Pat Dollard

I’ll start you off:

The Wizard Of Oz (Michael Jackson tried but fell on his pre-surgical nose)

Gone With The Wind

The African Queen

Any “Spaghetti Western”

A Christmas Story

Those are just a couple that come to my mind … and not so much completely for their classic status, but for their ‘timely’ content and context.

Now, having been a huge sci-fi fan in my youth, I hold near and dear certain movies that had meaning to me, not the least of which was the underlying Cold War theme.

Carpenter’s remake of The Thing was pure brilliance and horror, compared to the cool but effective b/w original (where, BTW, I swear the director – Ridley Scott – of the first ALIEN movie got his idea for the rhythm and flow of candid dialog between the characters).

Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds was chilling in it’s special effects upgrade, hyped the tension and panic, lacked in character content, and even slipped in the whole “Is it the terrorists?” in the panic of running from the tri-pods destroying the New Jersey neighborhood.

I Am Legend had a different outlook than the original The Omega Man … less hip and cool, more introspect and regretful … riddled with guilt and longing for a reset button on the mistakes made that caused the apocalypse.

And now, I’d be willing to allow a remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still …

Except, I will not allow the covert land mines being laid within that it’s manmade global warming, and Earth must be saved from the evil human … who the Earth actually belongs to. The original played on the Cold War tensions in the world … the aliens observing just how close all fingers were to the launch buttons. And our growing space program that threatened to carry that war into space (never mind it would take generations and generations before humans could even have a chance at reaching Klaatu’s or any other race’s planet.)

Our modern film making techniques could be a jolt of the fountain of youth for old sci-fi classics, and I’m willing to give them a chance. However, when you start tweaking and completely changing the underlying message of these originals to suit political cultism of today … well, I got a real problem with that.

Instead of global warming, why didn’t the writers/director/producers involved in this latest retread have the balls to land Klaatu and Gort in the Middle East and give the jihadi haji set reason to crap in their pants? Why aren’t their threats on the world and world peace and preservation ever fodder for a preachy alien and his bad-ass robot with nuke reactor for a liver? Why global warming, and the evil “developed and capitalistic and industrialized” Western movers and shakers of the world that feed the world and keep it free from childhood disease mortalities?

I’m really rather sick and tired of the concept coming from over-pampered, duck and sushi fed, high colonic flushed Hollywood whose only guilt factor does not involve THEIR personal mistakes or shortcomings, but picking away at the long healed scars of our past history, and insisting on rubbing noses in the new bloodletting that the ticket buying viewer had no responsibility in.

So now enter the environmentalist aliens who must take it upon themselves to crash into our terra firma and kick the out of us for belching carbon emissions and loading landfills. I haven’t seen the flick yet, but would be surprised if Al Gore is swept away by the aliens Klaatu and Gort at the end, just as Richard Dreyfuss was at the end of Close Encounters for a “Happily Ever After” marriage of flesh, alien metal and nobel gasses expelled into space. I can imagine the tears of the movie audience as Gort flew off with Gore inside the humming ship for parts unknown … would make me weep.

Yeah, as if those billions of “other worlds” being sucked into black holes every (day? how would you measure time ‘out there’ anyway? Hello, Uncle Albert … pick up the phone, eh?) don’t need Klaatu’s and Gort’s undivided attention …

Wouldn’t you just love to be able to tell these self-righteous Hollywood pinheads, “What a f-ng mess! What were you thinking? Get back in there and do it over … ? Oh, and why the f- wasn’t Klaatu waterboarded, huh?”

So, while the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still has the anti pollution/global warming destroying the Earth and threatening space with our filthiness message … why did those involved feel the need to inflict upon some unsuspecting alien “ham radio-like” operator amid the endless stars to pick up on the fact that Earthlings think “aliens” look, sound, and are as daft as Keanu Reeves by pumping this flick pollution into space last night?