The Limits Of Imagination

 The last thing I want to do is stifle creativity. That would be wrong. Then again, so is the idea of a Cheetos Movie. We have already lived through a couple movies about GI Joes. I have lost track of how many Transformers movies there are. I have made my peace with these, since they are films about action figures, not dolls, and action is what summer movies are all about so why not bring them on? 

Battleship? It's a board game. A board game that is so simple that it can be played with folded pieces of paper and pencil. And yet Hollywood managed to wring nearly two hours of stuff blowing up and aliens blowing up and blowing up aliens to satisfy the masses. It has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of fifty-four percent, so somebody liked it. And it wasn't the first board game to get the big screen treatment. Clue was and its all-star cast showed up in multiplexes way back in 1985. Its box office was aided by having three different endings. Which, if you had waited for the home video release, were all revealed on one VHS cassette. 

Speaking of varied endings, there is the issue of movies "inspired" by video games. Part of the relative joy to be found in playing a video game is finding your own path to the battle with the big boss. Watching Sonic the Hedgehog go from left to right as fast as he can, collecting as many gold rings as possible on his way, without access to a joystick of any kind save the Twizzlers in your popcorn bucket seems like a pretty empty prospect. Apparently not. There is a sequel in the works. 

What are the limits of the imagination? How about a feature film based on a cell phone app? Angry Birds. Everyone's favorite time sink back in 2009 made it to movie houses in 2016. And then all those loose threads were sewn up in the sequel three years later in the sequel, much to the relief of all those who were losing sleep over such matters. 

How about a movie featuring not characters so much as those little clumps of pixels you stick in your texts instead of writing "happy," "sad," or "poop." Yes, in case you missed it, Sony Pictures unleashed The Emoji Movie four years ago to an unsuspecting and gullible populace. It made more than two hundred million dollars. 

Which brings us back to Cheetos. This one is not about the adventures of Chester the Cheetos Cheetah, but rather tells the story of the guy who claims to have come up with the idea for the "Flamin' Hot" version of the snack. Not exactly Citizen Kane, but then again, who really wants to sit around for two hours and watch some old guy complain about his missing sled? 

Oops. Spoiler alert. The sled, I mean. Not the red junk that gets all over your fingers.