Guillermo Del Toro — director of Blade 2, Hellboy, Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth — announces he’s working on a remake of Tarzan with Master and Commander scribe John Collee. “‘I’d love to create a new version that is still a family movie, but as edgy as I can make it,’ Del Toro said. ‘There are strong themes of survival of a defenseless child left behind in the most hostile environment.’”
Tag: Remakes
Bumpy Departure.
As far as remakes go, The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s sprawling, overstuffed Boston-area reinterpretation of Andy Lau and Alan Mak’s Infernal Affairs, is by no means an embarrassment. Packed with likable actors delivering quality performances (another hambone turn by Jack Nicholson notwithstanding), it’s a breezy and enjoyable two and a half hours of cinema, and it hits most of the beats of the original decently well. (Maybe too well. A little more deviation from IA might’ve helped in the suspense department.) Still, I left the theater somewhat disappointed, and am a bit surprised by the critical acclaim Departed is getting. For all the sleek direction, actorly firepower, and Mamet-ish wit on display here can’t disguise the fact that Infernal Affairs was a clearly better film — leaner and more nuanced, more elegiac and resonant. Lacking the emotional power of the original, The Departed basically just feels like a well-crafted but hollow genre exercise (that is, when it doesn’t feel like a Nicholson stunt.) And, as far as well-crafted genre exercises go, I think I might’ve preferred Inside Man.
The central plot of both films is at once delightfully simple — cop plays robber, robber plays cop — and devilishly complicated. Here, two Southie graduates of the Massachusetts State Police Academy go to work for opposite sides of the law: Bright young overachiever Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) takes a gig in a top police investigation unit aimed at taking down nefarious crime kingpin Frank Costello (a.k.a. Whitey Bulger a.k.a. The Joker), while troubled screw-up Billy Costigan (Leonardo di Caprio) finds himself, after a stint in the joint, hired muscle in Costello’s organization. But all is not as it seems: As it turns out, Sullivan the cop — bought off by a bag of groceries a few decades earlier — actually works for Costello as a mole on the force, while Costigan the robber has gone deep undercover at the behest of BPD detectives Queenan (Martin Sheen, avuncular and presidential) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg, aggro and amusing). As it becomes patently clear to both sides of the game that each has a rat in the house, Sullivan and Costello work to flush out their opposite before they get busted (or, in Costello’s case, dismembered.) And, complicating the situation even further (and in a departure from Infernal Affairs), these two nemeses also unknowingly share the love of the same woman, an alluring police shrink (Vera Farmiga) who tends to make really poor life decisions.
All of this is executed competently enough. Scorsese keeps the wheels turning and the tension up throughout, and The Departed benefits from many excellent performances around the margins: Both Wahlberg (easily the most comfortable with the Boston accent, for obvious reasons) and particularly Alec Baldwin (as a grizzled police detective, one-half his character in Glengarry Glen Ross, one-half Sgt. Jay Landsman) are laugh-out loud funny at times, while David O’Hara and Sexy Beast‘s Ray Winstone add sinister depths to Costello’s criminal outfit. And, while most of Mystic River felt more plausible to me, the Boston locale gives The Departed some strong local color that feels fresh and different from the Hong Kong of Internal Affairs. (I particularly liked some of the Irish witticisms. I’d never heard the Freud quote: “This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.” And I enjoyed Sullivan’s warning to his psychiatrist girlfriend late in the film, something along the lines of “If this isn’t working, you need to get out. I’m Irish. Something could be wrong, and I’d spend the rest of my life just dealing with it.“)
Both Leonardo di Caprio and Matt Damon do high-quality work too, but here some of my issues with the film emerge. As played by the charismatic Tony Leung of Hero, In the Mood for Love, and 2046, the undercover cop character in Internal Affairs is a resigned, world-weary sort, a guy who seems to carry reservoirs of inexpressible sorrow with him everywhere he goes. But, here, di Caprio is basically a pill-popping panic attack for two hours, cringing and sweating his way through every scene. Fine, that’s a stylistic choice: More problematic is Damon’s character, who’s become considerably less interesting than the conflicted cop played by Andy Lau (of House of Flying Daggers) in the original. For some reason, he’s been stripped down and rendered a much more conventional villain. Damon does what he can, but I preferred the subtler, more pained motivations of Lau’s mole than I do the unctuous, take-no-prisoners careerism they’ve saddled Damon with here.
And then there’s Jack. Nicholson has put in some extraordinary performances in his time, but, as someone put it in another comment thread, he’s been coasting like Pacino for a couple of decades now. And, for some ungodly reason, Scorsese gave Nicholson free rein here to act as crazy as he wants. (Yep, the dildo idea was his.) As a result, Nicholson can’t stop leering and preening to the point of distraction. Whether it be making rat faces, covering his arms in splatterhouse gore, coking out with two prostitutes in the Red Room from Twin Peaks, or generally just acting like he’s seated courtside at the Staples Center rather than running a crime operation, Nicholson just doesn’t work here. Wildly over the top throughout, he’s like a refugee from a sillier, stupider film, and he too often makes The Departed feel little more than a Marty-directs-Jack! casting stunt.
Queen Bees and Wanna-Bes.
So, to escape the sun for an afternoon (even while vacationing in paradise, sometimes you need an off-day), the family and I went to catch an impromptu double-feature over the weekend, the first half being Neil LaBute’s muddle-headed update of The Wicker Man. Going in absolutely cold, I suppose Wicker might make for a reasonably tolerable and diverting two hours, although I found the pacing rather stilted in any case. But if you’re at all familiar with the 1973 Edward Woodward/Christopher Lee cult classic, The Wicker Man seems like a pretty egregious misfire. Using some nefarious pagan alchemy, LaBute has stripped out much of the intriguing religious ruminations (as well as the sexiness and sense of humor) from the original Wicker Man and replaced it with a lethal dose of over-the-top LaBute-brand misogyny. In effect, he’s transmuted gold into lead.
Part of the fun of watching the original 70s-era Wicker Man is figuring out what the hell it is in the first place. Between song-and-dance numbers and the landlord’s daughter (Britt Ekland) famously in dishabile, Wicker swings wildly to and fro in a pagan delirium of genres…well, until it all starts to go horribly wrong (and even then Chris Lee is rocking that ridiculous turtleneck.) But in LaBute’s version, we’re in dour thriller mode from the get-go, as we watch well-meaning, earnest California highway patrolman Edward Malus (Nicholas Cage) experience a truly horrible day at the office. (Between this and World Trade Center, cop-Cage has been having a really tough week on screen, the kind martyriffic Mel Gibson probably dreams about.) As Malus recuperates from his harrowing (and ultimately somewhat nonsensical) day, he receives a letter from an old flame, Willow (Kate Beahan), begging him to visit her home — here an island off the coast of the Pacific Northwest — to help her locate her missing daughter Rowan. Soon, Malus absconds to the Verizonless village of Summersisle to chat up the bizarre town elders, which include Deadwood‘s Molly Parker, Six Feet Under‘s Frances Conroy, and the Queen Bee of Summersisle herself, Ellen Burstyn (still looking radiant and still deserving better), about the possible abduction. But, as he ventures deeper into this strange realm, Malus unearths not only an elaborate conspiracy of silence but a dark plot to put ancient pagan magic to the service of the island’s foundering fortunes…
Not to give the game away, but the trick in the original film (penned by Anthony Shaffer, brother of Amadeus writer Peter) is that the visiting cop (Edward Woodward) is a devout Christian who finds himself alternately horrified and tempted by the ritualistic seductions of the island’s pagans (His religiosity also provides grist for various disquisitions on martyrdom, crucifixion, and sacrifice by that island’s leading citizen, Christopher Lee.) But, LaBute’s conceit here, as you might expect if you’ve ever seen anything else he’s done (and I’ll admit to actually quite liking In the Company of Men), is that Summersisle is a radical matriarchy, with women holding all positions of power, girls the only students in the local schoolhouse, and men either killed at birth — courtesy of Ruth Fisher — or kept as docile, tongue-less workers and “breeders.” Explained another way, Summersisle’s cash crop in the original film is apples, the fruit of temptation, knowledge, and disobedience to divine will. Here’s it’s honey, which LaBute uses instead to make all kinds of unwieldy queen bee and drone bee metaphors (“The drone must die!,” women scream at Cage in one scene), to say nothing of the dangers of, um, honeypots.
Put simply, LaBute has basically chosen to use The Wicker Man as a cartoonish vehicle for his woman-hating issues, and the result is not only a serious diminishment of the original film, but also more than a little childish and embarrassing. [Note: From now herein, I’ll be talking about major, end-of-movie type spoilers — Quit reading if you don’t want to know.] In the end, look closely, and you find that there wasn’t a single sympathetic female character in the film, even folks who have no business being involved in the conspiracy. (LaBute ultimately even sinks so low as to have Cage gratuitously beat the crap out of a few “evil” chicks, including Leelee Sobieski, who’s inexplicably turned into a ravenous vampire or somesuch for this one scene, all accompanied with John Wayne-type punch sound editing.) And, perhaps worst of all, LaBute ends this version not with the climax of Cage’s story but a woefully misguided coda involving James Franco at a singles bar, thus turning the whole enterprise into basically one long, unnecessary remix of the kidney thieves story.
In sum, this Wicker Man at best feels akin to a middling episode of Nightmares and Dreamscapes on TNT. At worst, it’s a seriously wrong-headed remake and a mortifying enterprise for Cage, Burstyn, and co. to have been a part of. Do yourself a favor: Burn this sucker down and rent the original.
Terry Does Dick | Prison Break.
Speaking of Philip K. Dick, word on the street is the one and only Terry Gilliam will be heading The Owl in Daylight, a biopic of the author set to star Paul Giamatti in the lead. And, speaking of paranoid sci-fi-ish surveillance thrillers, Christopher Nolan looks set to board The Prisoner, as in a film version of the classic BBC series, after he finishes the Dark Knight.
Miami Heat.
As an atmospheric and consistently engaging police procedural that’s well above the mean of this year’s tepid summer crop, Miami Vice — which I caught several days ago and haven’t had the time to write anything about — is definitely worth a look-see. The plot is wafer-thin — two tough cops go undercover with an impressive arsenal of sleek, speedy vehicles at their disposal — and at times well past implausible, but, much like the first half of Collateral, Michael Mann mostly makes up for it by layering on the captivating high-def ambience thick. If you’re a fan of Mann’s film work — Manhunter, Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Heat, Ali, Collateral — and don’t go in expecting anything like his ’80s TV show (which I saw exactly never — when it started, I was living overseas, and I was probably too young for it anyway — in any case, this movie feels more like Mann’s short-lived Robbery Homicide Division), I think you’ll definitely find it rewarding. (Indeed, some Manniacs are raving about the film.)
The film begins without credits and in media res, with vice detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell, rocking a grotesquely bad ‘do) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx) in da club, dressed to the nines, and apparently looking to break up a prostitution ring. As the scene progresses, we intuit that Messrs. Crockett & Tubbs are the no-nonsense heads of a crack Miami police unit made up of Naomie Harris (of 28 Days Later and POTC 2) and the HBO All-Stars: The Wire‘s Herc (Domenick Lombardozzi), Brenda’s boyfriend Joe on Six Feet Under (Justin Theroux), and — indirectly — Deadwood‘s Sol (John Hawkes) and Blazanov (Pasha Lynchnikoff) and Rome‘s Julius Caesar (Ciaran Hinds). But before this hardy team of television thespians can capture their quarry, a frantic call from one of Crockett & Tubbs’ regular CIs (Hawkes) eventually sets the squad on a new target: Latin American drug lord Jose Yero (John Ortiz), who appears to be using nasty Aryan Brotherhood types as muscle. Soon, Miami’s dynamic duo find themselves deep undercover without a net in Yero’s organization, only to discover that he may only be a stalking horse for even Bigger Bad Arcangel de Jesus Montoya (Luis Tosar), and his beautiful majordomo Isabella (Gong Li), whom Crockett has his eye on…
That’s the setup, but as I said, it’s basically all just an excuse for Farrell and Foxx to wear nice duds, get behind the wheels of some really fancy people-movers, and seethe, flex, canoodle, and ruminate like the typical bevy of manly Mann men. To be honest, I’m more fascinated by gritty, street-level Wire-like depictions of the drug trade than I am this sort of fast-cars-and-million-dollar-tech type stuff. But for the most part, all this ends up being more entertaining than it sounds on paper, drenched as it is in a moody atmosphere of perpetual dusk and lightning flashes on the horizon (and, as in Heat Mann can do quality shootouts like no other.) Only when Farrell and Li lose their heads and fall head over heels in love does the film really slip off the rails — Basically the movie stops cold a few times so Sonny and Isabella, the latter acting particularly out of character, can get mojitos in Havana or go salsa dancing in South Beach. (Foxx’s relationship with Naomie Harris is equally formulaic, but less time is spent on it, until a third-act rescue which feels more than a bit like well-made television.) In sum, Miami Vice isn’t the type of movie that’ll knock your socks off, but it is consistently diverting throughout. And, as a worthwhile reimagining of the TV show, it earns its place among the very few recent television-to-movie remakes worth checking out.
Ye men of blood.
Online of late is the new trailer for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (a.k.a. the remake of Infernal Affairs, with Tony Leung and Andy Lau), starring Leonardo diCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin. I liked the original quite a bit, but I get the sense from this preview that this version may be marred somewhat by the usual late-era Nicholson grandstanding.
Wicker in the front.
Round up the landlord’s daughters: The trailer for Neil LaBute’s remake of The Wicker Man, with Nicolas Cage, Ellen Burstyn, Leelee Sobieski, and Deadwood‘s Molly Parker, is now online. Hmmm…the jury is still out on this one.
Liner Notes.
Admittedly, a summer B-picture like Poseidon isn’t going to turn the world upside down in any case. And it’s got nothing on the original Poseidon Adventure of 1972 (which itself isn’t all that great a film): Josh Lucas is almost always a likable presence, but he’s no Gene Hackman…nor, for that matter, is Kurt Russell Ernest Borgnine or Richard Dreyfuss Red Buttons (or is he Shelley Winters?) — but that may speak in this version’s favor. Still, by this point director Wolfgang Petersen is a master of both the underwater nightmare (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm) and the tube movie (Boot, Air Force One), and as a big, dumb disaster flick, Poseidon is competent enough. I can’t really recommend that you rush out and see it by any means, but it may be worth watching the back half on TNT some day.
So, you probably know the set-up. It’s New Year’s Eve somewhere in the middle of the ocean, and, aboard a massive behemoth of a cruise ship that makes the Titanic look like the S.S. Venture, passengers party the night away to the Black Eyed Peas’ Fergie, oblivious to the ginormous “rogue wave” bearing down on them. Soon, the wave hits, the ship capsizes, and our gaggle of disheveled celebrities — a professional gambler (Lucas), a recently-dumped gay architect (Dreyfuss), a former fireman and mayor of New York(!) (Russell), his daughter (Emmy Rossum), etc. etc. — band together to get to the bottom of things (which, of course, is now the top.) Along the way, they must brave fearsome flash fires, watery death traps, and clunky exposition-riddled dialogue in order to get out alive, if they can. (I won’t say who makes it and who doesn’t, other than to say that [Spoilers] actors from the HBO stable don’t seem to fare too well on this vessel.)
So, is the movie any good? Well, yeah, it’s ok, in a turn-your-brain-off kinda way. True, the dialogue and characterizations are pretty much terrible — even the wisps of backstory and perfunctory conflicts given these folks turn out to be barely credible. But the movie still works, since you just end up rooting for the long-suffering actors instead, many of whom seem like they must be hating the water tank by now. (Speaking of which, Kurt Russell, no stranger to B-flicks, seems particularly at home here.) And, to its credit, there are a few legitimately clever and suspenseful setpieces herein, the best of which makes a solid, if not incontrovertible, case for never getting trapped in a water-logged air shaft behind a claustrophobe and Richard Dreyfuss. And, like the similar crests in Petersen’s Perfect Storm, the Big Wave itself has a wrath-of-God grandeur to it, particularly in its first appearance, as it looms in the distance like inexorable Fate. In short, Poseidon is nowhere near to being a great film, but it does make for a mildly diverting carnage-filled cruise.
Servants and the Devil.
In today’s trailer bin, Kevin Smith offers up another helping of Clerks 2, Disney takes a page from Pixar in this early teaser for next year’s Meet the Robinsons, and Liev Schrieber and Julia Stiles add up the signs (and leave the swingset behind) in the new trailer for John Moore’s Omen 666 remake.
Hope you like leftovers.
Dallas (with Jennifer Lopez, Luke Wilson, John Travolta, and Shirley MacLaine)? Welcome Back Kotter (with Ice Cube)? The Dirty Dozen (now with “a personal element to it,” ’cause the original wasn’t a classic or anything)? Yep, it’s looking bleak in Hollywood these days on the new idea front.