It's your fault movies suck

Some thought 1999 would bring about the end of the world, what with Y2K, the Four Horsemen, and *NSYNC sweeping across the globe and all. But while the majority of us spent the year waiting for the end of civilization, we failed to notice that 1999 had brought about the end of culture instead.

The summer of 1999 gave us some of the most brain-dead cinematic adventures in recent years (American Pie, Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, and Austin Powers 2 are merely a few examples), giving us a fantastic assemblage of poor acting and FX-infused diarrhea humor, thus setting the stage for two years of complete cinematic misery.

The American public has become so jaded by dick-joke-a-minute-bad-actor-teen comedies that it wouldn't know a good movie if one cut its cranium off and ate its brains for dinner (as we shall soon see, à la Hannibal the Cannibal.) To put it simply: the resurgence of disaster movies in the mid-'90s made bigger "better" insofar as "better" became synonymous with "financially successful," and consequently lowered expectations for movie producers and moviegoers alike. As a result, real wit and drama took a back seat to pie-banging jokes and Ben Affleck asteroid movies—simply because teenagers would pay to see them.

What has happened since? Smart movies like Bowfinger, comic Steve Martin's post-New Yorker venture into screenwriting, seem to fail miserably at the box office, while dumb movies like Me, Myself and Irene, the Farrelly brothers' 34th movie with a butt sex or semen joke in it, strike gold. Movies, like popular music, have finally given in to the poor taste of your average Joe Shmoe. And not unlike the current teenie-bopperification of American music, there seems to be a perennial fan base for really bad Freddie Prinze, Jr. movies (Boys and Girls, anybody? Down to you? Hello? Wing Commander?).

It is America's immature I-want-a-happy-ending-no-matter-what mentality that is ruining most movies today. Catering to that public desire is destroying cinema.

So it was with some hesitance that I went to see Hannibal last weekend. Having waited a decade to read Thomas Harris' sequel to Silence of the Lambs—and nearly as long to see the film's sequel—I feared the worst. I did not care if Julianne Moore was as good as Jodie Foster, nor did I care if Ridley Scott was as good as Jonathan Demme. I just wanted them not to screw with the storyline and change the novel's controversial ending simply because the public would want them too. But that is exactly what they did.

Movie spoiling info ahead (skip to the next paragraph if you're one of those people). At the end of the book, Lecter basically brainwashes FBI Agent Clarice Starling and they live happily ever after, dancing into the moonlight. But at the end of the movie, Starling tries to turn Lecter into the police, and he manages to escape.

So a few people didn't like Hannibal's original ending or found it too terrifying. Good for them. But to change it completely? Come on. Regardless of the actual specifics, changing the end of the movie—any movie, really—changes the tone of the entire film. What if test audiences had found Thelma and Louise's ending to be too depressing, and the filmmakers ended it instead with Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis making out? (Bad example...that might have made the movie a lot better, actually.)

Nevertheless, if people do not respond positively to a book's ending, then why adapt it to film in the first place? There is a huge, horrible, nonsensical history of motion pictures raping the books from which they come, ignoring art for the sake of profit. We can only pray that the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings movies aren't adapted by the same idiots who did Hannibal.

Accommodating the wishes of the public compromises films, as it does music, television, books, etc. Considering how fickle America is about what it likes (cf. the late-'90s swing-dancing phenomenon, the Macarena, Cher) there is no sense in trying to give people what they want instead of something actually good. This year, I'm rooting for Traffic—not Gladiator—to bring hell come Oscar night.

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