The End of the Age of Sequels

It was a very short period of time where sequels seemed to reign supreme. Spiderman 2: better than the original. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: best of the bunch. Maybe it was the Return of the King that brought down the brief reign of the sequel. I'm not sure when it happened, but it has. Just watch Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and you will see my point. This movie was so careless with the story line and the characters, it made me ill. They shoe-horned in Hugh Grant's character and they made Bridget out to be way more dippy than she is in the book. They split one character into two. The list of atrocities is too long to catalog. As Bridget herself would say: Gah!

Sequels are also notorious for inside jokes and self-referential "wit". I say "wit" because they really think they are being funny and clever, but they actually are just recycling old jokes in a smug manner. When movies start getting all self-referential these days, I start getting disgruntled. Stop doing that, movies. I don't care to gaze in wonder or gasp for breath at your amazing grasp of the post-modern! Embrace the post-post-modern! Or the Age without Irony or whatever the Fuck era we are currently existing in. You no longer have to prove how clever and detached you are to me. Start showing me how stupid and attached you can be. I'm just interested in a little authenticity, people.

Shreck 2 also sucked with great force. It was smirky and amused with itself. It felt like after Sam and Diane had kissed. "I'm still watching Cheers," I say to myself, "why don't I care now?" "Oh yeah, they are still fighting, just not about anything interesting." If we are going to meet the parents, let's do so in the style of Meet the Parents. But not in the style of Meet the Fockers. While I will admit that I laughed aloud at the theater (all by myself, by the way) at the reference to American Idol ("Focker Out!") and I thought Barbara Streisand was like buttah, the movie did not live up to the ticklefest of the first one.

From this day forward, I vow never to see a sequel in the theater again. I will not spend my hard earned dollars or even those dollars handed to me by my parents to feed the mill that creates this crap. In fact, I won't buy the sequels on DVD either. Especially not the direct-to-dvd sequels such as Aladdin 3 or the Disney Princess movies (Snow White, Jasmine, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel and Belle all together fighting crime or the advance of feminism or whatever it is those literary equivalents of cotton candy do in those stories). I'll see the original. But not Number 2 (pun most definately intended).