Just one two too many

Advanced orders now available! Reserve "The Land Before Time XI: The Invasion of the Tinysauruses" for 81 full minutes of G-rated, family-friendly entertainment, coming to you this January! \nThis is, of course, for those families that have been eating lead paint since last year when "The Land Before Time X: The Great Longneck Migration" came out, and consequently have forgotten that this dead horse is beginning to resemble a Mel Gibson movie. \nThe original "Land Before Time: We Don't Need a Subtitle Yet" was good. Great, even. It taught all those lessons that you are supposed to learn, including cooperation, racial/interspecies acceptance and how to avoid lava flows while providing a gritty story for adults and children alike. Sixteen years later, we have absolute crap. \nUniversal should be ashamed of itself for producing such straight-to-video bilge, if it weren't for the fact that everyone else is doing it, too. "Mission: Impossible 2." "AVP: Alien vs. Predator." "Speed 2." Even Disney is going this route as its once-entertaining-for-the-entire-family films ("Mary Poppins") give way to mindless kiddie flicks ("Pocahontas 2: Journey to a New World"). \nWhy is Hollywood producing such crummy movies? Probably because they're cheap, easy and the very names provide sufficient advertising that they're guaranteed to turn a profit. Of course, this means that the general landscape of the movie industry is being reused too much, and the creative soil is getting sucked dry. Even thought-out names are generally too difficult; a simple "2" is all many sequels get.\nThere's nothing innately wrong with a sequel: Some number twos have topped their original, for example: "Aliens," "Toy Story 2" and "Terminator 2." But sometimes another volume just sullies the name of the first: "Jason II" through "Jason X?" "The Matrix?" The same principles apply to remakes. "The Magnificent Seven" -- good. "The Manchurian Candidate" -- bad. "The Birdcage" -- good. "Planet of the Apes" -- blech. \nBoth sequels and remakes of originally good films are symptoms of the same problem in Hollywood right now, and, to some extent, reality television will fit in, too. They all come back to a basic principle of capitalism: If the masses will pay for cheap crap, then produce cheap crap and not quality material! Eventually the population gets stuck in a vicious cycle where they purchase intellectual/artistic drivel, then the tripe is the most prevalent work out there, making the general populous even dumber, and so they settle for even crumbier material ... You see how it continues. Do you really want to live in a world where every movie is "Lawnmower Man 2" or "Police Academy 6?" Didn't think so. \nThere's not a lot any one of us can do about this phenomenon. As long as people keep paying to see crappy sequels, they will continue to come out, a la "Land Before Time." What we can do is ignore them. As long as people don't keep paying to see crappy sequels, they will not continue to come out. \nSo when "Terminator 4" hits theaters with The Rock as the cyborg, how about we just don't see that one, eh? It isn't easy to turn the tide when dealing with an industry the size of Hollywood, but it has been done: McDonald's will probably never be as hot a stock as it used to be, thanks to people who simply decided not to put grease right into their veins. If people watch what they're supporting with their entertainment dollars, maybe we'll see an upturn in movie quality and a decrease in crappy sequels, though there is one sequel I'm itching to see: "Land Before Time XII: The Cataclysmic Meteor Impact"