In response to the leaked promo trailer for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant remake, some people are claiming the film doesn’t look like a Herzog work at all. This is surprising, especially since the scene with the old ladies reminds us of the Aguirre act-at-gunpoint legend. Plus, ever since we heard the news of this “reimagining” we thought it was too befitting for Herzog to rework Abel Ferrara. However, that had more to do with the idea that both filmmakers are batshit crazy, not that their films are really that similar.
Still, wouldn’t it be more exciting to see Herzog take on something even less appropriate for his style and taste? Inspired by the Twitter meme #wernerherzogremake, which began yesterday in connection with the Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans promo, we’ve selected ten films we’d love to see Herzog redo just to see what his warped perspective would bring to these stories. While most of them are slightly tied to something he’s made in the past, each is still a completely unlikely project for Herzog to take on. But hopefully he’ll only see such implausibility as a challenge and actually go with one of our suggestions. …Read more
It’s not being received well at all on Earth, but maybe the new remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still will get better reviews in Alpha Centauri, a nearby star system to which Fox is beaming the disaster sci-fi film. Despite the negative reaction here, it’s expected to gross at least $25 million, though that would be less than the last lame global warming-based sci-fi movie, The Happening, which opened to $30.5 million back in June.
The beloved holiday classic A Christmas Story has been turned into a musical, which will have industry-only readings next week. As long as there’s a musical number titled “Fra-Gee-Lay” involving a giant dancing leg lamp, I might want to attend my first Broadway Christmas production in twenty years.
Terry Gilliam, who is being honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Dubai Internation Film Festival this week, is looking at Dubai’s new studio and for local funding to potentially shoot his revived The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in the country. I’m still crossing my fingers that this film actually works out this time.
Colombian filmmaker Andres Baiz (Santanas) will make his English-language feature debut with Babylon, a 3:10 to Yuma-like film set in Jamaica and starring Paul Giamatti as a British minister.
Lists of movies within movies are fairly common on the internet, enough that I now realize I need to finally see Bowfinger simply because I’ve counted about a million list makers in love with something titled “Chubby Rain.” And the lists are likely to keep on coming thanks to this week’s hot release, Tropic Thunder, which actually features two movies within (the Vietnam War film “Tropic Thunder” and the festival-winning making-of documentary “Rain of Madness”), as well as the upcoming How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which has spawned a popular fake movie trailer for an NC-17 film titled “Mother Theresa: The Making of a Saint” (previewed above). Yet until someone makes a Wikipedia page for “List of Fictional Films,” these blogged and forumed lists are necessary to keep us movie fans remembering those non-existent movies we wish existed.
Narrowing down to ten seemed to be difficult — fictional films have been at least nominally been created for tons of films about filmmaking, otherwise reflexive films, sketch comedies, spoofs, etc. — until I realized that a lot of these films within films are appropriately nominal or trailer- or clip-sized gags and would in reality be terrible (imagine actually watching the entirety of“Asses of Fire” from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut). Even “Je Vous Présente Paméla” (”Meet Pamela”) from Day for Night and the sci-fi film being made in 8½would probably be major disappointments in actuality if you expected from them the work of Truffaut and Fellini, respectively.
So, I went mostly with fictional films that would probably be bad, but would at least be amusingly bad — though I purposefully avoided fictional porns, including those from Boogie Nightsand The Big Lebowski, of which there are literally thousands:
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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