Watch This!

Over the years I have cultivated a number of friendships with people who work in the movie business. That has tainted my personal love affair with movies by one word: business. Even if I didn't experience these tales of compromise and woe from a series of extraordinarily talented people, my subscription to Entertainment Weekly would still probably be enough to sour me on the magic behind the magic. Last week I read an article about the "struggle" to get a new chapter in the Fletch series made. You remember Fletch. Starring Chevy Chase? Lots of silly names and a few disguises? It was the epitome of mid-eighties snark. Those of us who wander around with our heads stuck in that decade, like myself, continue to mumble snippets of Andrew Bergman's script.
Andrew who? The guy who helped write "Blazing Saddles." All those funny things that Chevy said weren't simply made up on the spot. Some of them were, but most were carefully planned, then filmed, then edited and color-corrected and on and on. It was lightning in a bottle, and the fact that it worked as well as it did makes the folks who live in those scary offices in Hollyweird get all creepy about making a sequel. Or a "reboot."
For the record, I am as tired of the term "reboot" as I am "app." As I slavishly anticipate the release of the second installment in the "Iron Man" series, the fourth Spiderman movie is being sent back to high school. James Bond has found fresh legs in Daniel Craig, but he's no Sean Connery. Star Trek continues to seek out strange new audiences and boldly go into yet another permutation. The stories of my youth continue to get a fresh coat of paint and rushed back into circulation in hopes of wringing that one last dollar from our collective memories. Why else would Ridley Scott consider making a movie about the board game Monopoly?
"Hey, the last movie we made about a board game made money," shouts the voice from the scary office.
Hard to argue with logic like that.