Do the right thing. That’s a recurring message in Hollywood movies.
Humphrey Bogart walked off into the Casablanca fog with Claude Rains rather than Ingrid Bergman.
Shane wanted to be left alone, but because Van Heflin would get himself killed taking on the bad guys, Alan Ladd did the right thing, and shot them all [it was a western].
In LA Confidential, Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce stand up against corruption in the end.
Bruce Willis detonates the bomb in Armageddon so Ben Affleck can marry Liv Tyler.
Serenity’s Captain Nathan Fillion puts his crew in danger rather than let Summer Glau be taken by the sinister Alliance.
And from what I gather, there’s a fair bit of doing the right thing in Avatar. I don’t know for sure, because, despite wanting to, I haven’t seen it yet. It’s out on DVD on Monday (perhaps you’ve come across some advertising about that) but I’ve already been offered two different pirated DVD copies of it. I’ve said no. Hollywood says that’s the right thing to do because DVD pirates are bad for the industry. So I was hacked off when I read this …
Avatar will be re-released this summer with an additional six minutes of footage, its director James Cameron has said in a newspaper interview. "We were sold out of our Imax performances right up to the moment until they were contractually obligated to switch to Alice in Wonderland.
"So we know we left money on the table there," Cameron told the LA Times.
Avatar has grossed more than $2.5 BILLION. Cameron has been working on Avatar since 1994. Everything I’ve read about Cameron and Avatar suggests to me that a great deal of time and an extraordinary amount of money (well over $250million) went into crafting the 162 minute original release. I’m surprised that it suddenly needs an extra 6 minutes.
Bolting on an extra 6 minutes as an excuse to squeeze more money out of the public, doesn’t seem to be the right thing to me. It smacks of greed. It stinks of the ethicless business practices that contributed to the world’s recent/current financial woes. But worse than that, it means everyone who has ever bought or borrowed a pirated DVD has a reason to justify ignoring Hollywood’s calls for crackdowns on copyright infringement – if they don’t care about us, why should we care about them.
Something we should all be thinking about. Which reminds me, don't get me started about Ryanair.
1 comment:
Another view is that Shane panders to the worst in us. Shane was a bad gunslinger, but he retired after growing up and having an attack of conscience.
Then in the name of all that is good, he puts his old skills to use.
And all we have been waiting for is for him to give the bully Jack Palance his comeuppance.
But really it was Shane getting his rocks off again with a good old showdown, and us too.
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