My ex and I used to make time to watch Aeon Flux when they made a series out of the mind-blowing shorts from the short lived MTv show Liquid Television. The heroine, a skeletally skinny assasin in full S&M gear in the shorts, looked a bit less like a death-camp inmate on the series, but the plot lines remained more convoluted than the Bush administrations justifications for just about anything they do. Now this La Femme Nikita on acid is coming to the big screen with Charlize Theron as the titular uber-chick. I just watched two trailers, and while Theron is about 100 pounds heavier than her animated counterpart, she has the attitude down pat. I might even allow myself a bit of gleeful anticipation about this film. But only a little. Most of the movies made from television shows of which I am, or have been fond have delivered only the direst of disappointments. Lost In Space, The Avengers, The Wild Wild West, Star Trek V(shudder), all sucked harder than a lamprey in a vacuum chamber, and don't even get me started on the upcoming Six-Million Dollar Man movie starring, hang on a minute while I repress my gag reflex, Jim Carrey. It's bad enough when a much anticipated film fails to impress (you listening Lucas?) but when the creativity-challenged money grubbers in Hollywood get their hands on our childhood heroes the result is usually abyssmal. The bean counters and bottom line feeders are so worried about appealing to every single mouth-breathing yokel with seven bucks to spare that they'll butcher the story in order to insure against offending anyone...anyone but the people who made the original source material a hit in the first place. So you end up with Will Smith fighting a giant spider, Jim Carrey turning an iconic, and truly original astronaut into a comedy worthy of a Jim Neighbors sitcom, and Gary Oldman lipsyncing 'oh the pain' onto a stupid CGI effect specifically designed to make the audience wonder WTF?! For those of you that remember Battle of the Network Stars, and can also remember anything other than Adrien Barbeau in a skin-tight one piece, you might join me in this question:
Where's Robert Conrad when we need him?
Nostalgically yours,
Marius
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