pop culture and lack thereof, the disappearance of our pop culture traditions that spawned a generation of well cultured masses.  All in one-hundred and thirty pages? How is that accomplished? In one utterly engrossing passage, Dougherty riffs on how directing and making a film, which was once such a demanding task, is now reduced to a mere mundane ability thanks to technology. Author Dougherty makes two things clear during this novel; that Joi was both an actress with great potential who never reached the upper echelons of Hollywood royalty she had the potential to reach due to circumstances that were both beyond her control and due to her own behavior, and she was very beautiful.

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Sin City (2005)

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Cannibal teens, psychotic hookers, talking dead bodies, yellow skinned child rapists, and a disfigured psycho with an affinity for trench coats. The third corner of hell? No, it’s all mundane in Sin City, thus is the oddities presented in the Frank Miller created series of graphic novels. Miller set forth a legacy in 1991 when he created a series of incomparable visionary graphic novels called “Sin City” which had no superheroes, no intergalactic madmen, and no demonic entities, only the horror of mankind and the back alleys of the worst city in the world.

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Kaena: The Prophecy (2003)

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Ultimately, I wanted to like this movie. I really, really wanted to love it, on the contrary, but damn it, I just couldn’t, because Within twenty minutes of the movie I had this very grim sour look on my face and I was just so disappointed. Judging by the trailer and pictures from Entertainment Weekly I thought this would be great, I love fantasy, I love the genre of it, but this just wasn’t anything good. Forgettable, and just plain bleak, too bleak for a child’s cartoon. Not even teenage boys are going to like this, and the reason is it’s just so damn confusing.

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Mansquito (2005)

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This is the hybrid we’ve been waiting for, the combination of the mosquito and man that not even the best filmmakers could manage, Mansquito! I can just imagine the pitch meeting for this film at the studios. It’s comedy gold. Regardless, this is the kind of shlock drive-in movie you would have loved to see back in the fifties, though it follows along the vein of past movies plot-wise. The premise sounds cheesy even after considering it came from the Scifi channel who are now known for cheesy flicks, but it’s actually an interesting movie. I didn’t hate it. I was surprised also that Lorenzo Lamas wasn’t in this flick since he usually is in about every other Scifi Channel flick… maybe he was holding out for more money. After a new strain of disease rivaling west nile hits a worldwide epidemic, scientists are now working on a new antidote researching mosquitoes. A convicted murderer is being transferred to the lab to become a guinea pig for the antidote, but when he breaks free he raises hell in the lab and ends up being doused with experimental liquids.

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Ray (2004)

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098e000fd2ecc5b5e85103b7c53Ray Charles was a man who took the limits of his skin color that kept him down at the time along with his disability and used it to his advantage with his pure musical genius, his ability to reach beyond the musical genre and discover all sorts of facets of music experimenting. The film directed by Taylor Hackford is a bittersweet inspiring tale of Ray Charles’ life, love, and struggle with drug abuse. Charles played by Jamie Foxx in an amazing performance, is portrayed with the humanity and flaws that give this film the reality it needs and never pulls back. Charles himself picked Foxx after a rigorous test of piano skills and approved him personally, and the film manages to convey all of Foxx’ skill in its entirety.

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Man on Fire (2004)

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ManonFireThe remake of the 1987 obscure action flick with Scott Glenn, Denzel Washington takes the mantle this time around as Creasy, an ex-soldier whose committed gruesome crimes and is desperately trying to seek penance and is constantly haunted by the fact of his crimes. He applies for a job to guard a very important business man’s daughter since there have been a rash of kidnappings under the rule of a mysterious mob boss, but when she’s Creasy is ambushed, shot down, and blamed, the girl kidnapped. he’s now on the hunt to find her and will stop at nothing to make all the people involved suffer miserably. I’ve never seen the original film starring Scott Glenn, so advantage: Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean this movie was anywhere near a ball to watch, especially since it’s far from anything I expected. You know, like a movie with a plot? What, you say, there is a plot! Show me it and I’ll credit you.

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