Escape From New York remake

[Kal]

my problem with remakes is even simpler than that: they suck.

exactly. if they actually worked hard on making a film as good as the original perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. i mean, nobody gives a shit about nolan and batman because he brought a fresh new concept and made a fantastic film. most remakes or reboots are bullshit and have horrible scripts and are essentially really bad updates of good films.

[matt35mm]

They suck in film because they are nearly always done for bad reasons by studios to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but I don't think they suck in principle.  When the same motivation of mass appeal is applied to an original screenplay, the results are just as bad.  It has nothing to do with whether or not it's been done before.

A lot of the most original thinking that I've encountered has been in a new production of some older play, because the people who've produced it are often motivated by some new perspective that they can bring to it.  Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.  When it works, it's poetry, and sometimes your previous experience of this story actually adds to the poetry of the new production.

In most studio film productions, they apply the same old tired perspective of whatever made money last time to whatever they're making now, whether it's an original screenplay or an adaptation of a book/videogame/tv show or whether it's a remake of another movie.

I think the perspective matters more than whether or not these characters have been brought to the screen before.  Besides, there's nothing original about most original screenplays, anyway.  I like good stories, but I can be riveted by a story that I've heard before if there's something exciting about the perspective.

In the case of Hollywood remaking stuff like Escape From New York, what you're getting is a tired perspective laid over a story with characters that we've seen in a movie before; that's the worst of all worlds, and as such, the newer one will feel less fresh than the old one.  The movie's being made for stale reasons; it will be a stale movie.  But whatever, it'll make money and that's their job, I guess.

Also, I thought New Line Cinema was dead.

[MacGuffin]

New Line plans 'Escape' with Breck Eisner
Director in talks for remake of John Carpenter pic
Source: Variety

Breck Eisner is in talks to direct New Line's remake of "Escape From New York," set up with Neal H. Moritz's Original Films.

Eisner directed Overture's remake of "The Crazies" and "Sahara."

New Line has been developing the revamp of John Carpenter's 1981 original for several years. Gerard Butler had been attached to star as Snake Plissken in 2007, but left over creative differences.

Original sci-fi actioner, starring Kurt Russell, was directed by John Carpenter from a screenplay he co-wrote with Nick Castle. Pic follows antihero Plissken as he tries to save the President in gang-ruled Manhattan.

[MacGuffin]

New Line dropping 'Escape From New York'
Source: Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: If eye patch-wearing antihero Snake Plissken is going to slither in a reboot, it won't be at New Line and Warner Bros. They've allowed the option to drop on a remake they've been developing, meaning that the reboot of the John Carpenter-directed 1981 classic is up for grabs. The original starred Kurt Russell as Snake, a tough convict dropped into a futuristic New York that has been turned into a post-apocalyptic maximum security prison. He's charged with rescuing the president (Donald Pleasence), who is held hostage by the prison kingpin (Isaac Hayes) after his plane within the city walls. Snake's offered a pardon if he's successful, but fitted with a lethal device that will kill him if he tries to run or misses the deadline. New Line and producer Neal Moritz have been working on the reboot, most recently with The Crazies helmer Breck Eisner attached to direct, and a script by writers that include Allan Loeb and X-Men: First Class scribe Jamie Moss. There have been rumors of interest from Gerard Butler and Jeremy Renner. Those guys were never confirmed and more recently there was word the studio courted Tom Hardy, whose work in Inception, Warrior and the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises has made him a go-to guy for tough man work. Eisner and Moritz are also working on Flash Gordon, and Eisner also is attached to The Last Witch Hunter at Summit.

[socketlevel]

Good.

[Tortuga]

Why can't they just let Carpenter make Escape From Earth already?

_{As for sequels/remakes, I actually liked Escape From LA better than NY. As a storyline it's a pretty lame/retarded copy of NY, but as a film (taking all aspect of the art of cinema into account) it's on an entirely different level than the first one. It's almost as if it was deliberately made as a different version of the first film, with its own set of messages and aspirations. It isn't (just) a (great) action movie, it's pure satire. A beautiful metaphor for western civilization in general and Los Angeles in particular. It's pretty ingenious; you get this character who is forced into believing he's about to die for no purpose whatsoever (this pretty much pisses him off pretty bad of course). Then he gets confronted with the LA lifestyle in all its facets. And being in the situation that he's in, the absurdity and tediousness of that society gets pushed to herculean proportions. It's almost Fellini-like in how grotesque and evil and funny it all is.
I think LA is much clearer than NY in showing how much Snake's character hates everything and is angry ALL the time and really wants to escape from humanity itself.}

[squints]

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction — Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament."— it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No — Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we're descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather's brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on to-day.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I'm supposed to look like him — with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father's office I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe — so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, "Why — ye — es," with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

[RegularKarate]

And now we know why you your name.

[Just Withnail]

we already knew

[MacGuffin]

Joel Silver, Studio Canal To Reboot John Carpenter's 'Escape From New York'
By MIKE FLEMING JR | Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Joel Silver's Silver Pictures has joined forces with Studio Canal to build a new franchise with a retelling of Escape From New York. The 1981 John Carpenter original starred Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken, a tough convict dropped into a futuristic New York that has been turned into a post-apocalyptic maximum security prison. He's charged with rescuing the president (Donald Pleasence), who is held hostage by the prison kingpin (Isaac Hayes) after his plane crashes within the city walls. Snake's offered a pardon if he's successful, but fitted with a lethal device that will kill him if he tries to run or misses the deadline.

A remake had been attempted not that long ago at New Line with producer Neil Moritz and The Crazies helmer Breck Eisner, with Gerard Butler, Jeremy Renner and Tom Hardy all mentioned as potentials to play Plissken. That effort ended when New Line let the option lapse almost two years ago.

Studio Canal, which partnered with Silver on the Liam Neeson action films Unknown and Non-Stop and the upcoming Sean Penn-starrer Prone Gunman, has entrusted Silver with the rights. Silver is planning an entirely new take on the material. The goal is to turn it into a trilogy, starting with an origin story in a fashion similar to the way Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes restarted that franchise. Studio Canal will finance development of the project before placing it with a studio. A writer search is underway.

Silver and Silver Production Prexy Andrew Rona will produce. Silver's EVP Alex Heineman will be executive producer. As for a new Snake, either Butler, Renner, Hardy or Neeson would hit the mark as the one-eyed tough guy.

[polkablues]

They already rebooted Escape From New York. It was called Lockout, it starred Guy Pearce, it was set in a space prison, and it was terrible.