So, a few days ago, I reminisced about how my friend Cheno and our merry little band of youthful movie buffs used to shoot our own movies on a VHS camcorder. Cheno was the writer-director on most of these efforts, while the rest of us pulled multiple duties as on-screen talent, camera operators, stunt performers, grips, prop masters, and caterers. Our finished films — the ones we did finish, that is — were always entertaining, and Cheno came up with a lot of creative solutions to deal with various problems, but I must be honest: they were pretty primitive stuff. They couldn’t be anything otherwise, given the equipment we had available at the time.

That’s why I am continually amazed at the amateur-made stuff I see on the web nowadays. As uncomfortable as I may be with many aspects of the digital revolution that’s swept our society in the past 20 years, I can’t deny that it’s made a lot of things possible for the average person that weren’t even worth dreaming about back in the day. Take, for example, the short animated film C.O.D.E. Guardian, which imagines a World War II battle fought with anime-style giant robots (it’s presented in two parts in the following YouTube clips):

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As long as I’m feeling grumbly this afternoon anyway, I may as well note that two more genre classics are scheduled to be remade: Barbarella and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I can actually see some value in redoing Barbarella, which, despite its kooky, 60s-ish charms, is a pretty bad movie. As I was saying the other day, there is a case to be made for trying to improve questionable material. But The Day the Earth Stood Still? A movie that (a) is just about perfect on its own terms, (b) holds up quite well even after 50 years, and (c) stemmed entirely from the nuclear nightmares of the early Cold War times in which it was made? Come on. What’s the point?

Remakes have been a significant part of Hollywood’s output since at least the 1930s, when many silent movies were filmed again as talkies. But it seems to me that the philosophy behind remakes has changed in recent years. It used to be that you remade less-than-memorable movies in hopes of coming up with something better. The Maltese Falcon is the perfect example; few people today realize that the Bogart classic was actually the third time Dashiell Hammett’s novel had been adapted for the screen. The two earlier versions have been largely forgotten, presumably for good reason.
Today, however, remakes mostly seem to be movies that audiences do remember, and even revere; cult classics seem to be particularly vulnerable. (My theory is that modern remakes are largely exercises in branding; Hollywood is updating familiar movies because audiences are already aware of the titles and basic premises, so there’s less of a challenge for the marketing department.)

Take, for example, the latest exercise in “why is this necessary”-ism: a remake of the John Carpenter-Kurt Russell favorite Escape from New York. Wow, what a brilliant idea, a real natural. After all, the last remake of a Carpenter film, The Fog, did so spectacularly well at the box office, didn’t it? (Yes, kids, that’s sarcasm you’re reading.) While we’re at it, why doesn’t somebody remake Carpenter’s best-known film, his big breakthrough and masterpiece, Halloween? Oh… never mind…

You know, I saw Kurt Russell on The Late, Late Show the other night. He was there to plug Grindhouse, naturally, but the host, Craig Ferguson, was far more interested in discussing the Escape remake. Kurt, classy guy that he is, said he had no issues with it and wished the new production well. I tend to agree with Craig, though; he said (in his amusing Scottish accent) that it was bullshite, that Kurt was Snake Plissken, that Snake was an icon, and that no one else could take over the role. And then for good measure, he repeated himself: it’s bullshite.

I would just add that somebody already did a remake of Escape from New York. It was called Escape from L.A. What’s that, you say? You don’t remember that one? Yeah, well, that pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?

From a Time magazine review of the new Quentin Tarantino-Robert Rodriguez shlock-o-rama Grindhouse, here’s an observation that I found interesting:

You won’t find sex, or even the aura of sexuality, in films by the current generation of pop-referencing auteurs. They swarm all over the violence in 60s-70s grindhouse movies but are squeamish in showing the eroticism that once was crucial to the genre. The generation of “kids with beards,” as Billy Wilder called Francis Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, took their cues from a wide range of movie sources — Saturday-matinee serials, John Cassavetes improv dramas, European angst-athons — and if they got excessive, it was in kitsch and violence, not sex. Rodriguez got some puffs of grindhouse steam going in Sin City; but here, he and Tarantino are as puritanical as their predecessors. All bang-bang, no French kiss-kiss.

 

In both “features” of Grindhouse, the MISSING REEL card flashes as a sex scene has just begun. That’s a comment on the old days, but it also proves that when it comes to eroticism, of the true or even exploitation variety, these directors are such cowards. If they use sex at all, it is in the horror-film mode pioneered by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Show a woman in a shower, then kill her. The impulse is both prurient and puritanical; they provide a brief voyeuristic pleasure, then feel obliged to punish the women, and the audience, and themselves.

This reminds me of something I noticed when I worked at the multiplex back in college: the viewers who squawked with moral outrage and demanded refunds at the briefest glimpse of a feminine nipple were usually the same folks who enthusiastically turned out on opening night for the latest action or horror bloodbaths. One family of regular patrons stands out in my mind; the numb-skulled parents thought it was peachy keen to take their five kids — who, as I recall, ranged in age from teen down to toddler — to Total Recall three or four times, but were appalled that their precious younglings’ eyes were exposed to the sexual content in The Fabulous Baker Boys. Both films were rated R and, in my opinion, were inappropriate for kids regardless of their respective particulars, simply because they dealt with grown-up subject matter. (Well, Baker Boys did, anyway, but Total Recall definitely wasn’t made with families in mind, regardless of its subject.) But these folks thought that Michael Ironside getting his arms ripped off (“See you at the pahty, Ricktah!”) was fine family entertainment while Michelle Pfeiffer’s boobage was the very embodiment of evil.

I was thinking then that there was something out of whack with the cultural values being expressed through our entertainment, the dichotomy of “immoral” sexual content versus “perfectly acceptable” violence, and that was almost 20 years ago. The equation has only gotten more lopsided since then; our theater screens are awash in gore and sadism, but I honestly can’t recall the last time I saw any nudity in a film… what is it about Americans that we prefer fake bloodshed over cinematic nookie? And does that make anyone else out there uneasy, or is it just me?

I’m fairly indifferent to the new movie that everyone is buzzing about, 300. I’m not actually opposed to seeing it, but I have yet to see or hear anything about it that makes me want to run right out to the cinema, like, now.

(If you really must know my reasons, I’m unimpressed by the video game-y look of the film, and the commercials make it look as if all the dialogue is presented in a top-of-the-lungs shout. It just looks a little too over-the-top bombastic for my tastes.)

However, this cartoon makes me think that, perhaps, it might behoove me to get myself down to the multiplex. And that I’d better be sure to like what I see, no matter what. Because I really don’t want to turn in anything to anybody…

And now, just because I can, allow me to present the trailer for the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie:

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a spectacular trailer. Whether the movie will be any good is, of course, an open question. The art of the trailer editing has advanced to a point where it’s no longer possible to tell what you’ll be getting yourself into, based solely on the previews. In fact, I find that the trailer is better than the finished film in something like seven out of 10 cases.

In addition, I’m rather ambivalent about the Pirates movies. I love the concept of them — the POTC ride has always been my favorite Disney attraction, and my boyhood fantasies were filled with blackhearted scalawags, buccaneers, and corsairs — and Johnny Depp has created an indelible, iconic, very likable character largely through the force of his own charisma and artistic daring (who’d have thought that playing an entire movie as a sexually ambiguous drunk would work?). But the first film probably could’ve been trimmed by 15 or 20 minutes without anyone ever missing anything, and the second one suffered from the “Bigger is Always Better — Except When It’s Not” syndrome that afflicts so many sequels. And why did this whole thing need to be a trilogy anyway? The first film could’ve stood on its own very nicely.

All of which is just me being my usual curmudgeonly self, of course. Everybody reading this knows that I’ll be seeing At World’s End. After all, I’m a sucker for a good trailer. And pirates. A good trailer with pirates? Irresistable…

At this point, I’m considering any casting news I hear about Indiana Jones 4 to be solidly in the “rumor” category, but the word that Sir Sean is considering reprising his role as Henry, Sr., is both unsurprising and — if it’s true and if he agrees to do it — welcome news indeed. His attachment to the project will mean that (a) my chances of liking Indy 4 will go up by a factor of 12, and (b) The League of not-so-Extraordinary Gentlemen — pardon me while I spit the bad taste from my mouth — will no longer be the last feature film on the CV of one of my favorite actors. So let’s keep our fingers crossed, shall we?
Oh, and in related news, British scientists have determined that Connery is, in fact, the real James Bond. Duh.

I picked up the image that appears below the fold from Boing Boing, and while I don’t have particularly strong feelings about copyright, digital rights managment (DRM), or the future of media distribution like the Boing Boing crew, I do very much agree with the sentiments it expresses:

[A warning to my language-sensitive readers: naughty language ahead, including the Queen of Naughty Words. Not just once, either.]

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Hm… Sean Means says that Premiere magazine’s final issue will be in April. Supposedly, it will live on somewhere on the InterWeb, but I have a hunch that won’t ever amount to much.

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