I’m really not sure who out there will be excited about this, but apparently Men In Black 3 is getting close to being official. Stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones and director Barry Sonnenfeld have all reportedly signed on for the sequel, which will be in 3D (of course) and is due in theaters in May of 2011.
I liked the first Men In Black okay back in the day, but the sequel (often held up as an example of the worst-case example of what happens when you rush a film into production with half a script to beat an impending writers’ strike) is just a sketchy collection of half-baked gags and ideas, and is about as forgettable a big summer blockbuster as Wild Wild West (oops). And don’t even get me started on the use of 3D gimmickry…but Sony needs a big blockbuster in 2011 – that’s when Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 was due out until the studio scrubbed it for a 3D Twilight-flavored reboot the following year – so I guess the studio calculated that it’s easier to park dumptrucks full of money in front of Smith’s, Lee’s and Sonnenfeld’s respective homes and get Men In Black 3: A License to Print Money into theaters for Memorial Day weekend next year.
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Breck Eisner, director of the recent not-quite-a-zombie-movie The Crazies, is reportedly in final talks to helm the remake of John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York (one of my personal all-time faves). I’m pretty much over being upset about remakes of movi
es I love – a remake of Escape From New York, no matter how awful, won’t retroactively erase my DVD of Carpenter’s magnificent original – and Hollywood’s been threatening to remake it for years, so it was bound to happen eventually. The only detail that sort of irked me in the report is that the script apparently combines the story from the original Escape From New York – the President is trapped in a walled-off NYC that now serves as a supermax prison and an soldier-turned-outlaw is promised a full pardon to rescue him – with an origin story for Snake Plissken. One of the coolest things about the original Escape is precisely that you don’t really know what Snake did before or who he was exactly, except through small snippets of dialogue from other characters.
Remaking Carpenter has been a thing the past few years – Rob Zombie remade Halloween in 2007 (check out my review here) and they’re shooting bits of the prequel to Carpenter’s The Thing a few blocks from my office here in Toronto this week. But there’s a magic to Carpenter’s movies that none of these remakes can hope to touch (and I’m one of the few who liked Zombie’s Halloween), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be enjoyed on their own merits. There aren’t many bigger Escape From New York fans out there than me, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. But nobody will ever top Kurt Russell’s Snake Plissken for pure cinema badassery.
Stay tuned for more on this project as I hear about it.
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One final item that I find genuinely confusing. Producer Brad Fuller recently Tweeted that the planned sequel to last year’s Friday the 13th remake is “dead – not happening.” I assume there’s a story behind this – studios don’t typically kill sequels to horror remakes that make more than $100 million worldwide (and I can’t believe that a Friday the 13th movie is that expensive to make). The Friday sequel was planned to be in 3D, and it also would have marked the 13th film in the Friday franchise, obviously an important milestone. I can’t wait to find out what happened here.
Labels: horror movies, John Carpenter, Movie news, remakes
¶ 10:21 AM 0 Comments
The Hollywood Reporter says John Carpenter's cult classic They Live (seriously, is there another drector who's made more bona fide "cult classics"? I can't think of any) is the latest passenger on the remake train. The 1988 original is a wonderfully angry sci-fi/action flick about class warfare, Reganomics and aliens. Wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper plays a nameless drifter who stumbles across an alien conspiracy to subdue and control the human race throug
h media-based, subliminal mind control after finding special sunglasses that let him see things as the truly are –dollar bills are really just slips of paper that say "THIS IS YOUR GOD" and billboards are emblazoned with the simple order to "OBEY," while the aliens look like the Nazis who get their faces melted at the end ot Raiders of the Lost Ark. It's a really great little movie that manages to follow the legacy of the best science fiction by using its fantastic conceit to comment on society, while also managing to not take itself too seriously. And it also has one of the absolute greatest fight sequences I have ever seen in a movie, a hilariously brutal, dragged out brawl between Piper and kickass character actor Keith David, with a few pro-wrestling moves thrown in for good measure. Who knows if the remake will be any good – the production still doesn't have a writer attached, much less a director or cast – but given the global economic crisis and the fact that the gap between rich and poor continues to widen into a full-on chasm, an upated They Live could be something awesome. We shall see.
In unrelated news, here are a couple of links that I think are worth your time. The first is Roger Ebert blogging about the death of the newspaper film critic as the mainstream media continues to chase the celebrity-gossip dragon. It's not really terribly relevant to what I'm doing here, aside from the fact that Ebert is one of the best film critics out there and anything he has to say about the state of film criticism is, by definition, important (at least it is to me).
The other is considerably lighter. Ever wonder about the lady with the torch in the Columbia Pictures logo? Or what mountain the Paramount symbol is based on? How many lions have roared before the opening credits of an MGM picture? Here are the answers.
Labels: John Carpenter, Movie news, Random thoughts
¶ 10:44 AM 0 Comments
Doomsday is a lot of things. It’s a post-apocalyptic sci-fi action movie. It’s a “virus outbreak” movie à la 28 Days Later or, I guess, Outbreak. It’s a zombie movie. It’s a medieval adventure movie. But mostly, Doomsday is totally awesome.
Doomsday follows an improbably gorgeous British special forces operative sent into near-future Scotland years after that country was walled off due to a viral outbrea
k. It seems the virus, believed to have been wiped out when Scotland was sealed off and everyone on the island died off (or so they thought!), has resurfaced in London. So it’s up to Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra) to lead a team of British commandos into Scotland, now a lawless no man’s land populated by cannibals, to return with a live human, who will hopefully provide the key to finding a cure to the virus.Your enjoyment of Doomsday relies entirely on what you think of the above plot description. If it sounds stupid to you, then yeah, it is. If it sounds like fun, buckle up and enjoy, because Doomsday is one of the most fun B-movies to come along in years.
Doomsday is the third movie from writer-director Neil Marshall, a British filmmaker who wears his love for cult genre movies on his sleeve. His first movie, Dog Soldiers, was a low-budget (even by British standards) action-horror movie about a group of soldiers on a training mission in the Scottish highlands who stumble across a pack of werewolves. It’s a fun, gory little flick that borrows liberally – and knowingly – from genre classics like Aliens and Assault on Precinct 13. Marshall followed that up with 2005’s The Descent, one of the best horror movies I’ve seen in years, about a group of women on a caving expedition who stumble across a pack of flesh-eating mutants. The Descent is a quantum leap forward from Dog Soldiers, ditching the earlier movie’s sly humour and self-awareness for an oppressive atmosphere and straight-ahead chills. It’s a genuinely brilliant horror movie that I recommend to anyone – particularly women – even those who normally aren’t into scary movies.
But with Doomsday, Marshall takes the slicker, bigger-budget feel of The Descent and fuses it with his knack for riffing on the movies that inspired him. The big influences on Doomsday – and Marshall admits it freel
y on the commentary on the director’s cut and on the featurettes – are the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior, Walter Hill’s cult 1979 gang movie The Warriors and John Carpenter’s classic Escape From New York. The latter happens to be one of my all-time favourite movies, so I made Escape From New York the first half of a double bill with Doomsday when I sat down to review it. Marshall borrows so lovingly from that film (not unlike Quentin Tarantino does in his movies), he even uses the same font for the opening credits, as well as a “London, 2035: NOW” title card that evokes Escape From New York’s famous “1997: NOW.” (The gangs of mohawked cannibals and their viciously crude weapons, as well as the entire climactic car chase across a dead plain, borrows just as liberally from The Road Warrior.)Evoking awesome older movies is all well and good, but if the actual movie under discussion doesn’t hold up, then it’s all for nothing. Luckily Doomsday doesn’t disappoint. It’s an absolute blast from start to finish, from it’s insanely over-the-top violence (we don’t just take it on faith that the roving bands of maniacs are cannibals; Marshall shows them cook and eat one of Sinclair’s team members in shocking detail). Marshall not only gets why movies like Escape From New York and The Warriors and The Road Warrior and 28 Days Later are “cool” on a superficial level; any hack can dress up extras in tattered leather and football shoulder-pads, or set up a gladiator fight between the hero and a giant, menacing brute. He gets what makes them so enjoyable on a deeper level, and he’s clearly having a ton of fun riffing on not only post-apocalyptic action flicks, but in the later portion of the film when Sinclair tracks down Kane, the rogue scientist believed to be sitting on the cure (Malcolm McDowell, picking the scenery out of his teeth), Doomsday becomes a medieval adventure movie. It seems Kane has set himself up as the head of his own little kingdom in a Middle Ages theme restaurant built into a real Scottish castle, surrounding himself with knights and archers. This allows Marshall to have his heroine swordfight her way th
rough legions of armoured soldiers right before his Mad Max car chase at the climax, which is also pretty spectacular. A genre mash-up this ambitious could easily have been a total mess, but Marshall pulls it off and then some.Doomsday though, is no Escape From New York. As fun as it is, Mitra lacks Kurt Russell’s dry wit as the iconic Snake Plissken (though Marshall does give her one eye for good measure). But saying she’s not as good as one of the greatest movie antiheroes of all time isn’t really that much of a knock; Mitra’s performance is a bit too grim and humourless, and if she allowed herself to have a bit more fun, it really could have elevated what’s already an insanely fun B-movie to a higher level. And of course, if everything I’ve described just sounds stupid to you, well, that’s probably what you’ll think of the movie – Doomsday is the kind of genre movie that isn’t trying to be any more than it is, and the downside to that is if you’re not on board for that, then I suspect there’s not much here for you. But if a hot chick fighting cannibals and knights in post-apocalyptic Scotland sounds like fun to you, Doomsday is an absolute riot.
GRADE: B+
THE EXTRAS
The Doomsday theatrical-cut DVD (which is the version I was sent to review, but I bought the unrated director’s cut, just because I dig the movie that much) has a nice little array of features, the only thing to miss the cut from the unrated version being commentary from writer-director Neil Marshall. There’s a cool making-of featurette called ‘Anatomy on the Brink,’ which covers the cast and crew and various aspects of production. The whole thing runs about 20 minutes, and gives enough detail to remain interesting, but is short enough to not drag. Everyone involved with the movie seems to be having a blast, which comes across in the final product, and Marshall and the crew mention movies like Escape From New York, Mad Max and The Warriors enough to convey how much of a love letter to those genre classics Doomsday really is.
Also included are shorter featurettes on the visual effects, from the CGI to the makeup effects used in the movie’s many gory action sequences (exploding bodies/heads, etc.), as well as a segment on the movie’s weapons, the awesomely high-tech, and brutally low-tech alike. On the surface it’s all pretty basic DVD-extra stuff, but it all gets across how much effort went into the movie, as well as the level of care and detail absent from a lot of bigger movies. Overall it’s a solid DVD package for a great little action flick.
Labels: DVD review, horror movies, John Carpenter, zombies
¶ 1:29 PM 0 Comments
