Month: October 2006

And you thought your teachers were weird:

Bruce Potts is a teacher of Public Speaking at the University of New Mexico and has a full tribal face tattoo. He has a straight forward attitude and imparts a cool vibe of acceptance. We’ll bet his students get an extra edge on using demeanor and attitude in public speaking. And a life long lesson on not judging books by their covers. Either that or they study really hard because they’re afraid he’ll eat them.

Via Boing Boing.

Terry Gilliam:

I’m thinking of suing George Bush and Dick Cheney for making the remake of ‘Brazil’ without my approval…Their version isn’t as funny, though.

Gilliam was in town recently, promoting his new movie, Tideland. I didn’t end up going to see him — I would have needed to leave work early, and his appearance outside The Daily Show studios was still just a rumor when I learned about it that morning — but I read Mitch Cullin’s book a few months ago, and I’m interested to see what Gilliam has done with it. It opens in theaters on October 13. (Despite the August release date listed on the film’s website.)

Sequels, prequels and remakes, oh my!

  • A remake of Sleuth starring Jude Law and Michael Caine. This one actually seems pretty interesting. The original’s not half bad, but it’s not what I’d call a classic or anything.
  • A prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing…taking place, what? I guess however many millions of years earlier when the Thing first arrived on Earth and got itself frozen? Should be a blast, that.
  • Another sequel to Species, because against all odds the third one appears to have made some money back on DVD.
  • Another sequel to The Mummy. Of course, title-wise, I don’t where there is left to go after The Mummy Returns. The Mummy’s Still Here? That’s My Mummy!? Mummy and Robin?
  • An Americanized Vicar of Dibbley. (I haven’t seen Little Brittain, but apparently they’re working to remake that, too.) With a few very notable exceptions, American remakes of British television die pretty quick and ignoble deaths. But hey, who knows?
  • Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation as a weekly television series. I could definitely see updating this, with today’s modern surveillance equipment, but I think it would be tough to sustain over a long-running series. A lot of the original film rests on Gene Hackman’s terrific performance.
  • A Bloodrayne sequel? Okay, now Uwe Boll is just fucking with us.
  • A remake of Near Dark? But…why?1
  • A Friday the 13th remake? Again, I ask, why? The original is interesting only in so far as that it’s actually a pretty lousy horror movie; it’s remembered mostly for its many sequels, which weren’t that much better, but I guess the world was just hungry for a serial killer in a hockey mask at the time. That serial killer isn’t in the first Friday the 13th movie, and therein, for me, lies pretty much the only interesting thing about the film. A lot of recent American horror movies seem more interested in ramping up the sadism than the scares, not really frightening us but making us uncomfortable with scenes of brutal, disgusting, and even overly elaborate torture. (Little shock, given our current President.) The producer of this planned remake also produced the most recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies and the Amityville Horror remake, so I’m not filled with much, if any confidence.
  • A sequel to WarGames. I’m sounding like a broken record here2, but I really have to wonder why. And, from the description, the planned movie sounds a lot more like a remake — or, maybe more accurately, a rip-off — of the original film. It sounds, in fact, like the WarGames title was attached to fend off charges of being a rip-off. “We know it’s a lot like WarGames, they can say. It’s not unoriginal, it’s a sequel!” Heavy sigh.

And these are just the ones I’ve read about recently.

1 Greil Marcus of Salon once suggested that Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man was, in a roundabout way, a sort of prequel to Near Dark, or at the very least that the two films shared a character played by Lance Henriksen. I could never tell if she was joking or not. I don’t think the evidence really backs this up — Henriksen’s characters have different names, for one thing — but the idea always interested me. There’s no reason they couldn’t be the same character, or at least none that couldn’t be easily explained. Either way, both good movies, neither of which need a remake.

2 It occurs to me now that this expression really doesn’t make a lot of sense. A broken record doesn’t sound like much of anything. What this means to say is a skipping record. That’s what repeats itself. So why isn’t that what we say? Just an observation.

Wil Wheaton has an idea:

So here’s my idea: when you have a passionate, built-in audience for a specialized show, like Firefly, or Babylon 5, (or some non-Sci-Fi show, even,) instead of trying to make a big and expensive theatrical feature that just won’t cross over into the mainstream audience, and give the studio an excuse to kill the entire show, why not take the money you’d spend on one big movie, and use it to produce a full season that would be released on first-run DVD, in stores or on the intertubes?

Via Whedonesque. In the comments at Wheaton’s blog, someone goes on to note that J. Michael Straczynski is already doing something like this, with Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, an anthology of short B5 episodes to be released on DVD. (This isn’t just a pipe dream; sets are apparently built and shooting starts soon.)

It’s a nice idea. As much as I liked Serenity — and have grown to like it more on subsequent viewings on DVD — I very much would have preferred for the series to continue. If it was a choice between Serenity and Firefly, then, for me, Firefly wins every time.

That said, I don’t think there’s any chance whatsoever of this idea ever working. Serenity was greenlit, at least in part, because Universal thought a movie could draw in a new audience. This audience might be convinced to go see the new science-fiction film playing at their local multiplex, but they probably wouldn’t seek out a direct-to-DVD release of a television show they’d never heard of. So, even if the thing got made, it’s unlikely that any studio would shell out much in the way of promotion. (And, as I think we unfortunately saw with Serenity, even promotion from the studio isn’t a guarantee of financial success.)

I doubt Straczynski’s new Babylon 5 movie is getting the same budget that a feature-film version would get — or even the same budget that a studio would give to a new television series — and I doubt it will find much audience beyond pre-existing B5 fans. (That’s none too shabby, in itself, as DVD sales have shown, but it’s still low enough to give a studio pause before they bankroll any more.) In most cases, I don’t think a pre-existing audience for a television is going to be enough for a studio to shell out much at all, and these DVD releases run the risk of being viewed as little more than shoddy, quick cash-ins, shadows of the original series they’re trying to continue or re-develop.

It’s a nice idea, but I just don’t think the money would be there for it. That might change some day — and efforts like the new B5 movie might help change it — but I don’t think we’re there just yet.