Remake Remake Fucking Remake

Started by modage, March 05, 2005, 10:02:37 AM

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MacGuffin

McGraw, Lohman Ride 'Flicka'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Fox 2000's "My Friend Flicka" update is heating up as Tim McGraw, Alison Lohman and Ryan Kwanten have signed on to the picture.

Based on the novel by Mary O'Hara, "Flicka" is set against the backdrop of a modern-day ranch in Wyoming. It tells the story of Katie (Lohman), a teenager who dreams of running her family's ranch, much to the dismay of her father (McGraw); his hopes are pinned on her older brother. In the tale, Katie finds a wild horse she names Flicka and claims it for her own.

Theater-turned-film director Michael Mayer ("A Home at the End of the World") will direct from a script by Larry Konner and Mark Rosenthal. "Flicka" was made into a feature film in 1943 and hit the small screen in 1956.

Kwanten, who will play Katie's brother, stars in the WB Network drama series "Summerland." An Australian native, he plays the title role in the feature "America Brown," which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the audience award for best film at the 2004 Montreal Film Festival.

Lohman's recent credits include "Matchstick Men" and "White Oleander." She next appears in "The Big White."

Country singer McGraw recently appeared in "Friday Night Lights."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Horror Sequel & Remake Talk
More Chainsaws, Amityville and The Hitcher?
 
The producers of the new, improved Amityville Horror, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, were all smiles at the recent junket about their upcoming projects. The first thing they informed us about was the fact the there would indeed be another Texas Chainsaw Massacre. "It's a prequel." And on whether R. Lee Ermey would reprise his role, "We don't know if he'll do the prequel, but we would love to have him again."

Since this producing team has the Midas touch for remaking classic horror films, one would think they would be the go to guys to remake all of them, but not them. "We don't really want to be the "Horror" guys, but if there was another horror classic we would want to do, it would be The Hitcher." So does this spell the end of an Amityville sequel? "If the studio wants us to do another one, we will."

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Affleck-Damon Collaborator to Direct 'Devil' Remake

Producer Chris Moore, who got his start collaborating with actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, will make his directorial debut on "Race With the Devil," the remake of a 1975 horror thriller.

The original, released by 20th Century Fox, centered on two couples who head off to Colorado for skiing and dirt biking. Along the way, they witness a satanic sacrifice, but when they call the local authorities, all evidence disappears. They resume their vacation but find themselves shadowed by a cult.

Peter Fonda and Loretta Swit starred in the original.

The film is being updated for the production outfit Regency Enterprises by writers Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan.

Moore had been partners in the LivePlanet production venture with Affleck, Damon and Sean Bailey. Among Moore's producer credits are the "American Pie" movies, the "Project Greenlight" movies, "Joy Ride" and Affleck and Damon's breakout hit "Good Will Hunting."

When LivePlanet reupped with the Walt Disney Studios this year, Moore left to pursue a directing career, a move he said was about four years in the making.

"I didn't wake up at 12 and have a Super 8 camera in my hand," Moore said. "I'm the kind of guy who learns by being around people who are doing it, and I've been around a lot of sets with experienced directors and first-time directors. I got into the movie business to tell stories, and I think directing is really the ultimate storytelling job.

"I feel like I have enough experience now that I might be able to do a good job. I went through the drill with a pad and paper and asked, 'Would I hire myself?' And you know, I decided that on genre pictures and things of small budgets, I would hire myself. Maybe after I do it a few times, I'll do bigger movies."

Swan and McWeeny, who also writes under the name Moriarty on the Web site Ain't It Cool News, are writing the John Carpenter-directed episode of Showtime's "Masters of Horror" anthology. They also wrote "Dread" for Fox and "The Final War" for Revolution Studios
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Fox Searchlight batting 'Eyes'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

"The Hills Have Eyes," a remake of the 1977 Wes Craven horror cult classic that Alexandre Aja is directing, has landed at Fox Searchlight. The Fox specialty division beat out several suitors for the project, which was in turnaround from Dimension Films. Craven, who directed and wrote the original, is producing with Marianne Maddalena along with original producer Peter Locke. "Eyes" tells the tale of a vacationing family that takes a wrong turn, accidentally going through an air-testing range. When they get stranded in the desert, they become the targets of a cannibalistic, feral group of people. The original movie was part of the 1970s wave of cutting-edge horror films and helped establish Craven's reputation as a horrormeister. The project will be overseen by Lawrence Grey, who brought the project into the studio, and Jeff Arkuss for Fox Searchlight president Peter Rice. Aja, who directed and co-wrote the French horror film "Haute Tension" (High Tension), also will write the remake with his "Tension" co-writer Gregory Levasseur.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

deathnotronic

Taking "cult classic horror films" and remaking them is terrible.

Dawn of the Dead's remake was kind of good. KIND OF.

The original Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite movies though. I kind of have an obsession with zombie movies in general.

modage

wow.  fox searchlight getting into the 'lets make some money, too' game already.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

mogwai

Quote from: themodernage02wow.  fox searchlight getting into the 'lets make some money, too' game already.
yes, sorta. but when george lucas takes notice of this he'll whip an inch of every staff's lives.

or option two: yes, but foxlight searchfight is also pretending to be indie all along.

MacGuffin

'Crazies' talk: Anderson on Par remake
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Brad Anderson is in negotiations to direct a remake of George A. Romero's "The Crazies" for Paramount Pictures. Michael Aguilar and Dean Georgaris of Paramount-based Penn Station are producing. Romero will serve as an executive producer on the update of his 1973 film, which was set in a Pennsylvania town where the military attempts to contain a killer man-made virus. Scott Kosar is writing. Ally Shearmur and Andrew Haas are overseeing for Paramount. Anderson's directing credits include "The Machinist," which also was penned by Kosar and stars Christian Bale and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Anderson's other credits include "Happy Accidents" and episodes of TV's "The Shield" and "The Wire."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Sommers on WORLDS Remake
Paramount Pictures plans a big budget remake of When Worlds Collide with Stephen Sommers at the helm.
Source: FilmStew.com

Helmer Stephen Sommers (The Mummy) has signed on to direct a remake of the 1951 sci-fi film When Worlds Collide for Paramount. Sommers will also produce with Bob Ducsay, his Sommers Co. partner.

Sommers will also write the script for remake about scientists discovering that another planet is veering dangerously close to Earth and making plans for a small group of humans to leave the planet before the inevitable deadly collision.

The budget for the project is expected to be huge, on the scale of a somewhat similar remake, War of the Worlds, from Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg, also at Paramount.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

West on call to remake 'Stranger'

Simon West is in negotiations to direct a remake of the cult horror flick "When a Stranger Calls" for Sony's Screen Gems division. Jake Wadewall is writing the script for the redo of the 1979 film, which was released by Columbia Pictures. Ken Lemberger is producing. The studio also is developing a sequel called "When a Stranger Returns." Stacy Cramer is overseeing the project. The original film starred Carol Kane as a high school student traumatized while baby-sitting, after she receives calls she thinks are coming from the parents asking her to check on the kids. The calls turn out to be coming from inside the house. West's credits include "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider," "The General's Daughter" and "Con Air." He also is set to direct "RPM."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

MacGuffin

Columbia trying 'Experiment' with Edwards thriller
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Columbia Pictures is planning a remake of Blake Edwards' 1962 thriller "Experiment in Terror."

Screenwriter Robert Pucci has been hired to pen the script for producers Lou Pitt and Matt Baer, with Edwards serving as executive producer.
 
The original "Experiment," directed by Edwards and starring Lee Remick, Glenn Ford and Stefanie Powers, was set in San Francisco and based on the novel "Operation Terror" by Gordon Gordon and Mildred Gordon, who adapted it for the screen. It told the story of a woman (Remick) who is terrorized by a criminal using her to help him steal money from the bank where she works, threatening to kill her teenage sister (Powers) if she doesn't comply. She enlists the aid of an FBI agent (Ford) to thwart the criminal.

"When people think of my movies, they tend to think of comedies, but the thriller has always been one of my favorite genres, and I'm thrilled to be working with Columbia on this new take on one of my favorite films," Edwards said.

"Blake Edwards is a living legend, and we're excited to be working with him, Lou Pitt and Matt Baer as we contemporize 'Experiment in Terror,' " said Doug Belgrad, a president of production at Columbia.

Jonathan Kadin will oversee development of "Experiment" on behalf of the studio. No casting has been set for the project.

Pucci's previous credits include "The Corruptor" and "The Spider and the Fly."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Tryskadekafobia

Back in Bowl
Source: Variety

New Line is getting possessed by "All of Me."

Mini-major is planning a remake of the 1984 comedy starring Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin and set scribes Brent Goldberg and David Wagner to write a modern take on the story.

Studio is aiming to cast Wanda Sykes in the Tomlin role of a dying heiress who tries to transfer her soul to a young woman but instead finds herself possessing the right side of the body of her lawyer, played by Martin in the original.

Sykes has held initial meetings with the studio but is waiting to see a final version of the script before attaching to the project.

Endeavor-repped writers are planning to keep the conceit and spirit of the original but update the technology involved and comedy, as well as give it a more hip sensibility.

"We're trying to pay homage to the original, but with all new set pieces, and make the woman someone younger who will play off a man who's more of a milquetoast," said Wagner.

Goldberg and Wagner most recently penned "The Other Guy" for Disney with Adam Shankman attached to direct. Other credits include "The Girl Next Door" and "National Lampoon's Van Wilder."

New Line execs haven't yet made any decisions about a male lead or helmer for "All of Me."

Original was scripted by Phil Alden Robinson and helmed by Carl Reiner.

Mark Kaufman, Matt Moore and Luke Ryan are overseeing for the studio.

MacGuffin

Remade in the USA
Hollywood loves to do 'em again, even if they weren't so great the first time. New ideas? That's foreign territory. Source: Los Angeles Times

In order to enjoy a movie like, say, "Charlie's Angels" or "Starsky & Hutch" as nature and Hollywood intended, a viewer needs to be both simultaneously steeped in and ironically removed from trash and celebrity culture. That is, he or she must be able to appreciate that Snoop Dogg is Huggy and not mind that Huggy is Snoop Dogg all at the same time. (This isn't nearly as hard as it sounds.) Nora Ephron's upcoming "Bewitched," for example, piles on so many referential layers, the premise alone could topple over in a light breeze.

In the old TV show, an irascible ad executive did his best to cope with a beautiful, clever stay-at-home wife, who happened to be a witch. In the film, which stars Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, a dimming movie star is cast in a remake of the old TV show and hires as his costar a beautiful, clever actress, who happens to be a witch. Basically, it's a movie about a movie star whose life begins to imitate an old TV show after he starts remaking it. Who can't relate?

Big studio movies don't talk about life anymore, they talk about other movies and TV. And in some ways, remakes cop to this practice more honestly and openly than the standard-issue formulaic action flick. Both set out to conform to set expectations — remakes just do it by embracing staleness, thereby cleverly deflecting accusations of staleness. From a strictly critical perspective, this is not necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how these movies tend to result in the kinds of products whose pleasure resides principally in the act of taking them apart. Still, there's something deflating about staring down yet another long list of déjà vu titles, no matter how relevant or well cast.

By the end of 2006, somewhere on the order of 60 remakes, updates and "reimaginings" will have been released in the preceding 24-month period, barring scheduling problems or production delays. And that's not even including sequels or adaptations of books and plays. Has Hollywood's repetition compulsion finally crossed the line into treatable pathology? Frankly, I'm not up to the math. The data entry alone would be a massive undertaking. The practice is so ingrained, even complaining about it feels like a rehash.

EVERYTHING TO EVERYONE

THE saying about not trying to be all things to all people doesn't really apply anymore in America, where "premarketability" is now not only a word but apparently a very attractive quality in a product. No matter how imaginatively or how spectacularly remakes depart from their original sources, their power to surprise will always be safely circumscribed within familiar parameters.

Even films that lift no more than a title and a few broad character strokes from a well-known source are more inherently marketable, in a neat inversion of logic, than movies nobody has ever heard of. No wonder camp classics and cheesy kids' movies and sitcoms are so popular as fodder — they provide the perfect vehicle for narcissistic nostalgia trips and the ideal opportunity, when dutifully hip-ified, to correct previous lapses in political correctness, hair and clothing styles, or pre-ironic earnestness.

Also perennially popular are remakes of sci-fi or otherwise effects-heavy classics whose early technology can be shown up by the digital tools of today; remakes of foreign hits, from which all offending foreignness has been expunged; and politically "relevant" remakes that wish to comment on current events without risking the ire of Fox News pundits. Like Steve Zaillian's upcoming remake of "All the King's Men" — which tells the story of a Southern governor who rises to power thanks to his talents for corporate deal-making and "feel your pain" empathy, slides into cynicism and womanizing, and is eventually impeached — they usually sound like a great idea. But experience teaches us not to expect much from this category, either.

Two of the most potentially interesting remakes last year, "The Manchurian Candidate" and "The Stepford Wives," though perfectly timed, didn't nearly live up to their potential. "The Manchurian Candidate," while fair, declined to draw out obvious parallels between the McCarthy era and today's. "The Stepford Wives," which could have been a great post-feminist coda to the proto-feminist camp classic, was a hash of focus-tested political correctness and controversy avoidance.

The bulk of Hollywood's recent and upcoming recycling efforts seems to be concentrated on such twinkly objects as "Bewitched," "Herbie: Fully Loaded," "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "The Honeymooners," "The Longest Yard," "The Pink Panther," "The Dukes of Hazzard" and "Shazam!," retooled to flatter current sensibilities.

In the "Love Bug" sequel "Herbie: Fully Loaded," for instance, Lindsay Lohan plays the daughter of the crash derby driver of the original, a sexy, sassy power-teen (Britney-bred audiences demand it) who takes control of the wheel to help out her dad.

Consider the differences, for instance, between the remake of "Freaky Friday," which was not a bad movie, and the original, which was not a particularly good one. The original took its cues from observable life. The remake took them from InStyle, Oprah and MTV. Annabel, as the original central character was called, was in the school band; her modern counterpart, Anna, is in a rock band. (Posting her comparison on a message board, a fan of the remake expressed her disbelief, after seeing the original, at witnessing Jodie Foster on screen with braces and a bad haircut.) Annabel's mother, played by a frazzled and loopy Barbara Harris, is a harried, married housewife with a cigarette habit and a beef with her daughter's inability to appreciate how easy she has it. Anna's mother, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is a self-made, semifamous psychiatrist and author whose charmed life includes TV appearances; a handsome, romantic, supportive fiancé; and apparently limitless credit.

God forbid we be expected to identify with an unaccomplished mommy and a dorky kid. It used to be that Hollywood specialized in escapist fantasy portrayals. Now it provides aspirational ones. Either we're clamoring for fantasy portrayals we can use, or we're all remakes now.

As Hollywood gives itself over to its role as global purveyor of fantasy, escapism, familiarity and comfort and bombastic "event films" so ritualized they're practically Kabuki, the job of speaking to our contemporary global, social, political, sexual, religious and economic realities — whether in drama, comedy or satire — has been left almost entirely to world cinema. To watch small, human stories from places as diverse as Iran, Korea, Kurdistan, Mexico, China and Brazil is to experience a small shock of recognition — not with the culture or the language or the surroundings but with their unvarnished representations of human experience, their empathy, their humanism.

CREEPING ISOLATIONISM

It's also to realize how deeply alienating our own mainstream cinema has become, even when it operates under the guise of realism. Remakes are nothing new, but the new breed of remakes seems to reflect a widespread indifference to the world around us, even a self-defeating narcissism, encouraged by marketers and embraced by consumers who would rather be included than surprised, flattered than transported.

Not to suggest American cinema doesn't have filmmakers attuned to the particularities of American life. Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater (who has just finished remaking "The Bad News Bears") are among the best known, and small, gem-like films crop up regularly on a smattering of screens (such as Phil Morrison's upcoming "Junebug," in which a cosmopolitan Chicago art dealer visits her new husband's parents' home in North Carolina, where she's met with quiet wariness by his small-town family).

In the early '90s, I worked for a video game company that made live-action videos and aspired to make interactive movies. One day, one of the managers, a man prone to sudden enthusiasms, grabbed me in the hall: "What if you could direct your movie?" And me, ever the surly underling: "Uh, I'd ruin it?"

I suspect it's this sort of thinking, more than anything else, that has shaped the tone and sensibility of so many mainstream American movies, leaving the stories of American life mostly untold — or at least largely unhyped and unseen.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

w/o horse

Killer Tomatoes Remakes?
Source: ComingSoon!

Bloody-Disgusting received a scoop from a radio interviewer who attended The Longest Yard red carpet at the premiere Wednesday and got quotes from Adam Sandler about a possible Killer Tomatoes remake. Here's a clip:

"Sandler also talked about remakes, saying one of his favorite remakes was the "Dawn of the Dead" remake. I asked him if he had considered doing a remake of a horror movie and he said "We actually talked, still do, about Killer Tomatoes. I think we should do that one - lots of gore, but lots of laughs too. Robby's in. That's a classic man....we definitely goin to look at that again soon." Asked what he's got coming up he said he's going to be doing a film with Tarantino called "Glorious Bastards" and a movie with Christopher Walken that's "very, very funny"."
Raven haired Linda and her school mate Linnea are studying after school, when their desires take over and they kiss and strip off their clothes. They take turns fingering and licking one another's trimmed pussies on the desks, then fuck each other to intense orgasms with colorful vibrators.

jtm

Adam Sandler? Killer Tomatoes?... i'd watch it.

Sleuth

I will only watch it if Adam insists that the writers make him charming and a man of the people
I like to hug dogs