To my knowledge, I’ve never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis<\/i>, but I’m beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that<\/i> Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.<\/p>\n
And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of “nemesis”? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt<\/a>, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com<\/a>, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.<\/p>\n Sigh.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s not that I hate<\/i> the guy or anything — the mere sight of his face doesn’t make me want to strangle him, not like, say, Adam Sandler. Indeed, he seems like he’d probably be an okay guy to have sitting on the barstool next to you on a Friday afternoon at your favorite beer tavern. But as an actor, as a movie star, I just don’t understand why people like Matthew McConaughey. He’s got a pretty body and a face best described as “cute,” but no charisma, no spark, no “It.” At least not in my opinion. I find him utterly boring, to be honest.<\/p>\n As to this specific role, Magnum is a better fit for him than Dirk Pitt was, but still not a good<\/i> fit. He can easily handle the beach-bum aspect of the character, but the thing that no one seems to remember about Magnum is that he could be a right bastard when he had to be, especially in the episodes that had anything to do with his Vietnam experiences or the unfinished business thereof, and I just can’t see McConaughey being able to pull off the cold-blooded stuff. He’s too much of a lightweight. His portrayal of Dirk Pitt suffered from the same problem; he’s just not credible as a guy who’s supposed to be made of tempered steel underneath the tan.<\/p>\n Of course, it’s entirely possible that a big-screen Magnum<\/i> remake will be played for laughs, as so many other TV-to-movie projects have been, obviating the need for McConaughey to be convincingly tough. I’m sure any of my long-time readers can guess where I stand on that<\/i> idea.<\/p>\n In case you’re wondering about the title of this entry, “Don’t Eat the Snow in Hawaii” was the title of the original Magnum P.I.<\/i> pilot movie. However, in this context, when we’re faced with the possibilities both of Matthew “Mc-Bora-hey” trying to fill Tom Selleck’s Top-Siders and of a spoof Magnum<\/i> rather than a respectful updating, well, then the title takes on a somewhat different connotation. Because the snow in this case has a distinctly yellowish tinge, if you take my meaning.<\/p>\n As long as I’m all revved up anyhow, and at great risk of sounding like a whiny old poop, when is this trend of remaking every damn thing going to end anyhow? I’m getting really tired of all the stuff I loved as a kid being “reimagined” into pale imitations of their former selves. The one saving grace of these exercises in branding — because that’s what remakes really are as far as the studio suits are concerned, just familiar and exploitable names rather than ideas that really need to be updated — is that they seem to magically fade from memory as you’re walking out of the theater, so it’s not like they displace the originals. They’re as insubstantial and ultimately harmless as soap bubbles. But still, it’s annoying to think that somebody out there thinks that stuff like old Magnum<\/i> episodes — which are readily available on DVD — aren’t good enough for modern audiences.<\/p>\n Look, I love Hollywood. I love Hollywood movies. I used to get angry with the snobs who decreed that nothing that came from a big studio could possibly be as good or as original as some impenetrable Hungarian cinema-verite<\/a> bauble about unemployed fisherman who sit in darkened rooms and smoke all day long. But these days I’m beginning to wonder if maybe those film-school types had a point about Hollywood being out of ideas. I mean, come on… a big-screen version of every television show ever? A remake of frickin’ Bill and Ted<\/i><\/a>, for god’s sake? Yeah, that movie is a little dated now, but what possible reason is there for going back to it, other than the crass belief that people will go see anything that has a familiar-sounding title?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To my knowledge, I’ve never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I’m beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record. And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies","category-the-glass-teat"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}