You know, Steven Speilberg didn’t invent Nazis.

The history of moviemaking is only a century old or so. It’s really possible to see all the notable movies ever made. That’s because there aren’t very many of them. A few movies break new ground, one way or another, or at least get the fundamentals of story-telling correct for a  change. Then Hollywood apes them in hundreds of movies until the audience can’t take it any more, and starts watching television. The suits wait for a new messiah to take them from the desert of Victor Mature movies to the Promised Land of The Guns of Navarone.

I haven’t seen it, but I’ll take a guess that Paul Blart: Mall Cop, has a scene where he’s hanging over a precipice while reaching for a rope that’s just a bit too far away. It’s been in every other movie made in the last fifty years, so I assume it’s in that one, too. Life’s too short to watch Paul Blart: Mall Cop, so I’ll just watch the Guns of Navarone again if you don’t mind. In the original Chinese, of course.