(Holy Shit! Want. This. Now.)
The scope and tone of the Zack Snyder directed Superman feels earnest and emotional in all the right ways. This is the best execution of ‘pure epic’ that I’ve ever seen in a modern comic book superhero movie. Here is hoping that Man of Steel lives up to the incredible expectations engendered by this trailer.
While Chloe Moretz and Julianne more lack the flat out ‘otherliness’ of Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie, the Carrie remake (of Depalma’s 1976 classic) seems to be sticking true to the beats of the original tale while bringing us into the 21st century where cellphones and cyber bullying co-exist with psychical humiliation, and studio cinema has a way of putting ridiculously attractive collection of twentysomethings all in the same highschool. How will a rampage of butchery and revenge by loners and daughter of a zealous religious nutter be taken in our ‘school shooting every couple of months’ world? I predict the film will be good, perhaps too safe for its own good, but not great – and very likely completely ignored by the general public. Your mileage may vary. The trailer is below. It uses a creepy remix of the classic Shirelles song to great effect and it is great to know that head-bashing as a trailer cutting rhythm works quite well here as well, albeit note quite at the level of the masterpiece trailer for A Serious Man.
There is a moment in Fede Alvarez’s articleless remake of The Evil Dead that offers a hint of the condescension to come; an utter lack of faith in the audience or a confidence crisis in storytelling. After a thoroughly unnecessary prologue involving the exorcism of a dead-ite girl in the basement filled with more cat corpses and mutant hillbillies than Sleepwalkers and The Hills Have Eyes combined and our younger, prettier, twentysomethings come to the cabin in the woods to become, as they say, “spam in a cabin.” Fifteen minutes after an interminable stretch of graceless character building and (forgive me) soul sucking serio-tragic exposition, the characters find themselves down in the burned out foundation from the prologue, dead kitties still hanging from the charred joists. This is when the editing geniuses behind the film feel the need to flash back to the prologue to remind us that, you know, an ‘evil dead’ thing was going on in this creepy woodland cottage. This is immediately followed by the reveal of the Necronomicon, the evil book that releases demons into the world. Here it is not only fully annotated in large bloody english Cliff-Notes over the ancient text, but also, far more insultingly, the book has a handy-dandy series of pictures to explain things after each scene and to tell the audience what is going to happen next. If this is satire of the excesses of Raimi’s original trilogy (Dead By Dawn is itself a parody-laced remake-slash-continuation of sorts – if you don’t know, don’t ask) the he is of the most subtlest sort. (Hint: This is not the case.)
Alvarez and co-writers Rodo Sayagues, with script-polisher Diablo Cody, are utter slaves to burying references and Evil Easter Eggs from the original trilogy that things threaten to make this film more of a distracting dialogue with what came before, not to mention rather unsuccessful games of bait-and-switch in the screenplay. “The Classic” Delta 88 Oldsmobile, the charming rustbucket of a vehicle which takes on an increasing significance in the original films, shows up here not as an old clunker, but more a piece of impostor art object to be used as pretty object for our pretty actress to sit upon. I single out the remade car not as a miffed Raimi fanboy (of which I assure you, after a few too many Spiderman flicks and Disney Oz prequels, I am not) but rather that an ill executed homage such as this is indicative of the whole enterprise. But wait, there is more. At the other end of the pander-spectrum are things of such pathological minutiae that I am kind of embarrassed to know of their existence at all, such a necklace chain sculpted into the shape of skull (again don’t ask – it is not really that important.)
Excess is the name of the game in these films, and that is not a problem per se. What was the original if not the combination of the Friday 13th slasher mixed with the highlight reel of all The Exorcist pea-soup moments shaken and cooked into a high energy speedball of manic-camerawork. It worked as slapstick, it worked as a frightening hallucination. The remake is merely an engine for gore. Painful, quite realistic gore. A wet-dream for those who look for this type of thing, that somehow survived NC-17 censorship. Tree rape and limb-severings aplenty are done so with effects that slickly combine old-school practical and modern digital craft. So much time is spent getting rusty nails propelled into arms and faces that the filmmakers forgot to make it riveting (sorry) in any other way. If onscreen suffering floats your boat, and you’ve not tired of the Torture Porn cycle that I thought was well behind us at this point, then this is the horror film for you. Because Evil Dead is not scary, or even interesting.
The torturous road travelled by William Friedkin’s 1977 remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s classic Wages of Fear is both obscure and legendary. The film bombed hard upon its original release, and it was a very expensive picture. Since then ownership and rights issues have been snarled in a lot of legal confusion, while a proper aspect ratio version of the film has never been issued in any format. The only way to see this film properly is if you knew someone with a 35mm print. After Friedkin threatened to sue EVERYBODY associated with his film a short while ago, it seems that the powers that be are mounting a re-release (and BluRay) in short order after at 35 year wait.
It’s all outlined in detail, here.
I should probably stop posting trailers for the sequel film to the rebooted Star Trek franchise, as the direction that the creators want to take these films is simply out of synch with what I know to be a Star Trek film. Apparently in this new tangent universe, there is no 5 year mission to explore new worlds. Why bother when you can set your tone in the vein of Chris Nolan Batman features – all culture of fear and terror and bureaucratic gridlock. This trailer also commits cardinal sin of using a Requiem for a Dream “Lux Aeterna” score, which at this point is as terrible of a cliche in science fiction trailers as is “Everyone Was Kung Fu Fighting” is for Jackie Chan imports. Oh, they apparently crash the enterprise and I know we never seen that done in a Star Trek feature film before.
I feel like a petty negative-nancy when it comes to the mass-sell of this film, with its endless explosions and its PG-13 lingerie shot. At least with The Wrath of Khan, they had the science and ethics of the Genesis project. Here, it’s all noise and fury, signifying nothing we’ve not seen in the past 5 years of space-shooter films. Congrats Star Trek, you are just like everything else. Thanks J.J., Orci and Kurtzman, you’ve risen my passion (a good thing!) but alas in a negative way towards what appears to be your collective, handsomely mounted and expensive mediocrity.
(Before you folks get all mad at me for pre-judging this enterprise: No, I don’t have to wait to see the film to get pissed off about it. I shall indulge myself like the patron saint of angry nerd, Ignatius J. Reilly, who to the best of my knowledge was not a Trekkie; but then again, neither am I.)
OK, so there is no getting of asses to Mars, and the chances of a three boob-ed lady or Kuato showing up are slim, but this new (full) trailer for Len “Underworld” Wiseman certainly delights in recycling images from the Paul Verhoeven film – only glossier and 21st century CGI-ier.
I sure hope that Kate Beckinsale gets her arms severed in this one, because the trailer seems to indicate that her character is a composite of both the Sharon Stone and the Michael Ironside characters in the 1990 version (but “See you at the party, Lori!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.)
Colour me biased to Verhoeven’s excessively trashy ways and unimpressed by Wiseman’s previous record as a slick – if totally bland – action director.
I remain unimpressed. The trailer is below.
An oddly compelling reason to never buy a Honda, but also an interesting commentary on how our ‘hero’ has gone from a stolen 1961 Ferrari to a leased 2012 CRV. Superbowl, I hate you even more than usual. I’m off to palette cleanse on the real Ferris Too, Alexander Payne’s Election (The last time Matthew Broderick didn’t phone it in.)
Director: Rod Lurie (The Contender, The Last Castle, Resurrecting the Champ )
Producers: Rod Lurie, Marc Frydman
Starring: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, James Woods, Dominic Purcell, Rhys Cairo, Drew Powell, Billy Lush, Laz Alonso, Walton Goggins
MPAA Rating: R
Running time: 110 min
(2/5)Sam Peckinpah’s original Straw Dogs caused massive controversy in the UK when it came out in 1971. Alongside Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, Peckinpah’s tale of survival and man’s inner animal didn’t sit well with the British Board of Film Classification, leading to cuts (particularly to the notorious rape scene) and even banning in the mid 1980s. It’s now a classic that remains controversial and a genuinely tough watch to this day.
Jump forward 40 years and we have writer/director Rod Lurie’s redundant, pointless, and almost entirely ineffective remake that takes the interesting jagged edges of the original and smoothes them out to make a predictably polished Hollywood version.
Remakes are a constant in Hollywood; always have been. Despite how easy it is to bemoan the current perception that there are no new ideas in Hollywood and everything is a remake or a sequel, it’s not really THAT different from what Hollywood has always done, capitalizing on existing properties for new profits. And sometimes this actually works out well, whether it’s a new take on a book that’s been adapted before, or a transposition of an older film into a new context or culture. This week, we have remakes of Footloose and The Thing (remake, prequel, whatever) on our screens, and while I haven’t seen either of those and can’t comment, I thought it’d be fun to look back at several remakes throughout Hollywood history that are definitely worthwhile in and of themselves. Granted, some of these are actually secondary adaptations of source material from a different medium, but in all cases, there were well-known and often quite good film versions already in existence. Also, I’m not necessarily saying these remakes are better than the originals, but just that they’re worth watching on their own terms. So before you say “another version of THAT?” or “they’re adapting that AGAIN?” – remember these. 
The Front Page is far overshadowed by its more famous remake, and there are good reasons for that. Though The Front Page is a snappy newspaper comedy much like His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks had a stroke of genius in switching the gender of hotshot reporter Hildy Jackson from male to female, adding a romantic and battle-of-the-sexes angle to the story that’s totally absent in the original. He also innovated the use of overlapping dialogue to make an already fast-moving script move even faster. The all-male version of the story was remade again in the ’70s by none other than Billy Wilder, with the original title. I have not seen that version. But if there was ever an argument for remaking things with liberal changes, it’s His Girl Friday, which stands as one of the greatest films ever made.
1940 USA. Director: Howard Hawks. Starring: Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy. Remake of THE FRONT PAGE (1931).
Remakes get tricky when there are books involved as sources. Few people would disagree that John Huston’s film is the definite version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, but it wasn’t the first. It was, in fact, the third version, but neither of the first two have the crackle or power of the 1941 film. Easy enough to say, well, this isn’t a remake, it’s an adaptation of a book, but ultimately that’s an arbitrary judgement because we like this version better. If someone tried to adapt The Maltese Falcon now, it’d certainly be compared to this version and considered a remake.
1941 USA. Director: John Huston. Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet. Remake of SATAN MET A LADY (1936) and THE MALTESE FALCON (1931).
Norwegian thriller Headhunters (Kurt’s Review) is one of those great genre-gems from abroad that gets into the American re-make pipeline well before the original has a chance to find an audience; and that is the case here, as Summit is developing an English language right at this moment. Magnolia has had the rights to the film for some time, when they picked it up at the European Film Market months ago, but on their website there is no mention of either the film or a release date, although the film has already started to roll out in Europe. Here is hoping people get the chance to see this one on the big screen (Hey Magnolia, here is a free marketing hook: One of the key characters is played by Nikolaj Cster-Waldau, A Game of Thrones’ Jaime Lannister) it is a lot of fun and full of surprises.
Headhunters is an action thriller which introduces the
charmingdouche-bag Roger Brown, a man who seems to have it all: he is Norway’s most successful headhunter, married to the beautiful gallery owner Diana, owns a magnificent house – and is living well beyond his means. Meanwhile, he is playing at the dangerous game of art theft. Headhunters is a story about deceit, faithfulness and revenge.
The subtitled trailer is tucked under the seat.
I was reluctant to post anything on this story until things became a bit more ‘firm.’ But they have indeed solidified in the past week according to Variety. Spike Lee is going to direct another adaptation of the Japanese Manga made famous by South Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s visceral highly-cinematic and much lauded (it won the Grand Prize Jury Award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival) adaptation which ended up as one of the more famous films to come out of the South Korean film-boom in the early half of the aughties; and the middle chapter of the directors much lauded ‘Vengeance Trilogy.’
Having seen what Lee can do with the pure genre grind with the fabulous Inside Man, and having less attachment to Old Boy as many in the fan boy film community seem to, (I am partial to Sympathy For Lady Vengeance myself) I am quite keen to see what Lee brings to the table on this. Will the squid eating sequence remain? The controversial plot twist survive in all its icky-glory? It shall be a while until this hits any screen and judging by several derailments of this project in the past, there is certainly no guarantee it will ever hit the big screen. Colour me interested…
Here we go again. Another great foreign title being remade for American audiences. Once again, I’m not opposed to these things happening, but when they’re so close on the heels from the release of the original it inexplicably rubs me the wrong way.
The movie fandom community seems to have really grown attached to Ben Affleck on the other side of the camera, so it’s no surprise we’re all itching to see what he brings us next. As it happens, what he’ll be bringing us is a remake of the foreign box office sensation, Tell No One (my review).
I suppose I’m interested to see what Affleck does with the title but as always with these types of remakes I’d rather see these “great” directors doing something original (the Boston thing has worked really well for him so far) with their time. Despite how you may feel about Fincher doing Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, honestly how much more do you think Affleck can bring to something as simplistically straight forward (and I mean that in the most awesome possible way) as Tell No One?
Anyone other than me seen this pretty great film from a couple of years ago? If yes (or no), what are your thoughts on Affleck remaking it and what are your thoughts on this latest trend of Hollywood remaking recent foreign films in lieu of an original property?
