The latest movie-related Trending Topic on Twitter is #nicerfilmtitles. That’s “nicer film titles” (not “nice firm titties”), and it’s basically a meme for coming up with alternative names for movies so that they seem a little friendlier and wholesome in their content. But since 140 characters aren’t enough for users to include synopses for their contributions, we’ve selected 10 favorites (so far) and elaborated on the story details.
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Today’s news that Summit Entertainment has already chosen a release date for Eclipse, the third entry in theTwilight series, suggests the studio is in a hurry. With New Moon, the second entry in the series, currently in a production surge under the direction of Chris Weitz for a November 20 release date, Summit’s latest decision raises the bar even higher, by placing Eclipse right in the heat of summer 2010’s blockbuster season. What’s the rush?

Former New Line marketing chief Russell Schwartz, whose resume includes a steadily successful franchise about hobbits and rings, offers one piece of advice for the newbies at Summit: Slow down.

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• Tron 2.0, described as a “next chapter” kind of sequel, has cast two actresses, Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett, both of whom were in Turistas. The production, which is to start filming in the Spring and to be released in 2011, is still looking for a male lead. Wait, you ask, isn’t the male lead split between young and old versions of Jeff Bridges? Apparently that “trailer” we saw back at Comic-Con was only test footage.
• Speaking of things that were cool in the early 80s, James L. Brooks is finally making a sixth film, tentatively titled How Do You Know?, and has just cast Reese Witherspoon as one of three leads.
• If you’ve seen the new trailer for Dragonball: Evolution, you may fear more live-action anime adaptations, so ignore this announcement from Universal about bringing TV and toy sensation Bakugan Battle Brawlers to the big screen.
• I can’t wait to see the look on parents’ faces when they realize they shouldn’t have brought their kids to see Cheech and Chong’s Smokin’ Animated Movie.
• If you want to know anything about the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, there are a few good documentaries to check out, but if you want a fictional love story involving the architect, you may look forward to the adaptation of Nancy Horan’s historical novel Loving Frank.
• Catherine Hardwicke is actually better off not directing Twilight: New Moon, which Summit has set for a November 20, 2009, release. Rush jobs like this are rarely good, yet the two subsequent sequels are also tentatively slated for the same timeframe in 2010 and 2011. I guess if you think the Saw movies kept getting better, you could be hopeful.

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.

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RKO has announced that they’re setting up a production company to remake eight classic, Val Lewton-produced thriller/horror films over the course of the next two years. The movies to be remade include I Walked With a Zombie (a mystical-racist spin on Jane Eyre, one of Lewton’s many collaborations with director Jacques Tourneur), While the City Sleeps (star-studded late Fritz Lang), Lady Scarface (the one starring Judith Anderson and Eric Blore, not the porno of the same title), The Body Snatcher (most notable for a single scene showdown between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff), Bedlam, The Leopard Man, The Monkey’s Paw, and The Seventh Victim.

I’m a huge fan of the Lewton films, but they’re not the kind of thing you can really be precious about––remaking Lewton’s library isn’t exactly like remaking Citizen Kane (which RKO coincidentally also holds the remake rights for). For the most part, Lewton was tasked with making micro-budget schlock that could be cranked out quickly and turn an even quicker profit, and it’s almost an accident that the films hold up as well as they do today.

But it is a bit troubling that Twisted Pictures––the people who brought us the Saw franchise––are co-financing four of the remakes, including I Walked With a Zombie. Even leaving aside the fact that Zombie is the one Lewton film I’ve seen that could never be made in its original form today––check out the “weird Black magic” double entendre in the original trailer above––the thing that makes the Lewton films great is that most of the scares are psychological, rooted in the implication of things that we can’t actually know and don’t actually see. Can you a imagine a more unnatural bedfellow than the see-everything style of Saw? No one’s expecting a batch of B-horror to be reformulated into grade-A masterpieces, but I don’t want to see RKO bastardize these titles as mere cover for the churning of more generic torture porn, either.

[Via Bloody-Disgusting]

New York Film Festival coverage:

• Brian DePalma schedules a last-minute press conference to talk about Redacted.
• Todd Haynes talks about casting women and children in the Bob Dylan-inspired I’m Not There.
• Silent Light: The Best Film at NYFF
• I’m Not There? I’m not a fan.

Chicago International Film Festival coverage:

• Press preview
• Tribute to Roger Ebert

The best of the rest:

• The Lumiere Manifesto Seeks To Dogme-ize YouTube
• There Will Be Blood: The First Real Trailer
• Looking Forward To Desert Bayou
• David Lynch Pays the Mortgage
• YouTube Assumes Online Videomakers Secretly Long to Go To Sundance
• About a Son: The United 93 of Kurt Cobain movies
• Vincent Gallo: Still Anal
• The Movies That Inspired The Simpsons
• SAW Blood Drives: More Porn Than Torture?
• The International Documentary Association’s Top 25 Documentaries EVER.
• John Landis gossips about Alfred Hitchchock, Don Ameche and the “shitty” Universal Studios cafeteria
• On our weekly podcast FilmCouch, Kevin and Paul covered A.J. Schnack’s Kurt Cobain: About a Son, and Karina ranted about one of the few documentary selections at NYFF, The Axe in the Attic.

Another Halloween season is ’round the corner, and that means Lionsgate is promoting yet another Saw movie and yet another tie-in blood drive. Paul sent me an email this morning, asking my thoughts on this “softer side of torture porn.” I’m certainly not against it–at the end of the day, it’s just William Castle stuff with a humanitarian twist. But it is interesting that last year, although Saw III grossed about $7 million less domestically than its predecessor, the 2006 blood drive more than doubled the volume collected in 2005. As the films have become less popular with the general public and more of a niche concern, Lionsgate’s influence over that core, horror fan audience has seemingly increased.

Or maybe, they’re just moving away from the torture and upping the porn.

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