I had the pleasure of joining the great and generous Carl Sweeney on his excellent classic Hollywood podcast The Movie Palace.
To mark the sixtieth anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, The Movie Palace has dedicated a run of episodes to exploring elements of the iconic horror film. I was thrilled to rejoin Carl for a discussion of the infamous and divisive remake of the film, in which Gus Van Sant leveraged the success of Good Will Hunting to convince Universal to sign off on a full colour remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, using a largely unchanged script and even emulating a lot of the same camera angles. The result was a critical and commercial failure, but remains an interesting experiment.
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and with special guest Stacy Grouden, This Just In is a subset of The 250 podcast, looking at notable new arrivals on the list of the 250 best movies of all-time, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.
This time, Bradley Cooper’s A Star is Born.
At time of recording, it was ranked the 182nd best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
Can you remember a year when the summer wasn’t dominated by sequels or spin-offs or reboots or prequels? If you can, most of them were probably adaptations. There’s been a lot of back-and-forth recently about the abundance of such films in the summer lineups, so I thought it might be worth a little exploration into the history of the sequel and of Hollywood blockbusters, and also worth considering the suggestion that has been mooted a lot recently: are movie-goers tiring of sequels?
Even death couldn’t keep Spock out of the next Star Trek movie…
I am a child of the eighties. It’s a bit of an irony that I am too young to actually recall any of the decade, but still feel more than a pang of nostalgia about it. Evidently I’m not the only one. Perhaps it’s in recognition of the turn of a new decade or the rise of a younger generation, but even a cursory glance at the big budget blockbusters coming our way this summer reveal that the times, they are a-changing. No longer is our fascination with quirky seventies sex comedies or gritty urban cop dramas of that decade: this year, we’re going back to the eighties.
It’s one thing to mess with my childhood by making a Smurfs movie or remaking Flight of the Navigator or Neverending Story, but it’s another thing to screw with my gran’s childhood. Well, at least it’s not a remake – it’s a long-distance sequel. Yes, Dakota Fanning has been cast as the lead in a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. And not only that, she’s going to be hip and cool while Oz itself is going to be darker and edgier – like every good Hollywood property. I’m cringing inside already.
This is one of those ideas I am not too sure about. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way has announced that they are moving forward with a new Twilight Zone movie. With The Box coming out later this year, I imagined that Hollywood’s thirst for remakes could soon find its way to these precious anthology series (which have themselves been remade). It makes sense – there’s a lot more scope and freedom in taking a name from a show without a regular cast or confined to single storyline but still has name recognition. The only problem is that, without these staples, what exactly are they going to do to create a two hour movie?
I really shouldn’t be too surprised at this, but here’s an excerpt from an interview with director Frank Darabont on looking for a study to produce his film version of Fahrenheit 451:
“I actually had a studio head read that script and say: ‘Wow, that’s the best and smartest script that I’ve read since running this studio but I can’t possibly greenlight it’ I asked why and he says ‘How am I going to get 13-year-olds to show up at the theater?’ And I said “Well, lets make a good movie and I bet that will take care of itself.”
Well, if Hollywood is going to aggressively continue its campaign of remakes in a 3D era, I suppose there are worse genres to resurrect than the old “Universal Monster Movie” horror sub-genre. We really should have seen this coming with the impending release of The Wolf Man later in the year, but there are confirmed remakes of The Bride of Frankenstein and The Creature from the Black Lagoon in the works. It seems that Hollywood is as keen to cannibalise its trashy glories as it is to remake its celluloid classics.
the m0vie blog 