Publisher Quirk Books and author Seth Grahame-Smith have come up with the best way to make a literary work more accessible since the creation of Classics Illustrated comic books: they’ve added “all-new scenes of bone crunching zombie action” to Jane Austen’s 19th century novel Pride and Prejudice. This new version, out in stores this May, is titled Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now With Ultraviolent Mayhem! And if you didn’t think it was a masterpiece before, chances are you will now.

Could we do the same thing to classic films? Well, the technology to add extraneous enhancements to movies exists. Just check out The Curious Case of Benjamin Button for proof. But like Pride and Prejudice, we’d need to “enhance” films in the public domain if we wanted to get away with it. Fortunately, there are hundreds of such titles (see a list at Wikipedia), some of which actually already have zombies (Night of the Living Dead, White Zombie, Revolt of the Zombies, and in a way the “scientific” film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms).

Avoiding the majority of public domain movies already consisting of horror and science fiction elements, we’ve come up with ten great classic films that would be even greater with the addition of zombies.
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• Apparently Keanu Reeves can play an 18th century Japanese warrior in Universal’s samurai epic 47 Ronin because he’s “half-Asian.” Specifically, he’s half Hawaiian-Chinese, which is only the same as Japanese in the disappointing sort of Orientalism still practiced in Hollywood.
• Ben Affleck may follow up Gone Baby Gone by directing Arizona, the true story of an investigative journalist killed while uncovering political corruption. This could be Affleck’s third work as a director if he’s still helming The Town, which he was linked to back in September.
• New trend in Hollywood: kid writers. While Paramount’s got that 12-year-old food critic film, Fox now has the rights to 9-year-old love expert Alec Greven’s advice series How to Talk to Girls.
• I wonder if Columbia’s untitled bounty hunter project starring Gerard Butler as a man hired to retrieve his ex-wife (played by Jennifer Aniston) will be more like It Happened One Night or His Girl Friday or neither of the above.
• Another YouTube documentary: this one details the online love affair of an Australian and an American whose relationship played out on the video site for all to see. Wait, so why do we need the film?
• The Dark Knight score has now been deemed eligible for an Oscar. Why doesn’t the Academy just announce that the film has already prematurely been nominated in all categories and get it over with.

Anticipating the worst from Diane English’s new remake of The Women is not just typical low expectations regarding remakes in general. My dread is specifically based on dissatisfaction with remakes and updates of films from the 1930s, arguably the best decade in cinema (it is certainly my favorite). While I may recognize and appreciate some favorable redos, such as DePalma’s Scarface (of which I’ve never really been a fan), Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills and the multiple repeats from Hitchcock, I am more often disappointed with attempts to recreate ‘30s classics, even when I approach them with already low standards.

Worst, for me, doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the film alone, especially when related to remakes and updates. The titles and versions I’ve selected are hardly the worst in terms of craft or production value — you’ll note there are no Dracula movies on this list — and a few would almost be acceptable if they were more unique or solitary works.

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It took me awhile, but last week I finally saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And to agree with many others, I think it features a few too many ludicrous moments. Yet the most outlandish, in my opinion, is the scene in which Indy and Marion seem to reenact His Girl Friday in about four seconds while riding in the back of a truck. I know it’d been awhile, both for them and for us, but I prefer a little more bickering, a little more holding back in comedy of remarriage plots.

Anyway, we knew a long time ago, thanks to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, that Indy and Marion didn’t last long together after the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, I didn’t really care if they ended up together at the end of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, either. It’s probable they still wouldn’t last. And I think the same often with other unlikely movie couples at the end of their respective films. Fortunately, a number of sequels tell us outright that the romance of the first film failed (see The Karate Kid, Part II and Jurassic Park III). Unfortunately, most of the following films didn’t have follow-ups. But if they had, I bet we’d have discovered the romances didn’t last much longer than the closing credits.

1. Bringing Up Baby: Dr. David Huxley (Cary Grant) and Susan Vance (Katherine Hepburn) - As is the case with most screwball comedies, the leads here just don’t seem that compatible. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Susan was quickly shipped off to a mental hospital for being such a daffy loon. Then there’s the matter of her destroying Huxley’s work at the end. No man would really put up with that, even if there were some attraction. And I never actually bought that there is any attraction from his end.
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• Naked pictures of a stripper? Not news. Naked pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter? Eh. Pictures of a stripper-turned-Oscar winning screenwriter emulating the naked-but-for-whipped-cream scene from the classic James Van Der Beek vehicle Varsity Blues? News enough!
• Meanwhile, proving that no good-intentioned attempt to bridge the cultural-political divide goes unpunished, some people are mad that soldiers presented Oscars. Interestingly, most of the complaints conflate the two documentary awards into the claim that the Academy implicitly mocked the soldiers by forcing them to give an award to the anti-Iraq war film Taxi to the Darkside. In fact, the soldiers presented the Best Documentary Short award, which went to Freeheld. Debbie Schlussel, probably the most hateful of the Hollywood haters, gets that part right, but she also repeatedly insists that Diablo Cody is fat, which, as the above pictures of her ribcage should show, is definitely wrong.
• David Bordwell credits “piracy” for ensuring the classic status of His Girl Friday. “If Columbia had renewed its copyright on schedule, would this film be so widely admired today?” Jason Mittel agrees in theory, but takes issue with Bordwell’s use of the p-word. “Once the film lapsed into the public domain, all of the resulting shoddy copies were legal and licit, not pirated. A more accurate term would be ‘unauthorized’…”
• I guess WIRED bloggers aren’t allowed to say “fuck.”