"Wanna watch a movie?" "Meh."

By: Kristi Hartman

Please excuse my absence for the last couple of weeks, this time of year feels like a Crayola-colored whirlwind. It's been one busy evening after another, with introduction of activities and homework consuming the weeknights. Someday our school routines and days will start to feel a little more regular, and less busy...right?   Anyone?  

I can tell you one thing I have not been doing a lot of, and that is watching movies.  

A few years ago pre-kids and full-time jobs, we were poor college students living in our sliver of an apartment, and many of our weekend nights would involve watching movies.  We would venture out to the local box office and watch current movies, or other times we would drive to the video rental store and walk around and around the perimeter of the store, searching for the perfect movie.  Once we had our plastic DVD case in hand, we always snagged a few over-priced treats by the checkout, and had ourselves a fun movie night. Just the two of us.

Lately, partially because sometimes we are just too tired to watch anything longer than an hour, we have only watched a movie maybe once a month.  If that. 

In my mind, it feels like things have changed.  Certainly in the way we rent movies now, but also in the selection and quality of movies out there. 

This is just my opinion, so feel free to disagree with me wholeheartedly, but I feel like the movie industry for the most part is in a rut.  A sequel, prequel, re-make overload, raunchy movie rut.  Instead of us walking around the movie store, seeing variety and possibilities, now as I click through the iTunes store on my apple TV all I see is yet another Spiderman movie, another Planet of the Apes, another Transformers, Planes 2, etc, etc, etc!  And if they aren't a re-make or tied to their original movie in some form, it's a raunchy, tasteless movie that relies on awful language and sex the entire time.  Few and far between are the wholesome, creative, inventive movies that won't offend or rely on foul language and sexual content or awful violence to entertain the masses.  Because these types of movies are so few in numbers these days, it makes me appreciate them even more.  

Now don't get me wrong, I still find little gems here and there that satisfy our movie fix, but it just seems so irregular now that it's not even mine and my husbands 'thing' anymore.  And that bums me out.   

So what are we to do?

One thing I've also noticed many of the creative and interesting movies seem to be based off of books.  Which tells me one thing.  Hollywood appears to be struggling to get it right on its own.

So let's all get our talented behinds in gear, get our awesome books published, printed, and sold and become giant successes, so we can finally have some decent movies to watch.

What's your take on the movie industry these days?

Any good recommendations?