No more than a movie

Some movies don't need any kind of sequel, and many of them really do not need it to be multiple hours of television.

The phenomena of the unwanted sequel is still with us -  where one movie is perfectly good enough, and the follow-up can't help but disappoint. We all saw it recently when Ready Or Not 2 came out to a critical and commercial shrug, because that movie made its point pretty fucking well in the first one, and there really wasn't much more to add, except for mindless escalation.

And now we get the unwanted TV remakes, prequels and sequels, and they're not only unnecessary, they stretch out for hours and hours and hours.

They keep trying to sell me on the new Man on Fire, and while the original movie does have a much better reputation than it did at the time (critics always got dazzled by the style of Tony Scott films, and were blinded to the substance that could lurk beneath his glossiest of surfaces). But even with a fine cast in the TV version - that lead dude in the new series is usually pretty excellent - there's no Tony Scott, there's no Denzel, there is no way many hours of the new thing is going to be better than two hours with those deadset champions.

Now there is a long remake of Cape Fear, and lots of people I trust say it's actually pretty good, but I just don't want to spend 10 hours in that kind of nightmare. A tight two hours and eight minutes with prime Marty Scorsese was enough for me. 

There is so much out there it's easy to ignore a lot of it - there's no need to bother with the forthcoming Harry Potter (and when the creator is using the cash it gives her to cause real harm to real people, it's a moral imperative to shun it and you can rest assured it will never be mentioned on this blog again); it did take me two seasons to realise the new version of Interview with a Vampire is really not my bag; and I never had the slightest interest in seeing that series about a young Nurse Ratchet.

Because it doesn't feel like it's not being added to, it's more like it's being leeched off. It's a dilution, not a construction.

I'm such a fucking film snob. Even after all sorts of televisual brilliance over the years.  After a catastrophic failure of my movie cataloging for this year, I've been catching up on TV series and some of them are great and some of them are okay and all of them would be better as a two hour movie. If you can't tell a story in 120 minutes, maybe you shouldn't be telling a story, and not everything needs to be 10 hours.   

This is obviously not a hard rule - get some Dekalog into you, that shit is aces, and there is always the exception of Twin Peaks - but when so much talent so sucked up into a story that was already told with a lot more efficency, it all just feels so pointless.