Hollywood Lacking Originality

How is it that movie makers can be lacking creative ideas and seek to simply sequel, prequel and remake already amazing movies? All of these attempts are failing, people want originality, at least I do. Nothing in theater's lately has really struck my fancy apart form a few book-to-movies that I deemed must-sees. (Twilight, Harry Potter, He's Just not that into you, etc.)

I can come up with original movie ideas left and right, why can't they? Here's some concepts I'm thinking in a nutshell:

-A movie about restaurant workers facing dramas in their own sub-plot lives. At the restaurant there's a drug gang working to take over the city and and undercover cop comes to work at the restaurant and help take down the leader. He falls in love with one of the gang whores. She betrays him, he gets almost killed and a nerdy under-dog server saves the day. In the mean time the unlikely restaurant managers are discovered as leaders of the drug ring, not the greasy cooks as anticipated.

-There needs to be more movies about debate in general. It's yeah, kind of nerdy, but it can be cool. There needs to be a story of a crappy program turning around and dominating the circuits. In the mean time everyone on the team secretly plans to transfer out of their current under-recognized program, despite the fact that together they're dominating the circuits. The coach in the story needs to be crazy eccentric, fun but a total bitch at the same time. The team needs to be composed of all different types of people from pot heads, to nerds to drama geeks, musicians and ex-jocks who unite for a greedy love of recognition, sex and partying. The team is all plotting to transfer or quit, and the coach feels betrayed and goes crazy when she finds out. She tries then to win her team over by throwing them a party and buying booze. One of the girls on the team rats out the coach and the program gets eliminated and the coach fired. The team realizes they've screwed up and they unite to bring the program back. Although they'll succeed in bring it back the coach gets rehired only as a speech teacher and a new coach is hired, all of the team still transfers. The team however all stay friends, even at different schools, and the ex-coach helps the new coach build up an amazing program even better than the first. Some of the people on the old team end up getting into major trouble with drugs, grades, too much sex, etc. and it's not all a happy ending.

-Girls that are friends in first grade contine their friendships up through high school. High school however is not all it seems. Sure there's the popular crowd, but there's another crowd of people trying to fit into a sub group. That sub group all fits in together as eating-disorder, indy-music, wrist-cutting cliques. Hollywood only shows the Barbie-Doll cliques of high school, but sometimes the alternive groups are just as bad, if not worse, about accepting people for who they are. The girls struggel with these changes. They used to be the booksy-artsy girls, now they're divided by razor blades, lack of food and black hair dye.

-Choir. Music is so unappriciated in movies, at least GOOD music. Not like high-school-musical stuff. There needs to be some type of movie about the hardships of being in choir at school, and band. There's so much drama and comedy in those activities that goes unappriciated. Plus the soundtrack would be killer.

-People on the coast may have their beaches, but the real action is in the midwest with the lakes. Surfers just wait on mother nature to make the waves to ride. People in the midwest get to have more fun with boat drivers making the waves to wake board and water skii on. While waiting their turns there's plenty of scenes that can take place on beaches with some hot muscel guys and girls posing on the shore listening to music and playing volleyball while grilling and camping. It's every bit as marketable as a beach movie, but with more action. Lots of people drown in lakes while drinking and skinny diping. Lots of people drown while jet skiing and people get decapitated by tubing and skiing with uneaven ropes, if they aren't careful. There's lots of potential for an awesome movie.

Well there's a few of the many ideas!

The Advance

The jewel of Kansas Wesleyan publications is "The Advance." It's amazing breaking story coverage and easy to navigate layouts along with high quality photography makes this student publication indispensable to campus.

I might have been reaching a bit with that one. No one on "The Advance" knows much about newspapers, although we have come far, we need to go farther . When I started out on the staff of this publication, it was apparent how terrible armature we were.

The editor claimed to be an AP style wiz who was inflexible to any commands, and two strong willed individuals in the class managed to take over the publication by swaying class and advisor opinion. Both of these class members were very contradictory towards each others' ideas and little got accomplished in the long run.

Now we are more established.

The former editor stepped down and one strong willed individual took over. The other took some time off so it worked out great. It needs to get better though.

In the beginning, "The Advance" started out as a tabloid style publication dominated by pictures of landscapes lacking people, oversized captions, small articles, and excessive ads to dominate space. The paper lacked any controversy and consisted of fluffy features and opinion columns.

Now, although not nearly an excellent publication, we have at least grown. We've managed to supply plenty of controversy, cut back the fluff, and moved to a larger page size. The photo quality is still lacking in many aspects, but design in general has improved. I wish I could be a part of the staff for a few more years and watch the growth continue.

Media Future

So what is the future of the media?? Twitter and facebook have become incredibly popular over the past couple years in media. The internet itself has taken over. Although TV and radio still exist as popular mediums, the future is the web.

This concept is not new, Dr. Morris has been proclaiming it since semester one. He's not the only one, many agree with this stance on the shifting paradigm and media convergences. With this being said, we must ready our skills to do more than one job.

One thing that really hit me at the KAB conference was the amount of skills all entry level job seekers must aquire. I always thought the secret to the trade was specialization. I guess I must think again.

Newspaper

I haven't updated this media blog in FOREVER!!! So any ways, let's talk about media. I think our school's newspaper could use some improvements. I am a staff writer, photographer, layout designer, and web editor of our school's newspaper. Just looking at it and I'm thinking we could make many improvements. Kat (our editor), Scotty (the other designer) and I have decided to make the paper better, we've got to write stories from a more powerful angle. Additionally, the layout needs to be more polished. We also need to work on the color settings. I think we could do away with some of the feature stories and try to bring hard news front and center. There's bound to be something interesting happening on this campus worth reporting!