The selections for this year’s Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness genre film section has just been announced via Twitter. The lineup will close with a gala presentation of Jennifer’s Body, the hotly anticipated second feature scripted by Diablo Cody, directed by Karyn Kusama and starring Megan Fox. Other highlights: Cannes stop-motion animation hit A Town Called Panic; “a post-modern, thinking man’s throwback to the ‘B’ Movie/Exploitation films of the 1950s/70s as well as a loving, sly parody of the same” called Bitch Slap!; Symbol, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s follow-up to Big Man Japan, of which Todd Brown said based on the trailer, “Either Matsumoto has cooked up yet another slice of unorthodox genius or he has completely lost his grip and made something totally abstract and self indulgent”; and George A. Romero’s Survival of the Dead. The full lineup is also on the TIFF website.
Even if you love the original Escape to Witch Mountain, you have to welcome a remake. The 1975 sci-fi Disney film has some very dated special effects — though the visible wires used to “levitate” a handgun and a harmonica give it a campy charm — and it’s not exactly the well-respected classic that The Black Hole or Old Yeller is, anyway. So, better a remake (or “modern re-imagining”) of a slightly beloved movie, which has already been redone once, to give The Rock another fulfillment of his Disney contract and utilize all the “perfect” digital effects now available.
While it seems that eventually all Disney live-action classics will be remade, potentially rendering obsolete the careers of Dean Jones, Kevin Corcoran and those ugly kids from Mary Poppins, there are some that may, like Witch Mountain, deserve to be recycled. Disney has previously erred in reworking films like The Absent-Minded Professor (Robin Williams is no Fred MacMurray) and The Shaggy Dog (Tim Allen is no MacMurray, either, nor even is he Tommy Kirk), and it’s mistakenly producing new versions of Swiss Family Robinson and 20,000 Leauges Under the Sea. But there are so many other films, most forgotten, that would better lend themselves to remakes.
Here we’ve selected 10 such classics, all but one live-action features, and we welcome you to suggest any others you may wish to see updated and/or re-imagined. …Read more
I never went to a normal college, never lived in a proper dorm or experienced fraternity hazing or even rush week from an inside viewpoint. I went to an urban art school and then a commuter school. And though I grew up in a college town and later worked on the campus of another college I didn’t attend, I feel like I don’t have the proper perspective with which to judge most college movies and college kid characters as being true to life. This probably explains why I enjoy so many bad movies set in colleges and/or involving college students. I bet I could even check out a double feature of The House Bunnyand College and have a good time at the movies.
Of course, I do have some semblance of good taste, and I also recognize that none of the following movies are anywhere near the quality of my favorite college movies (including Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathersand the Frat Pack’s Old School), or even the beloved Animal House, which I regrettably find to be highly overrated (no, that doesn’t mean I dislike it or think it’s bad or unfunny). The ten movies on today’s list are merely guilty pleasures that I can’t stop appreciating no matter how hard I try or how old I get.
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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The selections for this year’s Toronto Film Festival’s Midnight Madness genre film section has just been announced via 
