Pop Off: films lacking originality

With thousands of movies being released every weekend, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to come up with original stories. It has come to the point where one would call “Sinister” a found footage haunted house psychological horror film. Thirty years ago, it would just have been called horror. It seems like every corner of every genre has been made into a movie sometime or another, and in movies today we see a lot of plot recycling and reliance on franchises, also known as sequels. Here are several stories that I haven’t seen on the silver screen yet, and would really like to. And if any of these actually already exist, please let me know.

Something that never ceases to be fascinating is dreams. And while “Inception” is regarded as the quintessential dream movie, my issue with it was it almost made too much sense. Dreams are random, illogical and confusing, not structured and mapped. I’d like to see one of somebody traveling through and cataloguing their strange and surreal dreams. There doesn’t need to be a big overarching story about finding or extracting information out of someone’s mind. Dreams are interesting enough, and I’ve yet to see a film that successfully recreates the images of the subconscious.

One genre that’s definitely run out of ideas is the romantic comedy. We’ve seen everything: couples that love each other, hate other, love triangles, squares, octagons; it’s all getting old. Here’s something new: we have a couple in perfectly healthy relationship, then they travel to a parallel universe (bear with me) and find out their parallel selves are worst enemies. They realize the reasons for them hating each other are fairly sound and question their relationship once they return home. Yes, it’s crazy, but there’s a lot that can be done with it.

Biopics have always been fun subjects for movies, and it seems a different notable American produces one every year, with “Lincoln” set to come out next month. Someone who has been overlooked and really deserves a movie is Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was one of the leading American generals in World War II and was president during the early years of the Cold War as well as the Civil Rights Era. Not to mention the speech he made on his last night of presidency is pure cinematic gold.

A popular source of movies is young adult novels. “The Hunger Games,” “Twilight” and arguably “Harry Potter” have been some of the biggest movies of the past decade. One novel that hasn’t received an adaptation and absolutely deserves it is “Redwall.” For those unaware, “Redwall” is a series of novels that tells action adventure stories through anthropomorphic woodland animals, because they’re more fun. It’s smart, sophisticated and has some of my favorite literary characters of all time. I’ve been waiting for it to become a blockbuster animated feature nearly a decade now; some beast please make it happen.