Ethnic Avenue – The Street That Crosses All the Others

Posts Tagged ‘Creativity Is Dead’

If you haven’t already heard, everyone’s favorite in-and-out-jail relative—Uncle Pennybags—is coming to the big screen. That’s right, Monopoly—the board game—is becoming a movie.

Apparently, the raid of a 1980s-kid’s room for movie ideas (GI Joe, Transformers) isn’t over. Instead, it’s moved from the toy box to the top shelf of the hall closet (the family-fun-night section). Rumor has it that movies based on Candyland, Risk, and Battleship are also in the works.

I just won second prize in a beauty contest. What have you accomplished lately?

I sort of doubt that these movies will accurately represent the board games on which they’re based. If that were the case, you’d walk out of the Monopoly movie six to eight hours after you entered, regretting you could never recover that time, and stealthily emptying your pockets of the $500 bills you embezzled while you were “the bank.”

So, even before the thing gets made, I already know where I’ll be on opening night: at my humble green house on Baltic Avenue, mourning creativity’s long march to the gas chamber. Rest in peace my old friend.

Maybe I copied this idea from somewhere else–I don’t know–but this is the premier, collectors’ edition issue of Ethnic Avenue’s series R.I.P. Creativity: A Slow, Public Death. If you’re a nerd, put it in a cellophane sleeve and find a safe place for it in your mom’s house—you may be able to pocket a nice profit on eBay in a few years.

It’s hardly a secret anymore that creativity, by any objective measure, has gone completely to shit in recent years. If you haven’t taken the time to notice—between watching (the sometimes multiple) remakes of Transformers, the Hulk, King Kong, GI Joe, Knight Rider, Battlestar Gallactica, and countless others—you’re part of the problem. But, there’s so much biting going on these days, that no one single person could possibly catalog it. Even Wyclef Jean, the former emperor of stealing other people’s good ideas, is floating face-down in the sea of cheap imitations.

What do you mean you remember us from the 80s? We just landed.

The latest nail in the creative coffin is the remake of V, a science-fiction mini-series that, from my foggy recollection of the re-runs, was alright at best. Sometimes I wonder if some studio exec woke up Rip-Van-Winkle-style, after 25 years, with an issue of TV Guide from the 80s resting on his chest. Thinking it was some revelation from above; he merely took all of the descriptions to work and started making them again.

That’s the only reasonable explanation.