Timewaster's Guide Archive

Real name's Chris Hogan. I live in Newcastle, England. I'm a History BA graduate with a load of additional fiddly qualifications including library management and teacher training. Right now I'm trying to get out of my current dead end position and find a career as a history teacher.

In a TWG context I've been a role-player & wargamer since the late 80s. Love sci-fi films & zombie movies. I also maintain a couple of downright kludgy webpages I'll have to update to something more 21st c. sometime.

In many respects I'm a classic 'soft subject' (ie: non sciences) geek. :-/

Unfortunately as a society we are losing all creative ideas.  Just thing about it, how many songs, shows, and movies are remakes to older books, songs, shows, and movies.  In order to keep people buying into the old stuff redone they have to change it enough in order to have so originality to it.  Most time they use better special effects, different look, and other items of that nature.  This lead so a new futuristic twist to the same old stuff....which most times makes it seem like it is darker then the original

Wasn't the Humphrey Bogart version of "The Maltese Falcon" a remake of the original version of the film? I remember something to that effect in Umberto Eco's "Faith in Fakes".  

Didn't Shakespeare steal most of his ideas from Boccaccio and other writers?
Tolkein? *pfft* He just rejigged the Nibelungenlied  

I'm of the (somewhat contentious) opinion that there are no new stories under the sun, only good or bad retellings of the ones we have. The tendency of Hollywood to "stick with what works" (Rocky 1-5, Lethal Weapon 1-4, etc.) is just the reducto ad absurdem of this tendency...

Weak, weak ending.  The first 2/3 was intense though.

Stupid Spielburg and happy endings.  Letting the son live...grrr.

Spielburg did exactly the same in "Jurassic Park". IIRC that film had Indestructible Children of Doom unharmed by 10,000 volt electric fences.

Unfortunately it seems to be a canon of his filmmaking creed that children and dogs cannot be harmed, even if they do something so stupid as run blindly into the face of a Martian sweep-&-clear operation.  

Pathetic Pollyanna ending by a man who should have stopped making films after "Last Crusade"