David Cronenberg stunned many with his decision to remake his own film The 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.
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I’ve been in a really ominous mood all day. I thought it was just because the sky is grey and I’ve been been listening to this Belong EP, which basically sounds like a prolonged death rattle, but now that I’m reporting the second major story about people losing their jobs in the past couple of hours, I’m starting to feel like it’s not just me. The whole internet feels like the last scene of Madam Butterfly today––death now fills the air.

Anyway: the news. Warner Brothers has shut down its two remaining, dueling indie arms, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse. Warner’s COO Alan Horn released a statement basically saying that the shell of New Line will handle all low budget fare going forward, and claimed to be “confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros.”

So. What about acquisitions? Will Warners be sending one of the ten New Line employees left standing to Cannes next week, or will they just cede that game to the other indie arms and focus on the cheap genre fare that the new New Line is allegedly committed to churning out? What about the WIP and Picturehouse movies already in the can and on the shelf––like Picturehouse’s remake of The Women, or WIP’s anti-climax waiting to happen, Towelhead? Your guesses are as good as mine. I’m just hung up on the fact that Funny Games was the last WIP release. Funny Games killed a studio!

Films by well-regarded international auteurs such as Michael Haneke rarely receive the critical drubbing afforded to Funny Games. Haneke’s scene-for-scene remake of his own film did actually earn high praise from a few major critics (Owen Gleiberman and Scott Tobias among them), but most critics concurred with J. Hoberman: “Haneke is pretty much a humorless pedant,” the Village Voice critic wrote. And then, the antithetical poster quote: “Professional obligations required that I endure it, but there’s no reason why you should.”

So you know things are bad when the one story that makes an effort to rehab your film’s rep from “atrocious” to “polarizing” is itself something of a trainwreck, boasting quizzically misread facts and apparently rushed to publication before its time.

I’m particularly troubled by the effort within this Variety story to make excuses for Games‘ disappointing opening weekend performance. Diane Garrett writes: “The pic did resonate with a certain aud, generating $520,000 at 289 theaters for a $1,799 per-screen average in its opening weekend.” How many screenings do you get from Friday-Sunday––say, 15? So $1,799 divided by 15 is about $120. Assuming the average ticket price is $8, that means 15 tickets were purchased for each screening. Is that the kind of number that passes for “resonance” these days? We know it’s Variety’s job to tell the studio’s side of the story (at least, apparently), but isn’t this a little extreme, even for them?

But it’s also pretty clear that this version of the story was not meant for our eyes. I screen capped the story at 1pm EST (see below the jump), after waiting five hours for a glaring editorial note to be removed from the online version. As of this writing, it hasn’t been. See my screencap, with the gaffe marked in red, after the jump.

UPDATE 3:45 PM: Variety has fixed the error highlighted below, and I have fixed the error pointed out to me in the comments below. See, the internet is fact checked in real time!

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In continuing to use his movie blog as a platform for Hillary Clinton hate wrapped in the thinest of pop cultural guises, is Jeffrey Wells doing some kind of brilliant, absurdist theater, or has the presidential election simply driven him insane? First, when Baby Mama was announced as the opening night film for the Tribeca Film Festival, Wells admitted “a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for [Tina] Fey’s Hillary shilling.” I went to SXSW and ignored Wells’ blog for a week; when I came back, I discovered a post titled “Funny Games = Hillary Campaign.” Note the lack of prevaricating question mark in the headline: this is an unequivocal statement.

So what’s Wells’ evidence that Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 thriller has anything materially or spiritually in common with the troubled campaign of the first serious female presidential candidate? It’s specious, of course––amongst other things, he notes that the antagonists played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett “are clearly monsters, a term that has recently been used to describe Senator Clinton by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power”; they and Hillary also have “similar” haircuts!––but Wells’ balls-out committment to his own craziness is, as always, engaging.