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Money. It all boils down to money.

Have you seen the budgets for any of the current movie hits? They equal the budget of a minor nation. To break even they need a blockbuster. This means big time special effects, so people will actually go to the theater, and not wait for the thing to come out on DVD. This in turn makes it more expensive, and in the end, no studio executive will risk those huge amounts of money on any idea that is not a sure thing.

End result? A disappointing series of remakes, each less inspired than the previous; movies that are really rehash of old ideas, and then, because you need a huge audience to break even, you must make sure you get a PG or PG 13 rating, so parents will bring their kids, or vice versa.

It is not the government that censures the studios. It's the money! Since many parents will not take their kids to an R rated movie, you keep the movies PG-13, which you can achieve by putting a lot of violence, but no nudity. Violence also calls for great special effects.

If you want to see imaginative cinema, and new ideas, you need to look for foreign movies, shown in independent theaters, or more often found at the foreign movie section of Blockbuster or Netflicks.

Those movies, with much smaller budgets, take risks, because they can. They do not need to score big at the box office, and if they make their profit in the home rental market, so be it.

If you look for new ideas, try the foreign stuff. You will have to read subtitles, but guess what. How many of you watch movies at home with the close captioning on? It is the same thing, and you do not miss any dialogue. And in foreign movies, the script is the story, not the special effects and the big money Diva.

Learn more about this author, Pedro Miranda.
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