I spend a lot of time on YouTube. Sometimes I’ll watch a Breaking Points segment, usually it’s a clip from Jim Cornette’s podcasts. Between this content are ad breaks where I find out for the first time about upcoming movies/TV shows. Boy, the entertainment industry really is out of ideas. Why do people still devote time to this shit?
The first trailer that made me ask that question was one for the Firestarter reboot. I saw something about this on Twitter recently and thought someone was full of shit, like when you see those fake Bettlejuice 2 posters. No, someone in Hollywood said “what if we reboot Firestarter?” Another person then recalled the box office stats for the It reboot films and said “hellyeah we’re rebooting a Stephen King story!”
Firestarter is allegedly a Stephen King book. I stress allegedly because I don’t know if anybody’s read it. For all the Stephen King I’ve read, I never got around to Firestarter and I somehow had the durability to complete Under The Dome. Firestarter when it was originally published had “from the author of The Dead Zone” on the front and I bet the Richard Bachman books in their first printings had a better readership.
As evidence of Stephen King’s popularity, the dust collector called Firestarter was first adapted for the big screen almost 40 years ago. That’s how marketable the King brand is. There are many authors whose best work never gets adapted or noticed, this guy’s bootleg Jean Grey story gets a movie with a $12 million budget in 1984.
Similar to the book, I don’t know what the public consensus is on the first Firestarter film. I assume it’s shit because this is the one film from that decade that 80s kids aren’t overhyping because they enjoyed life a little more during Firestarter‘s opening weekend. I’ve been meaning to watch it because I’ve heard George C. Scott plays a Native American and I wanna see my favorite actor at his lowest moment. I imagine there’s scenes where George C. Scott mumbles “fuck, maybe I should’ve proudly accepted my Oscar and tongued the Academy’s ass.”
It’s baffling Firestarter is getting a remake because remakes nowadays are solely intended to grift off marketable IP and even with the King name, I don’t know how financially lucrative Firestarter is. I thing the only thing less marketable in the world of King would be someone redoing The Langoliers.
An argument made for remakes is the good ones revisit concepts that weren’t properly executed the first time. John Carpenter’s The Thing is the best example of that. The original version, The Thing From Another World was your routine lackluster 50s B movie genre feature where a guy in a generic monster suit occasionally appears after 15-20 minutes of science jargon dialogue. John Carpenter’s Thing was more faithful to the original John W. Campbell novella these films are based on, “Who Goes There?” More importantly, The Thing was a moment where movie magic hit a peak like someone ringing the bell on a fairground Test Your Might hammer game.
Is Firestarter (2022) striving to tell whatever genius story Firestarter (1984) failed to capture? Unlikely. I think some greedy shit for brains concocted an easy scheme. Will it work? Possibly. Expectations for a movie are lower than ever. I don’t know what you’d have to do now to repel audiences. Things are so fucked that respecting their intelligence could now be an issue. Theatrical audiences are so used to being talked down to, they wouldn’t know what to do if a new film respected their time and money.
Well that Firestarter promo filled a lot of space. Let’s see if I get any wind left to berate The Dropout.
The Dropout is the latest dare from Hulu. It’s been years since I’ve come across Hulu original programming that was intriguing. The Dropout won’t be the hardest thing to stomach here. Hulu also did a 4 hour Hillary Clinton documentary. More recently, they did a miniseries on Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson. Hours of material on fucking Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson in 2022. If we’re gonna blab about shit we stopped thinking about 25 years ago, let’s spend 7 hours reminiscing about the goddamn mother fucking Macarena.
The Dropout looks like someone caught The Social Network on cable and said “I’m doing this, but Elizabeth Holmes.” We got enough of Elizabeth Holmes in 2019 when HBO did that documentary about her, yet here we are with Amanda Seyfried playing her in a miniseries and Jennifer Lawrence about to play her in Adam McKay’s next movie. This is like that tedious moment in the mid 2010s when two studios made a Steve Jobs movie and were dismayed when nobody wanted to watch a dramatization of the Walter Issacson bio they read several years ago.
Judging by the trailer it looks like they’re depicting Elizabeth Holmes as someone with good intentions biting off more than she could chew. I hate when filmmakers/showrunners are terrified of being called sexist so they reimagine some cunt as a babyface. A good example of this is Cruella and The Iron Lady. God help me if they ever make a Leni Riefenstahl bio-pic. “I just wanted to make talkies. ‘The Holowhat?!?’ That’s what I said to Goebbels.” I’ll light myself on fire and use my flesh as kindling to burn the theater down like Inglorious Bastards.
That’s the current state of entertainment, dreck. Well I guess it was nice to focus on something besides my grandmother dying in hospice. A week prior it was revealed she had cirrhosis of the liver after spending almost 85 years failing to consume an entire alcoholic beverage. Her husband died with a failing liver, so did three of her sons. They did it in the more traditional fashion. Possibly because she was incorrectly prescribed medication while diabetic, she’s following that family tradition. This real life Flannery O’Connor story is bringing me so many goddamn migraines.
Hospice care is so goddamn chilling. There are no feeding tubes or IVs because they only prolong the inevitable. You can hold the hands of your loved ones, but you’re told to not rub their arms. That specific touch is something considered to awaken this will to temporarily fight to stay alive, which once again in hospice is a temporary delay of a guaranteed outcome. I guess that’s sound advice. You might feel bad for providing a sense of false hope to someone averaging 24 hearts beats per minute coasting on a cloud of morphine into the afterlife.
My granny was a Jehovah’s Witness. One conversation we had worked its way to her saying “I’m gonna write you out of my inheritance.” I said “fine by me, all I’d get are a few Watchtowers.” She loved that. She brought it up every time I saw her and laughed all over again. She may have even told it to her brothers and sisters. I’m glad I got that memory before whatever edgelord we might have as a higher power struck her down in such a sadistic fashion.
It's Emilio Amaro's Blog 
* First and foremost, my condolences. At least you had one last laugh with her before she went.
* You know, Stephen King actually described his own work as “plain fiction for plain folk – the literary equivalent of a Big Mac & large fries”.
* “I think the only thing less marketable in the world of King would be someone redoing The Langoliers.”
Three words – Hearts In Atlantis.
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God Hearts In Atlantis, I haven’t thought about that in years. The kid from that movie is dead now (Debbie Downer sound cue).
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