With the likelihood of a writers' strike in November, I'd like to add my own requests for moratoria on the following kinds of movies and TV shows from the studios and networks:

• Big-screen adaptations of comic books and video games.  Sometimes they're good, like V For Vendetta and the decheesified Batman with Christian Bale.  Other times, they're completely stupid, like Doom, 30 Days of Night, and the whole Resident Evil franchise.  I don't care what Jessica Alba says, fanboys aren't tastemakers.


• Sequels to Saw.  They're up to #4 now, with #5 and #6 planned.  You'd think someone would start thinking.


• Americanized remakes of Japanese horror flicks.  Not only does this show lack of creativity on the producers' parts, even for horror flicks they're stupid.  "We're being stalked by a pasty-skinned eight-year-old boy with big dark eyes because we watched a videotape that nobody bothered to destroy even though everybody who watched it was killed a week later!"


• Teen soap operas.  These are the source of every school shooting that has ever happened, because they promote the idea that the In Crowd is a bunch of conspicuously-consuming rich kids who party like there's no such thing as hangovers, homework or parental oversight while attending a private school that can somehow afford its own TV studio and radio station.  They almost always jump the shark once graduation rolls around, so why keep making them, especially since Cho Seung-Hui was imagining he was ventilating Dawson and Pacey instead of Agent Smith?


• Action movies starring Milla Jovovich.  My fondness for blue-eyed brunettes aside, these movies of hers come off like they were written by scabs during a strike.  Here's to hoping her impending motherhood will shift her thinking on the subject the same way Kathy Ireland's first daughter shifted Kathy's thinking on the subject of being a swimsuit model.


• Anything that sounds like it was conceived while on drugs.  What on Earth were the guys who came up with Snakes On A Plane toking?  "Dude! (snort of unidentified white powder)  Wouldn't it be awesome if in Executive Decision (another snort) instead of terrorists, (snort up each nostril) it were snakes?  Motherf#*king snakes on the motherf#*king plane, man!"  Learn the Lesson Of Samuel L. Jackson well: read the script before committing to it.


• Anything that Quentin Tarantino has been within a country parsec of.  I am a college graduate.  He is a high school dropout.  I majored in creative writing, and studied advanced fiction writing and advanced screenwriting at Harvard.  He rented a dozen tapes a night from the video store he worked at, and attended something called (and I'm not joking) "Two-Day Film School."  And yet his profanity- and racial invective-laden valentines to the kinds of movies they used to mercilessly mock on Mystery Science Theater 3000 still get greenlit, while my rather clever satires remain unsold and unproduced.  When a guy says he wants to remain an amateur, that should be a warning sign to toss his script into the shredder.