UnFun Film News: Latino ParaAct; Animal Farm, Neutered

I'm here today, readers, friends, random-ass strangers, to fill you in on two bits of news. They're not recent - I learned about 'em weeks ago. I try for positivity and whatnot, but I think both are awful tidbits of info, ones that reflect poorly on the film industry.

The first bit begins with something cool that I didn't know: Andy Serkis took advantage of all his motion-captured performances and started his own mo-cap production company. That was a cool thing to learn, to me, and I congratulate Serkis and wish him the best. 

Except on his first project for the fledging business: Andy wearing his green-screen suit so that he can put on a cinematic production of Animal Farm, which will have no politics in it.

Yes, I can't support a family-friendly Animal Farm film that will dance around all of the social and political issues that George Orwell put into his novella. This work was assigned to me in like the 6th grade (or earlier, I can't recall), which makes the changes completely stupid and... stupid. 

As a writer and Lit major, I am offended, repulsed, and disgusted that anyone would take George Orwell's amazing socio-political allegorical piece and turn it into what sounds like Babe 3: The More Animals Edition. Talk about aiming for the basement, right?...
Thanks (?) to AV Club for pointing me to this horrific discovery. I appreciate their efforts, if not the news itself...

And added to that suck-fest, AV Club told me about fresh Paranormal Activity franchise news! I haven't seen any of these, so I don't care much, but I had to note this info... See, first there's a PA5 green-lit for a 2013 Halloween release. But at the same time, Paramount is making a special Latino-targeted version of PA, because Latinos were (apparently) a big part of the audience for the other PA movies. Y'know, like these 2012 elections.

Do people really think Latinos will like it more if a version comes out in Spring 2013 (lots of development time, huh?), where people scream "Corre! Corre como la chingada!" (trans: "run! run like a mofo!") And here's what gave me such a negative opinion right out of the gate - the description from the Nikki Finke's Deadline article, the one that the AV Club was commenting on:

The spinoff will include the demon from the PA franchise and star mostly Latino actors and film partly in Spanish. ”This will be an off-shoot aimed at the groups who have been the biggest supporters of the property – Latinos and folks in Latin America – Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.”

If you look at the tags on the right side of the page, you can see that Sequel-itis is a pet peeve on this site, and I've railed against it for a long time. Regardless, I have no specific tag for "Racially-Motivated Pandering," or "insulting the target audience," or "is this bigot-y?" 

Will Paramount make one for Eastern Asians? Then another for Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi Asians? What about the Basque version? Or is that population too tiny to pander to? I don't know about you, but when I see a monster rip somebody limb-from-limb, I don't give less of a s--t because they're from a different background than me.

But as of now, I'll consider caring less when it's a studio exec...