Is One Of These Things Not Like The Other?

Everybody in Hollywood dies in threes, but their ideas come in pairs. If you ever had a strange sense of déjà vu at the theater, it’s not your imagination. One may be good and two is twice as nice, but who has time to watch the same thing just to see which is better?

Leviathan vs. Deep Star Six

The Abyss showed it was profitable to put people in peril underwater, but they did the sci-fi angle so well, Hollywood had to change the game to a more horror flavored genre in order to not totally rip off it’s predecessor. Be it a crew of miners or a crew at an experimental nuclear facility, both stumble across an unwanted guest that spends 90 minutes at the aqua-buffet. If the possibility of drowning and explosive decompression don’t suck enough, add being mangled by Aquaman’s pissed off pet. Sounds like a fun time under the deep blue, yeah? Just know our protagonists try to escape to the surface and kill the monster before moviegoers escape the theater.

Winner: Leviathan

Mitigating Factor: Casting. Greg Evigan? Nia Peebles? Matt McCoy? Where’s the star power? Clearly in Leviathan. It’s got Robocop, a Ghostbuster, and the Colonel who was Rambo’s C.O. – plus the monster looked like the moat beast from the Duran Duran Wild Boys video. That’s awesome.

Wild Boys always shine

Volcano vs. Dante’s Peak

Lava! Hot lava! Look out, that smarts! Disasters are terrific fodder for replication, so when the volcano epic got it’s due, Hollywood doubled up. I guess permafrost wasn’t lethal enough and overcast skies had too obvious a happy ending. Here, Mother Nature strikes the City of Angels and an idyllic paradise -- with a vengeance! For what I’m not sure. Last time I checked, volcanoes erupted due to pressure released from shifting tectonic plates, not from human abuse of the environment, man’s stupid scientific folly, masturbating, telling lies, or even littering. Although if it did, I’m looking at you, jerk off.

Winner: Dante’s Peak

Mitigating Factor: Lameness. Tommy Lee Jones is to no-nonsense gruffness as Pacino is to histrionics, and he chews a decent amount of scenery here. But worse is the whole premise – a volcano emanating from under the La Brea Tar Pits. Yeah, you heard me right. Los Angeles gets the Earthquake treatment and lots of familiar things get destroyed, but still – the Tar Pits! The only thing at the bottom of that sinkhole are the corpses of a few teenage runaways. And the producers of Volcano.

when the Earth has it’s period

Armageddon vs. Deep Impact

We plum used up everything we could find here on Earth to kill us…Hollywood, got anything left? How’s a pair of asteroids? Thankfully, Hollywood took the fork in the road and gave us the blockbuster version and the reflective version to cover as wide a spectrum as possible. An introspective cross-section of lives get effected including President Morgan Freeman (shit yes, black president!) and hottie Tea Leoni as death comes hurling in from the cosmos. If only they had a rag-tag group of lovable blue collars roughnecks to mount a secret mission to the asteroid’s surface to destroy the space rock. Well, in a Michael Bay world, they do. Take that, Morgan Freeman!

Winner: Deep Impact

Mitigating Factor: Aerosmith. At the peak of their bland ballading, the sequel to Cryin’Amazin’Crazy was so paint-by-numbers obvious that it was the most ridiculously hard to swallow cherry on top of an already excessive sundae. With more plot holes and impossible stunts than you could jump a space rover through, the slick studio heads decided an Affleck-Willis combo wasn’t lowest common denominator enough for America, so they asked co-star Liv Tyler to phone daddy and have his band crap out a cheesy anthem to seal the deal.



Underworld Saga vs. Blade Trilogy

Why did I pit these two series against each other? Because they came out overlapping, but more so both have tons of leather and bondage gear clad vampires duking it out to defeat the evil factions amongst themselves. Swords? Yep. Guns? Check. Mutant vampires and werewolves? Damn it, this is Hollywood, we can put all of it in a movie. The Matrix spawned a million gun-fu sophisticated CG laden action movies, and both canons load up on as much as they can. Granted, there needs to be some acting and character development to slow things down a bit, because no human can withstand 10 hours of gothic action and special effects compositing. A fanboy can, but no human.

Winner: Len Wiseman

Mitigating Factor: Both movies have sexy starlets in tight fitting outfits, crazy fight scenes, and rivers of blood, but director Wiseman sealed the deal with star Kate Beckinsale in turn. Directing – the best job your penis can have.



Capote vs. Infamous

The biopic is friendly and fertile territory for Hollywood. It’s good that the events and actions of one person’s life can be reinterpreted time and again, emphasizing the same turning points and timeline…with the same results! Wouldn’t that be cool if at the end of The Doors, Oliver Stone made Jim Morrison live? Or Andy Kaufman stopped being an avant-asshole in Man In The Moon? It’s biographical, so no, you don’t get to spice it up. You only get to retell it. Truman Capote wrote In Cold Blood, and both he and it were so fascinating that it merited Hollywood portraits of the same period.

Winner: Middle-aged, bohemian, green, NPR listening, bi-sexual, vegan / vegetarian hipster literati

Mitigating Factor: Vampires. Truman Capote never wrote a single word about bloodsucking nightcrawlers with automatic weapons able to do twisting back flips. How the hell am I supposed to care about a diminutive homosexual writer when even there’s 10 hours of vampire violence (which, by the way, is my favorite MPAA disclaimer of all time).

even Tru would approve of Ryan Reynolds in Blade 3

The Prestige vs. The Illusionist

Hollywood prides itself on being elaborate and detailed, but also dollar conscious. That’s why there are giant warehouses full of costumes and set pieces waiting to be reused. Not surprisingly, productions start up looking to use the same clothes and flats all the time. That’s competition, man! You can reach into a hat and draw out the most obscure topics, like turn of the century magicians, and abra-cadabra, there’s a twin billing of secrecy, illusion and double crosses. Kinda like Dallas and Dynasty, except with petticoats and card tricks.

Winner: The Prestige

Mitigating Factor: Grit. This Christopher Nolan flick just got dirtier and worked harder to have be edgy. You’ve got your preference between leading men Ed Norton and Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. What’s your fetish? Because you can choose between Jessica Biel’s legendary ass or Scarlet Johansson’s killer rack. Magic, deception, and Victorian backdrops a plenty are there for the viewer, but The Illusionist is too pretty and too happy an ending. The Prestige starts and finishes raw and dark.

These were ones that came off the top of my head…further research shows scores of others. So for fun, start a blog, read this, and make your own comments.