Death to Uwe! Uwe Boll.....


I'd like to enlist somebody's help in ending the career of Uwe Boll. In fact, I'd like not to just end it, but usurp it. I'd like to have his job. I've always been of the opinion that I probably wouldn't be a good film director, but surely I could do a better job than Uwe Boll. In fact retarded monkeys with screws in their eyeballs could probably do a better job than Uwe Boll. Failing taking his job, maybe I could just have his money. If anyone wants to help me take all his money, I'll split it with them. Hell, we could give it all to the American Cancer society or the Society to Help People Hump Inanimate Objects. Anything would be better than to let him have it.

Wait, wait. Who's Uwe Boll? Right, I got ahead of myself. To understand how much I hate this freak, you have to understand a little about what's happened to Hollywood. In the last 50 years the huckster sociopaths who used to run studios were slowly replaced by sociopaths who had gone to business school. Now I'm not trying to make a case that the likes of David Selznick were the best things that ever happened to the movies. They weren't. Those old studio bosses were vain, short-sighted, and had very little vision. But there was degree of showmanship that they all were proud to carry. A certain enchantment that allowed them, and extension occasionally us, to believe that even when they were churning out crap, it was great crap. This new breed of studio head brought a realization that as a business, glamour wasn't increasing the bottom line.

So, over time, a lot of mediocre minds with great connections and an MBA have applied themselves to the formula which will guarantee a huge return. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be one. And studios really, really need those releases. Studios are a bit like venture capital firms in that they fund a bunch of projects knowing that each one is a longshot, but that one can be reasonably expected to hit paydirt. The difference is that in the movie industry the 'failures' are the ones that only make a couple mil. The successes are the ones that bring in sums so staggeringly huge that it justifies the horrific sums of money these people get paid. Because it's okay to buy a solid gold jet staffed by hookers when you wrote the checks that got "The Mummy Returns" made.

So without a clear way to measure what will work, and a need to justify the mindless spending that happens around these things, these folks have resorted to the age old tactic of not trying anything new. When making movies from popular books didn't really work, they took it to the absurd with the recent mania for remakes. It seems like about a third of the movies that came out last year and about half of the ones that are coming out this year are remakes of older movies. We end up with the totally bizarre situation of having a big-name actor with two concurrently running movies that are both remakes of earlier films (Denzel Washington in Man on Fire and Manchurian Candidate). It's like the studio heads got sick of coming up with new titles for the same old potboilers rehashed with better special effects. That and I think they get to pay writers less for rewrites (though not actors).

So in the midst of all this circle-jerkerey, some genius said: "You know what the kids like? They like those video games! With the aliens and the shooting! We should make movies out of those!" That way they get to go to meetings with the accountants and show graphs about 'Market Penetration' and other porn-sounding things that don't mean shit to the final product. But what does it matter anyway, because they only need one of these crap fests to hit big and it justifies all the other excrement that they've been producing all year.

Which brings us back to Uwe Boll. After directing a few straight to video slasher flicks, Mr. Boll was hired to direct the movie adaptation of House of the Dead. For those of you who see too much sunlight, House of the Dead was one of those games where you pick up a toy gun and pretend to shoot zombies who are coming straight at you. Apparently, this level of plot was a little too much for Uwe Boll to comprehend. To say the movie version of House of the Dead was bad would be kind of damning since you'd have to admit to remembering it. Even the lame-ass plot and wooden voice acting of the arcade game is more memorable to me than the movie. I think there was an island... and some teenagers... and a house....

Anyway, despite the fact that it sucked like Paris Hilton, he got another job. Making another movie based on a video game. And apparently it's even worse. He's managed to get the extremely not coveted one percent at Rotten Tomatoes. Even Showgirls did better than that. Christ, even Roger Ebert's pick for the most offensive movie of all time did better than that. But that hasn't stopped wise Hollywood investors from putting up the money for old Uwe to make three more video game movies!

Uwe Boll, who is being compared to Ed Wood in really, really unflattering terms, is going to be a multi-millionaire out of making the worst movies the world has ever seen. How the hell is that fair? If I was as bad at my job as he is at his, my computer would erupt in flames and smoke every time I touched the keyboard. And if my luck was like his I'd get a raise and a new office every time I reduced my computer to slag. Really, the state of Uwe Boll's career is a pretty good argument for the existence of supernatural powers. I really can't help but think he has sacrificed his soul to some warty-penised demon in exchange for the ability to lay a steaming turd and get patted on the back for it.  ¶ 4:22 PM 0 comments