Still, nobody can figure out any kind of logical motivation behind the change of heart, given that Cronenberg has always been against the idea of a remake (despite the fact that he was okay with remakes enough to do one himself). And most of us would really, really, really like to see the Goldblum brought back for the lead, as redundant as that may seem.
Check out what the film blogs are saying about this reboot idea after the jump:
David Cronenberg stunned many with his decision to remake his own filmThe Fly, involving himself as writer and potentially director of Fox’s reboot effort. But this certainly isn’t a bad idea. After all, Cronenberg’s version is already a redo of Kurt Neumann’s 1958 sci-fi/horror classic of the same name, and it’s considered one of the best remakes of all time. It is very likely that he will now also deliver one of the best examples in which a director remakes his own film.
Sure, there are plenty of bad examples, especially when it’s a French filmmaker attempting to translate his hit comedy for Hollywood (see Three Fugitives and Just Visiting) or a Japanese filmmaker rehashing his own horror sequel in the States (The Grudge 2 and The Ring Two). And let’s not forget the unnecessary redundancy of Haneke’s Funny Games U.S.
But some of the greatest directors have made remakes of their own works that are at least as good, if not better than their originals. We take a look at five examples that Cronenberg could learn from — though he probably doesn’t need the help. …Read more
Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.
The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bondhas done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.
Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump: …Read more
It’s Halloween, a time when sales of candy and rentals of horror movies spike off the charts. Candy has been around since the time of the ancient Egyptians, but the horror film is barely 100 years old. The genre is enjoying a resurgence in popularity over the past several years: right now you’ve got Saw V in wide release, Let The Right One In in limited theaters, the vampy teen Twilight coming up in a few weeks and True Blood making waves on HBO. Studios can’t seem to go more than a few months without releasing some sort of a zombie flick, and vampires are coming back into their own.
But what was the first real horror film? Before movies existed, people had to get their scares from books and the local newspaper, but now you can just switch on cable and tune into NBC’s Chiller channel for instant scares. Check out a brief history of the horror movie after the break, and look just how far we’ve come.
In the new movie Eagle Eye, three characters participate in a re-creation of the famous crop duster sequence from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Only the plane from NbN has been replaced with an electrical tower and power lines, and it takes Shia LaBeouf, Michelle Monaghan and Anthony Azizi to perform Cary Gran’t part (Azizi also substitutes for the pilot and the farmer, I guess).
Such an homage is not surprising coming from director D.J. Caruso, whose last picture, Disturbia, is currently involved in a lawsuit for being an uncredited remake of Hitch’s Rear Window. This time, fortunately, Caruso borrows enough from other films, including Hitch’s second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, 2001: A Space Odyssey and I, Robot, to keep from being sued by any single party. Eagle Eye will likely also remind audiences of The Dark Knight, if not for the similar cell phone surveillance tactics then for Caruso’s even less capable talent for directing car chases.
While Caruso does a good job at allowing his audience to compare him to better filmmakers (yes, even I, Robot’s Alex Proyas), he doesn’t give us the world’s worst redo of the crop duster bit (that is probably this). But he also doesn’t come anywhere close to giving us the best. And for such a famous scene that is so widely studied and imitated, giving us merely another so-so re-creation is very disappointing. After the jump, you’ll find some of my favorite tributes to North by Northwest, mostly paying homage to that one beloved sequence.
Amy Winehouse swears the producers of Quantum of Solace will be sorry that they hired Jack White and Alicia Keys to record a Bond theme instead of choosing her, still-unrecorded tune. Without giving Amy too much credit, Vulture points out that the wrong bond songs have been left behind before. If Amy’s in a club with Scott Walker and Pulp over one with Madonna and Sheryl Crow, she should probably keep her mouth shut.
From Mental Floss’s list of “4 Alfred Hitchcock Secrets”: why Hitch’s initial plan for the end of North by Northwest was foiled, and how Hitchcock came to be okay with it.
The TakePart Blog points to the above Star Trek spoof, in which Kirk deports illegal alien Spock, and then, when he can’t figure out how to do anything for himself, lives to regret it.
The most notable DVD release of the week* has to be the first season of Mad Men, which hits the street tomorrow just in time for newbies to get caught up on the AMC series before season two premieres in late July (it’s been available on iTunes for quite some time). I went on YouTube looking for clips from my favorite episodes and found the above fan vid, which focuses on Betty Draper (January Jones), the miserable model-turned-housewife of mysterious ad man Don Draper. I love it, if for no other reason than that it really draws out the way the show takes mid-century cinematic archetypes and weds them to real-seeming, endlessly multi-faceted characterizations.
This clip specifically highlights Mad Men’s Hitchcock allusions: the slate-gray, Madeline Elster-esque suit that Betty wears to therapy; Don’s spying, here symbolized by his employment of a home movie camera like something out of a cross between Peeping Tom and Rear Window; and my favorite, Betty’s fateful encounter with a flock of birds.
Marnie is the film in the Hitchcock canon most guaranteed to rankle feminists. Tippi Hedren plays the frigid, thieving titular character whose only hope for salvation is at the hands of strong, virile Mark Rutland, eagerly embodied by Sean Connery, who blackmails her into marrying him – and makes her enjoy his punishment. Most Marnie enthusiasts answer accusations of misogyny by ducking under the director’s craft, as in “Yeah, Connery plays a sadistic hero – but look at the way Hitch frames the back of Hedren’s head!” – as if the plot needs to be apologized for, swept under the rug.
What neither the feminists nor cinephiles seem to appreciate is that Marnie is one of the greatest bondage and discipline (B&D in sadomasochistic parlance) pics of all time. Artfully disguised as a psychosexual thriller, Hitchcock’s classic is actually kin to The Story of O with Hedren’s O-like Marnie at the sole mercy of Sir Connery’s sexy daddy (think Sir Stephen), reduced to being trapped like a wild animal to be broken and trained, owned and cared for, eventually becoming Rutland’s wife/slave. This ain’t misogyny – it’s erotic art!
The Variety headline: “Production Resumes on [David O'Russell's] Nailed,” which had been shut down due to the production company’s failure to pay union fees last week. The real story: ThinkFilm, and its financial backers, Capitol Films, are having trouble paying the bills. Not only did Alex Gibney threaten a bankruptcy lawsuit after a promised bonus for his Oscar win for Taxi to the Dark Side never materialized, but the mini studio is apparently in a such a cash crunch that they’re having trouble paying for newspaper ads for their current releases, and are expected to stay out of the buying fray at Cannes.
Another day, another sign that I should stop eating bagels whilst reading the trades, lest I choke to death: The Weinstein Company is making a live-action feature version of Fraggle Rock.
Steve Martin has sold a pitch to Paramount for a comedy called From Zero to Sixty, which would star he and Diane Keaton. Also, Pink Panther 3 is coming! You can exhale!
But what if he had designed the opening credits to Star Wars? Well, it might have looked something like this video, which was created for a school project. Interesting, yes. Creative, yes. Entertaining, yes. Memorable, no. It just goes to show how significant some credit sequences can be, because this is hardly appropriate for George Lucas’ film. And I don’t just mean because the music is all wrong. If this student wanted to go with a jazz score for the titles, he should have gone with a jazz cover of the Star Wars theme. And if he wanted something more upbeat, he could have used a jazz cover of the Cantina Band song (both covers can be heard on this album).
If I was this guy’s professor, I’d give him a B+, mostly for effort and the fact that I love the lazer blasts and the zoom in on the Death Star at the end. For the A, though, he’d need to resubmit with something more suitable than a Buddy Rich soundtrack.
Vanity Fair recreated a number of famous shots from Alfred Hitchcock films for their March 2008 Hollywood Issue, and they’ve got a story about the shoot on their website. It’s pretty much content-free––unless we’re really supposed to be blown away by Renee Zellweger’s professionalism and commitment to the endeavor because she waited until she was getting her hair done to watch the Vertigo scene she had been assigned to ape––but Jeff Wells still finds something to grumble about.
“Of all the actors Vanity Fair could have picked to stand in for Cary Grant in a restaging of the classic crop-duster scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, they chose (who else?) Seth Rogan.” Yawn. Of course, George Clooney would be the obvious choice for the role, but even George Clooney seems to be tired of playing Cary Grant. The whole idea of having people like Gwyneth Paltrow and Keira Knightley star in these slavishly recreated spreads is so milquetoast and boring, that the casting of Hollywood’s new, chubby-nerdy-hot guy as Cary Grant––especially Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill, an ordinary guy who becomes sort of unexpectedly invincible––ends up looking strange enough to be inspired.
Martin Scorsese has never been shy about aligning himself with brands, but when the offer came in to shill Freixenet sparkling wine, he must have momentarily flashed back to Orson Welles’s Paul Mason commercials. There’s a difference between taking home a paycheck, and prostrating your legacy to a bald-faced, half-assed cash-in, remembered for all eternity via the YouTube dissemination of regrettable outtakes.
It’s no wonder, then, that this elaborate Freixenet ad directed by and starring Scorsese barely announces itself as an ad until the final minute or so.
The concept: Scorsese the tireless film preservationist finds three pages of an unproduced Alfred Hitchcock project called The Key to Reserva; Scorsese the filmmaker decides to film the pages “the way [Hitchcock] would be making it then, only making it now.” The ensuing short combines elements of The Man Who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, North by Northwest, The Birds, and probably countless other Hitchcock films; there are just two, extremely fetishistic, shots of the product. Watch it here.
MTV reports that Anthony Hopkins is getting ready to play Alfred Hitchcock in a film about the making of Psycho. IMDbPro has scant additional details: the film is in the script phase, and it will eventually be directed by Ryan Murphy, a TV writer who directed last year’s Running With Scissors. Helen Mirren will co-star as Hitch’s wife Alma.
This makes two slice-of-Hitchcock’s-life projects in the works, after Number Thirteen, which stars Dan Fogler as the young Hitchcock, and which I wrote about here. Psycho was shot on the Universal backlot, so hopefully the Hopkins film will at least touch on Hitch’s decadent steak-and-wine lunch ritual at the Universal commissary.
Since we last visited Trailers From Hellway back in July, the site has beefed up its offerings, and now boasts commentaries on classic adverts for films by Stanley Kubrick and Howard Hawks, as well as lovable schlock like The Revenge of Frankenstein and The Fiendish Ghouls. And thanks to a BoingBoing blurb, today I revisited the site and began to delve into the small catalogue of trailers boasting commentary by director John Landis.
Landis, whose unusual filmography spans comedy classics (Animal House), epic music videos (Michael Jackson’s Thriller) and, with the NYFF selection Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project, documentary, never fails to fill his TFH commentaries with probably long-forgotten backstage anecdotes. They’re usually too mundane to be really juicy; over the above, absurdly long trailer for Psycho, Landis seems way more interested in gossiping about Alfred Hitchcock’s daily lunch menu (which apparently included an entire bottle of wine and a steak) than in taking about the film itself. “What can I say?” Landis laughs. “It’s the best Psycho movie ever!” We’ll give him that.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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If you’ve already checked out 
The Variety headline: “
Vanity Fair recreated a number of famous shots from Alfred Hitchcock films for their March 2008 Hollywood Issue, and they’ve got a story about the shoot 
