Saturday, January 31, 2009

Remakes: They ain't just for genre pictures.

Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as two intelligent young adults who share a night of charged conversation and romance amongst the streets and river walks of Vienna, Austria. It's a film full of realistic optimism and philosophical musings.
Would the youth of today go for such a film? The simple answer is, no they would not.

Linklater's film came out in 1995, well before the advent of ipods and web 2.0 social networking, and thus it has dated poorly, translating to near complete gibberish in 2009. The sight of this strange world without camera phones and skinny jeans make heads spin in confusion.
So the first thing to consider when financing a remake is this... Let's have Levi's, American Apparel and H&M provide the wardrobe for the movie. It's healthy product placement. Don't doubt such a thing.

The next thing to consider:
We're in an economic downturn and college and European travel are really out of the question for many young people these days. They won't be able to identify with things that promote forward thinking and growth, let along something that uses one's earnings for anything other than itunes downloads, so it is far better (and safer) to set the film in an "everyman's" suburb. Hell we know it'll just be shot somewhere north of LA, so why not just set it in the valley... and have the young adults *ahem* kids work at the mall. There, location problem solved.

Now, the young people in question... Hawke and Delpy were 23 when they made the '95 flick; far too old.
Though they are getting close to 23 (they wouldn't look it!) let's have High School Musical alumni Zac Efron and Vanesse Hudgens headline this time out. Heck, they're a couple in real life, so the chemistry is already in place... boom.
They can trade hair care tips over playlists and peach smoothies with protein boosts from Jamba Juice.

Side note: Efron is in fact appearing in Linklater's forthcoming Me and Orson Welles!

You might ask what would keep two fine young wax figures like Efron and Hudgens working in a mall till sunrise... the mall is having some midnight madness salesathon for the kiddies to celebrate the advent of summer break. It could even feature concert appearances by fellow Disney commodities Miley Cyrus and (the) Jonas Brothers, and how about a pesky mall security guard played by ex-husband of Roseanne, Tom Arnold or better yet current U.S. Box Office champ, Kevin James.

The one thing I can't figure out is what kind of role facebook and myspace would play... Perhaps after hours of tween safe lusting and surface chatter about polar bears dying out in the arctic, Efron and Hudgens can come to the sensible agreement that it's best to "friend" each other online in six months. Scratch that, six weeks. There, that sounds reasonable.

Kenny Ortega get crackin'!

Monday, January 19, 2009

Today, for part 2 of our remake feature we're talking about giant ants. Yes... THEM!

Gordon Douglas'1954 flick is considered to be seminal sci-fi on celluloid and one of the best of the cautionary creature features. The first atomic bomb goes off in the desert of New Mexico and slowly but surely causes the mutation of teensy weensy normal ants into... yes that is right... GIANT ANTS!
Your basic parade of police, military and scientist types have to deal with this insect annoyance, tracking down some newly escaped queen ants. And queen ants can fly! The film gets bogged down by some police procedural work and the general talky-ness of the era before getting back to some good ol' fashion ant blasting in the Los Angeles sewers.

The film has been a definite influence on Sci-fi/horror cautionary tales over the years, most recently/notably with Joon-ho-Bong's The Host. So why in the world has this not been turned into a big, noisy American remake? Truth be told the title (without question mark) has been used many times over the years, for all sorts of films and TV shows, but alas, no straight up giant ant action in any of them.

Mr. Transformers himself, Michael Bay has been circling around a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds for years now. Not to diss ol' Hitch, but The Birds, while having a few good set pieces, is one of his films that has not held up all too well over the last decades. I could go into details but I won't because the bottom line is this: Mr. Bay stop thinking about those pesky seagulls and canaries and start thinking about giant killer ants in the desert of New Mexico. You've already done giant killer robots (in the desert), so why not go ahead and blow some shit up while angering a whole new slew of geeks. Your general lack of substance and character fits right in with the insect life style.

The original's giant ants were vicious to be sure; gnawing chumps with their pincers, shooting acid, general tunneling, burrowing and even Navy ship attacking, but the puppets used ( as amazing as they were at the time) were slow as molasses. Of course we'd CGI these suckers now, and just like the updated zombie, make them super fast, thus twice, thrice, as deadly!

This one is such a no brainer, it hurts.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Needle in a Haystack: UMFELD


Needle in a Haystack: a continuing look at low to no budget features, shorts and alternative cinema.





T
he movie in question today could be called experimental or avant garde, but please don't let that dissuade you. Musician Jochim Papp and video artist Scott Pagano have joined forces to create an extremly unique scape of sound and image with Umfeld.

Sometime early last year I stumbled upon a behind the scenes trailer and was quite intrigued. At that point the movie had not been released. I forgot to make any kind of note of it (besides a mental one) and thus Umfeld slipped away... until...
A few weeks back when I read about it again on the Dutch site, onderhond. By this time Umfeld had been released both on DVD and as a free legal download online! The trailer is definitly worth a look, if not the hour long film itself, so head on over to Umfeld.tv and enjoy!

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Remake: Possibly the most dreaded word in all of film geek-dom.
Or if you prefer, reimagining...

Plenty of people would argue there are no good remakes. These people would be misinformed. A majority of people would cite that John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing is superior to the original 1951 version. Another group - myself included - would say Philip Kaufman's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is better than Don Siegel's.

I see it like this...

Stories have been passed down and retold in some form or another for centuries but only in this past one, the Goliath known as the 20th, have these reformed, redone, remade stories been scrutinized in such a mass way. Or perhaps not. I don't currently have any newspaper clippings from 1867 or literary journals from 1768 (Were there any lit journals in 1768), or soundbites from the man on the street in 1434 Florence from when I traveled back there in my time machine last August.

Now there is good reason for these remakes to be looked down upon because many are unnecessary and awful. Most are also "genre" pictures and high concept, which is an interesting little nugget to ponder, but this entry is not supposed to be about the minutia of such things, because that could/would turn into whining and this is supposed to be fun.

No, today I present to you the first of a slew of stories that could possibly be remade, adapted or what have you... and have a chance of being just as relevant, just as good, or even better than older versions.

Bold words? maybe... Let's get to it.

Carnival of Souls

Herk Harvey's and John Clifford's 1962 cult classic about a woman who survives a freak drag racing accident, and then is subsequently haunted by a ghoul of a man on her way to a new job in Utah has in fact already been remade... by Wes Craven! Scratch that, it was presented by Craven... Looking at the plot synopsis provided by the ever reliable IMDb (note sarcasm), this 1998 version doesn't even sound remotely like the '62 original, minus the title and a car crashing into a river. Perhaps more similarities would become apparent if I saw the thing, but I have no desire to. Not because it is a remake, but because it looks like plain old garbage.

The Ingmar Bergman and Jean Cocteau inspired surrealism of Harvey's film is really something special, so why try and repeat that? The picture is in the public domain so it'd be no problem copyright wise to go ahead, and the film's themes of alienation are certainly timeless and possibly more relevant now but...

... Let's set our remake in 1950s New York. A few years before Harvey's film. Now fans might say this is ridiculous, that much of the original's appeal came from the film's use of Saltair, an abandoned open air pavilion and amusement park on the Great Salt Lake. True enough.

Now if we set this in New York it might very well mean no carnival either, or drag race... So why even call it a remake? Let's call it a reimagining, then. And I guess we can't call it "Carnival of Souls"...

Candace Hilligoss' Mary Henry was an organist, so let's have our "Mary" be a jazz pianist and nightclub singer. Why not go for a wild card in casting, and choose eccentric musician Nellie McKay? She talks right out of an old radio show and exudes a certain paranoid and schizophrenic whimsy.

Let's take an atmospheric cue from Alexander Mackendrink's "Sweet Smell of Success." Nothing says bright lights big, bad city quite like this film.



But something's still missing... An ethereal, unsettling nature. We've got to capture the suffocating nightmare of the streets; everyday faces are strangers of the strangest kind. Each corner turned is fear incarnate. Alleyways are tunnels into the deepest darkness upon which Mary might never return. But life will go on... amongst this sense of not belonging to this world.

Our nightmare needs to be grounded in a certain reality. For this, let's turn to the example of Hiroshi Teshigahara's self proclaimed "documentary fantasy."

Watch the first part of this clip and then move onto the 2nd:







Granted, these are examples steeped in Japanese pathos circa the 60s, but what better national cinema to cite than that of Japan when addressing the feeling of not belonging? Well there is America...

In sculpting a retelling of Carnival of Souls, it is best to steer clear of modern horror elements such as excessive gore and cheap, jumpy scares. To honor Harvey and Clifford's original one must focus on the psychological unwinding of a woman who feels increasingly out of place in the world around her.

Stay tuned for next time when we will discuss... THEM!

In the meantime, why not comment with your own thoughts or remake ideas. Participation means a happier tomorrow.

Friday, January 9, 2009

Needle in a Haystack: DIE SCHNEIDER KRANKHEIT

If it wasn't for the Toronto based website Twitch I wouldn't know about half the movies I am interested in seeing over the next year and beyond. I have to thank them enormously for all the news, trailers, posters, fest coverage and reviews they bring to the web. They make a tough job look easy and that is golden in my book. So, something else that is golden? The trailer for the sure-to-be-cult short film Die Schneider Krankheit . And guess who is hosting it? Twitch!

Head on over for some Retro Sci-Fi goodness!