There’s a moment in The Great Gatsby in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s eponymous hero reveals that he spends money and throws lavish parties to cover up his own emptiness. The same could be said for Baz Luhrmann’s film. It’s ironic that a movie about the dangers of flamboyant excess would so thoroughly indulge in such flamboyant excess. “But the story is all about excess, so Luhrmann is smart to employ such excess,” I hear you retort. True, but the story is also about characters, and they are sadly lacking in this adaptation. For all his visual splendour and loud music, Luhrmann has neglected character and substance, leaving the film feeling as empty as Gatsby himself.

These don’t feel like complex characters, but broad caricatures that often verge on the cartoonish. Joel Edgerton’s Tom Buchanan is basically a moustache-twirling villain and it’s never entirely clear what’s so great about Gatsby anyway. DiCaprio has a distracting habit of dropping his Ts, so he keeps calling people “old spore.” Tobey Maguire is predictably uninteresting as Nick Carraway, a character about whom we learn disappointingly little. As for the usually excellent Carey Mulligan, here she is reduced to the role of the vacuous love interest whose shrillness is matched only by her whininess. Why are these men falling so desperately in love with such an aloof, irritating non-person? You’d be better off dating a cat in a dress.

All this is clearly of little concern to Luhrmann, who is much more interested in his lavish visual effects and obtrusive pop music. The problem with the soundtrack is not that it’s modern, but that it’s just not very good. By all means use modern music, just don’t make it Lana Del Ray. Or Florence + The Machine. Or Emeli Sandé. The result is something that looks more like a music video than a literary adaptation and Luhrmann’s use of 3D makes it obvious that he prioritises spectacle over anything else. Don’t make a literary adaptation in 3D. You’re not Ang Lee. You’re Baz Luhrmann. The camera barely stays still for long enough to capture anything substantial, and just as we think we’re getting somewhere interesting we’re pulled right out of it by some gaudy slow motion or some loud will.i.am.

To give Luhrmann his dues, the film is hypnotic and the storytelling solid. But The Great Gatsby is a classic case of style over substance, the kind of which we’ve come to expect from Baz Luhrmann who seems like a child in a candy store, over-indulging in brightly coloured sugary treats. The film fails to heed the warnings of its own story, and goes lavishly over the top at the expense of humanity and emotion. You certainly don’t come away from The Great Gatsby feeling like it’s adapted from one of the best novels of all time. Which it apparently is but I don’t know, I’ve not read it.

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To misquote Abed on season four: “I remember when this show was about community college and didn’t suck.” Sure, it improved as it went along, but it never managed to shake that Community-tribute-act vibe. It was like the writers were performing a “Best Of,” but hadn’t actually heard the original songs. Or learnt to play their instruments. All the half-assed call-backs to paintball and the darkest timeline seemed to scream: “The fans will remember this! You know, from when it was good.”

Even the characters felt like bad lookalikes this seasons. Look at Abed, surely one of the most interesting comedy characters of recent years. This season saw him reduced to making increasingly lazy references and forced homages. Meanwhile, Jeff’s speeches have become so utterly mawkish and wet that he might as well just walk around wearing a t-shirt saying “I LOVE MY FRIENDS” and save us a lot of wasted time. As for Chang, he’s just one of the worst characters ever.

Worst of all, this season just wasn’t funny. This is meant to be a comedy, so where were the jokes? They seem to have been replaced with more and more contrived high-concepts. Let’s do a puppet episode, let’s do a superhero origins episode, let’s do a fate episode — and yes, two of those were the same one; it was literally conceptually confused. The feeling that this was a show trying to be Community permeated every unfunny second of season four.

But that’s because it was trying to be Community. Call me a stuck record, but with no Dan Harmon, you have no Community. Trying to write Community without him is a thankless task. It’s not the writers’ fault, they were doing their best in an impossible situation. It’s NBC’s fault, for firing the man who created Community and exercised such auteurist control over every aspect of the show. Community without Dan Harmon is like Seinfeld without Seinfeld, or How I Met Your Mother without the casual sexism.

Now, there are reports that Dan Harmon may return for season five, which seems highly unlikely given the hugely unfair way in which he was sacked — the Commutiny, as I call it. But I sincerely hope he does return, because that would be the only way to save this limping ghoul of a show. Otherwise, I beg that NBC have a change of heart and axe this show that I once so desperately longed to continue. #6seasonsandamovie? More like #4seasonsandanapology.

If you run over an animal with your car and it only just survives, screaming in agony, it is only right that you put it out of its misery. That’s what NBC has done to Community; they have all but killed it, leaving it floundering in pain. They therefore have something of a moral duty to finish it off, out of mercy. And I hope that someone somewhere in the world of television learns a valuable lesson about messing around with an artist’s creative vision. But they won’t.

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Everyone knows the best thing about Christmas. It’s not the presents, it’s not the food and it’s not the songs. Obviously it’s not the songs. It is, of course, the films. But don’t worry, this list won’t just be The Muppet Christmas Carol, Gremlins and Die Hard, brilliant though they all are. Here are my top 5 un-Christmas films:

5. First Blood (1982)

Set around Christmas, Rambo’s first outing stars a relatively puny, high-pitched Sylvester Stallone. With breathtaking action, striking cinematography and a genuinely moving climax, First Blood is perfect post-turkey entertainment. After all, what’s Boxing Day without a little post-traumatic stress disorder?

4. L.A. Confidential (1997)

Christmas is a celebration of peace, goodwill and the brutal beating of six prisoners by around 50 police officers. This real event (Bloody Christmas, Christmas Day 1951) is vividly brought to life by a brilliant ensemble cast including Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce and James Cromwell. A truly intriguing tale of police corruption, L.A. Confidential is one to watch once the kids have gone to bed or passed out from too much booze.

3. Black Christmas (1974)

Often said to be the original slasher movie, Bob Clark’s Black Christmas oozes festivity from every artery. According to IMDb, the film’s taglines include: “Christmas is coming early this year. And it’s murder” and “It’s beginning to look a lot like — bloodshed!” Coming up with your own is a very fun, very easy game: “‘Tis the season … to be DEAD!”, “All I want for Christmas is KILL!”, etc.

2. The French Connection (1971)

For me, nothing says Christmas like the sight of Gene Hackman dressed as Santa chasing a man down the streets of Brooklyn. He and Roy Scheider star in William Friedkin’s classic thriller, which would make a great Christmas cop double bill with L.A. Confidential. Thanks to its chilly atmosphere, strong sense of place and celebrated car chase, The French Connection is as essential to Christmas as the children under the tree. Or something.

1. In Bruges (2008)

Martin McDonagh’s black comedy is not only a modern classic, but also the perfect Christmas film; let’s face it, what Christmas is complete without swearing, midgets and death? Colin Farrell gives the performance of his career, alongside the superb Brendan Gleeson and an absolute tour de force from Ralph Fiennes. All three of them relish every single, sweary word of McDonagh’s script, which is both funny and thoughtful in equal measure; Tarantinoesque but infinitely more substantial. It’s set around Christmas so stick it on, and no matter how bad your Christmas is, at least you’re not in fuckin’ Bruges.

So those are my top five un-Christmas films; why not alienate your friends and family this Christmas by forcing them to watch one or all of them?

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I’ve already complained at length about the decision to split The Hobbit into three films; a decision which makes about as much sense as making Green Eggs and Ham into a 13 episode HBO series, or turning the game Hungry Hungry Hippos into a movie. Oh, anyway, An Unexpected Journey is finally here so it’s time to make an informed judgement. Well, a semi-informed judgement.

It seems that there’s simply not enough material in the novel to justify this money-making move to split it into three films. As Chuck explains in his great review, this first instalment feels aimless and meandering as a result; a gang of increasingly annoying dwarves go from place to place, battling CGI monster after CGI monster. By the time the credits roll (or whatever it is that 3D credits do; bulge, perhaps) it’s deeply unsatisfying, as if we’ve only watched a third of a film. Because that’s exactly what we’ve done.

This was never a problem for The Lord of the Rings trilogy, all three films of which were proper movies in their own right, each with a beginning, middle and end. After all, each one was based on a single novel. Yes, The Fellowship of the Ring ended with the beginning of an adventure, but there was still a sense of finality to the piece. An Unexpected Journey, on the other hand, feels like a chopped up portion of one movie.

At no point in The Lord of the Rings do you roll your eyes at a big CGI goblin with a stupid voice (Barry Humphries), or scratch your head at a crowbarred-in scene with Saruman (Christopher Lee), or curse a load of Dwarves under your breath. In fact, if you find the Dwarves’ comic antics anything less than riotously funny, then much of An Unexpected Journey just feels tedious. Too much time is spent introducing them in the Shire (the most boring place in Middle-earth) before wandering aimlessly from battle to battle, with some exposition here and a cutesy CGI hedgehog there. The bloated nature of it all highlights the problem of splitting The Hobbit into multiple movies; there’s not enough material to spread out over three films (“like butter scraped over too much bread,” to quote Bilbo) and so what we get is a lot of padding. A lot of soft, cushy padding.

If you were to watch An Unexpected Journey without watching the following two instalments, it would just feel like watching a series of events with no satisfying conclusion. A film should work by itself. You shouldn’t have to read the books or see other movies for it to make sense. The Harry Potter films are particularly bad in this respect; much of them require familiarity with the source material, and by splitting the final book into two movies, we get a penultimate instalment which goes absolutely nowhere. A single film should be a self-contained, fully coherent piece of work.

It would be odd to only watch, say, the third part of a trilogy, but it should still be possible. Again, The Lord of the Rings achieves this; The Return of the King works as a standalone film. Partly because it’s about as long as three movies. But even with its lengthy running time, An Unexpected Journey doesn’t feel like a fully satisfying movie and that is a problem. It’s a problem with splitting what should be single films into several parts, which allows filmmakers to get away with failing to successfully adapt material.

As I’ve argued, if you can’t fit your adaptation into a single film you have already failed. But now audiences are going to have to pay three times as much money for what may prove to be three unsatisfying The Hobbit movies. Why should this be acceptable in the world of film, when it’s thankfully not anywhere else? It’s like if a band were to release one album with all the guitar and bass parts, and then another the following year with all the drums and vocals. Or like reading The Hobbit, only for it to painfully snap shut on your fingers once you get a third of the way through. It seems that films no longer need to be actual films, and can get away with laziness and incoherence to make even more money.

Thanks to this greedy trend, what could have been a children’s fantasy classic looks more likely to become the disappointing follow up to one of the greatest trilogies ever made. The whole thing makes you wish that Guillermo del Toro had stayed in the director’s chair, making it all a little less cosy and a little less long. And if anyone from HBO is interested in my Green Eggs and Ham show, we’ll talk.

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As Halloween approaches, so do more pointless remakes of classic horror films. This week we’ve been treated to teasers for the new versions of Evil Dead and Carrie. It would be easy to be cynical about both projects, but who knows, maybe they’ll be better than the originals.

Except obviously they won’t be. Because the originals are just about perfect, and more importantly, they’re original. The clue is in the name. These glossy new remakes may smooth over the rough edges, but in doing so they eliminate everything that made these films interesting in the first place.

Talking of rough edges, it’s worth noting that director Fede Alvarez has made Evil Dead‘s raped-by-a-tree scene “way more terrible than the original.” But Sam Raimi, who made the original and also co-wrote and produced the remake, has expressed regret for putting that scene in his 1981 classic. So what happened? I can only assume that all those Spider-Man films warped his brain.

At least there’s no CGI in the new Evil Dead, which cannot be said for the remake of Carrie if that trailer is anything to go by. I love Chloë Moretz and Julianne Moore as much as the next 30 Rock fan, but they’re not Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie.

The movie has the blessing of Brian De Palma who directed the original, and obviously the new Evil Dead has Sam Raimi on board, but should it be them who gets to decide? In the brilliant South Park episode “Free Hat”, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg change Raiders of the Lost Ark, mainly by putting Ewoks in it. George Lucas claims that he has the right to do what he wants with his movies, and Stan argues: “They’re not your movies; they’re ours.” Kyle adds: “When an artist creates, whatever they create belongs to society.” Whether that’s the case is debatable, but it’s certainly worth considering. For horror fans, Carrie is our Raiders and The Evil Dead trilogy is our Star Wars trilogy. And if there’s one thing we learnt from the Star Wars prequels, it’s that we should leave stuff alone.

So here’s a drastic proposal: No more remakes. It would only be a temporary ban, just to redress the balance and bring originality, creativity and imagination back into our cinemas. Eventually we could have one or two remakes again, but they’d have to be approved by a panel that consists entirely of me. Fine, we’ll work out the details later.

The interesting thing is that films are the only form of art in which works are remade. Oh and music, considering covers of songs are essentially remakes. But you wouldn’t read The Lord of the Rings and think: “Well it was alright, but I reckon I could have a better crack at it.” So why do people do that with movies? There’s no argument against remaking other forms of art that won’t apply to films.

When justifying remakes, filmmakers tend to use two main arguments. The first is that we now have technology to make films look better than they did the first time round. What they mean by that is: “We now have computers.” So this year’s Total Recall remake probably looked very shiny and cool, but we’ll never know because no one saw it. But Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall looked great in the first place; the physical effects are still highly impressive. Of course some of it looks silly (and that’s mainly Arnie’s fault), but that’s because it was made in the past. That’s what we need to remember: Some films were made in the past. All art is a product of its time and that’s part of what’s interesting about it. You wouldn’t remake a cave painting because we now have more sophisticated materials. They’re valuable precisely because of their space in time. Remaking films to all look the same totally rids them of any of that history and context.

The other argument used to justify remakes is that we’re bringing these great films to a whole new generation. But why can’t this new generation watch the originals? The new generation have Netflix and stuff. Nowadays, when I ask someone if they’ve seen, say, A Nightmare on Elm Street and they say they have, I have to clarify if they mean the Wes Craven masterpiece or the Michael Bay waste of everyone’s time. When they say that they mean the remake I want to grab them and say: “Then you lied, you haven’t seen A Nightmare on Elm Street.” But it’s not their fault; like so many things in this world, it’s Michael Bay’s fault. He’s responsible for a range of soulless remakes of horror classics, none of which I’ve seen, because I don’t need to see them; I’ve seen the originals and I know what a modern horror film looks like. I can put two and two together and avoid giving Michael Bay any money.

Of course that’s the real reason to remake a successful movie; it will make money. To use the critic Kim Newman’s analogy: “Opening another McDonalds is a safer bet than a standalone restaurant.” There’s something insulting, then, about the pretence that remaking a movie is some sort of noble tribute; filmmakers always claim that the reason they’re remaking a classic is because of how much they loved the original. But surely loving something is a reason to leave it alone. If you love it so much, why change it? Remaking a film implies that the original is somehow defective.

If you really love a film then be inspired by it, or even reference it. This year we’ve seen some fantastic works of modern horror such as The Cabin in the Woods and ParaNorman, both of which lovingly pay genuine tribute to classic horror films, while also telling original stories. The great thing about Kyle’s idea that art belongs to society is that we can reach into the pool of our collective culture and take out bits we want to use, just as long as we put something else back in. Whether something’s plagiarism or not is pretty much down to the quality of the resulting piece of work; if it’s good then it’s an homage, if it’s bad then it’s stealing. This very article is a derivative mess.

So by all means draw inspiration from the enormous wealth of art that makes up our culture, just stop remaking it all. There are planned remakes of everything from American Psycho to The Orphanage; An American Werewolf in London to Videodrome (written by Ehren Transformers Kruger, which I’ve complained about here), and we need to introduce this ban before it’s too late. There have only been about two worthwhile remakes; The Fly and The Thing. Don’t get me wrong, they are two of my favourite films; it just seems that two decent remakes in the entire history of cinema doesn’t quite justify the endless slew of boring, shiny, production line rehashes. Maybe banning remakes would stop us from seeing some of the greatest works of cinema ever made, but you know what? That’s a risk I’m willing to take.

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Remember when one novel could be made into one film? Well there was a time — a time before studios insisted on splitting single books into two or even three different movies. With the recent news about The Hobbit becoming three films, it’s time to address this trend.

The problem with this practice is that, like so many things, it’s motivated purely by money. What’s particularly cynical about it is that filmmakers deny this, claiming that the decision to make one novel into several films is somehow an artistic one.

Peter Jackson claimed that the reason for The Hobbit becoming a trilogy of films was to get more of the book onto the screen; “Do we take this chance to tell more of the tale? And the answer from our perspective as the filmmakers, and as fans, was an unreserved ‘yes.’” What about as business people? Of course they want to make as much money as possible, and The Hobbit is a cash cow. Or a cash … oliphaunt? I don’t know, I don’t really like The Lord of the Rings. The point is, it’s a guaranteed money-maker, so obviously they want to milk it dry. But what’s objectionable is claiming that it’s for the benefit of the fans, when the reality is that the fans are just being used; there’s something quite deceptive and even nasty about that.

Those who defend the decision to split single books into multiple movies argue that it is important to be as faithful to the book as possible, and one film is simply not long enough to do justice to the detail of the novel. This does make for an interesting debate about just how faithful a movie adaptation needs to be. This is often made difficult by confusion over what we mean by “faithful.”

An adaptation should be faithful in its retention of themes and tone, but in terms of plot, detail and even characters, it needn’t be particularly faithful at all. Books and films are very different, and if you can’t fit every aspect of a novel into a movie, then don’t. Part of the art of narrative is working out what and what not to include. If you have to divide your adaptation into several parts, you have failed.

It’s understandable that fans of books would be protective of their content and would want every detail intact after the transition to the big screen. But it’s important to realise that art is versatile; look at Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights from last year. It omitted about half the book, and as a result was a focused and beautiful piece of cinema. Apart from the Mumford & Sons song at the end, obviously.

In any case, The Hobbit is only about 300-400 pages long; making that into three films seems ridiculous, especially when you consider that Joe Wright’s new adaptation of Tolstoy’s 800-page Anna Karenina fits into a single film.

Meanwhile, the final Harry Potter book was made into two films, the first of which was totally redundant, as absolutely nothing happened. Mind you, the first seven Harry Potter films were totally redundant. But that penultimate waste of time made the whole decision to split up that last book seem particularly greedy, and sneering with it. And I’ve not read the Twilight books, but I refuse to believe for a second that there’s enough of worth in there to justify dividing the last book into two films. But then teenage girls have a lot of money, and if Stephenie Meyer wants to exploit that while instilling in them a profound sense of gender-based inferiority, then who am I to judge.

My favourite movie adaptations of novels (Fight Club, American Psycho, A History of Violence … yes it’s a graphic novel, but it counts) all fit into single films while leaving the heart of the books well and truly intact. A film is not a book, and art tends to be at its best when trying something different. So stop wringing out every last commercial drop from these pieces of literature like George Lucas if he could read, and stop deceptively claiming that it’s for the fans when they’re the ones being exploited.

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