Failure to properly insert cartridge into end of week may result in unOpened Thread. Please consult warranty.
Cranking up the remake cycle even faster, speculation abounds on who’ll be cast as the female lead in the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remake. Rumors include Ellen Page and Natalie Portman so far. Daniel Craig has already signed on, stretching his acting chops by playing a taciturn investigator who enjoys many romantic affairs. Meanwhile, if you can’t wait two years for a hit remake of a Swedish movie to storm American theaters, you’ll love Let Me In, the American remake of Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in). It stars Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass‘s Hit Girl) and Kodi Smit-McPhee (The Road‘s “The Boy”). If you can’t do something nice, do something derivative, my mom always used to say. In her best Ethel Merman impression.
If you like murder ballads, you’ll love this news: Nick Cave has been brought on to rewrite the upcoming Crow remake. Cave’s an accomplished musician and screenwriter, with several good credits to his name already. The Crow was about a guy who died, but came back to kill criminals. Which I guess Hollywood needs more of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vU22ts-Qcw
I would have posted the teaser trailer for Thor that got shown at Comic-Con, but it got taken down. So let’s talk about how great it would have been. Anthony Hopkins, right?
Would you watch Chloe Moretz take out a harrowing vengeance on Anthony Hopkins as penned by Nick Cave? Or is there something I didn’t cover (other than celebrity gossip, which we had plenty of this week)? Sound off in the comments, for this is your … Open Thread.
You know what? I agree with Pete that there’s nothing inherently bad about a remake. Let The Right One In was a great movie. I haven’t seen The Road or Kick-Ass, but both those young actors were pretty much universally agreed to be awesome. Would it be nice to have more original movies out of Hollywood? Sure. But I see know reason why Let Me In can’t turn out to be fantastic.
They should remake the mediocre movies, or the ones that were flawed. You could turn something like the Postman into a great movie if you did it without Kevin Costner and with a better screenplay that didn’t have lines like “You give out hope like its candy out of your pocket, postman.”
The things you should remake should generally be things that people were really excited about but ended up being disappointed by. Or a story where we’re more attracted to the characters than the story itself–Star Trek and the comic book movies come to mind (This is also why the first sequel to the comic book movies are usually better than the originals–watching a story with the hero in it is more interesting than the boring exposition of the origin story).
If you’re starting with something that was really well-executed like the Godfather, or something that was really tied to its time, like citizen cane, or something that was both, like Casablanca, what are you going to do that is going to even be marginally better than just renting the original?
my problem with Let Me In is it looks kind of bad. It seems to have missed all of the parts of Let the Right One In that made it great – the minimal soundtrack, the quiet desperation, the lack of action (in the traditional movie sense). They even lost the awesomeness of the title.
They seem to be have made a cookie-cutter horror movie based on an interesting, progressive horror movie, and it will be seen by English-speaking viewers more than the original. If it sucks, as the trailer indicated, that’s a terrible shame. (If it does not suck, my faith will be slightly restored in hollywood remakes, but… to me this just looks like The Grudge again.)
I had no idea where to post this now 4channic discourse is comment-locked: http://i.cdn.turner.com/dr/teg/tsg/release/sites/default/files/assets/poole-testimony.pdf
This is the testimony of the founder of 4chan to the Tennessee district court regarding the hacking of Palin’s e-mails. Quotations:
‘And is there a page known as the /b/ board or
Random /b/ board?
A. Yes.
Q. And sometimes it is said that there is very
little rules on the /b/ board?
A. Yes.
Q. However, do certain rules apply?
A. Yes, there is a note that all /b/ global or a
handful of /b/ global rules apply to the /b/ board.
Q. And what is the first rule for the /b/ board
and all boards?’
Can you imagine the temptation to say, ‘you do not talk about the /b/ board’?