The Devil Hates Dancing

If you thought Save the Last Dance, Step Up 2: The Streets or Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo were far too pagan for your tastes, the good Christian people at Uplifting Entertainment have provided you with a God-friendly alternative.

C Me Dance is a story about a teenager who loves ballet, but has a terminal illness and is being stalked by the devil, presumably because she's a great dancer and the Devil doesn't like that. She's a Job in tights and a tutu. I guess the Devil never got over what Johnny did to him when he went down to Georgia.



If Christians feel that they need their own entertainment, that's their business. But if anything is defying God and making the Devil angry it's the acting in this "movie". Are teenagers do dumb these days that they'll only know a movie is specifically for them if you abbreviate words in the title? It's like the production office texted the title idea to the writers who just left it verbatim. I'm surprised it didn't turn out, C Me Dnce.

PS: I don't think I could've come up with a more perfect picture if I tried.

Remakes redux

A friend has asked why Hollywood is making a new version of Child's Play. I have no idea. No one knows. The easy answer, the answer that is partially true, is that the production company wants to make money. Kids these days, and young adults too, are very put off by things that are older than say, 2000. Think about it, a kid born in 2000 is almost 10 years old. They don't want to see the "old" movies that we used to watch way back in 1995, or 1990, or 1982...potentially the best year for movies of all time.

So, to make money, studios want to remake things with newer flair and relevancy. Cinephiles, and all lovers of movies, know that a movie is good no matter if it's in black and white, color, sepia, silent or audible. Horror movies are ripe for remakes because there is an automatic audience and the movies are pretty cheap to make. A horror movie-goer will not go see a horror movie based on who is in it, but on what creature/monster is slaughtering people. The monsters all work for scale because they're not real. That's one reason why there aren't many famous people in horror movies: It makes them too expensive. Sure there are exceptions, but there are always exceptions.

A remake is usually made of a movie that did well in the theaters or has sold well in the stores. Child's Play, for instance, is a fairly well-thought of movie series with an easily-recognizable star: Chucky. It would take less time and effort for a studio to make a horror movie where the villain has already been thought up than to hire someone to create a new bad guy. Plus, there is fan fiction all over the place. People have tons of ideas for storylines for characters that already exist. You should check out the Harry Potter fan fic with Snape and Hermione.

So a remake is cheaper, can be made faster and makes them more money because the studio is getting a whole other generation of movie-goers to see something they already created and own the rights too.

But that doesn't make it alright. Most remakes are so terrible and come from stupid board meetings where agents are only thinking of how much money the original has made that they forget that you can't replicate certain experiences.

For fuck's sake, they want to remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Why would you remake a movie that has been playing in movie theaters all over the world since the first night it opened? A remake of Total Recall is coming out. Not going to make any money. Part of what makes Total Recall so great is Arnold being 1990's Arnold. You can't replicate that. What are they going to do, put a woman with 4 breasts in it to make it better? Plan 9 From Outer Space: Are things so bad that now you're going to remake a movie that only has value as the worst movie of all time? Just remember, there are a few good remakes out there, but mostly awful ones. Try to view them remakes on their own terms, unless it's impossible. It will be impossible to view the Rocky Horror remake on its own terms, so it'll just suck and I won't go see it.

Here are a few good remakes:

Ocean's 11
Teaxas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)
Assault on Precinct 13
A Fistful of Dollars (remake of Yojimbo)
The Thing (remake of The Thing From Another World)
The Italian Job
Dawn of the Dead
King Kong

Here are some of the most terrible excuses for remakes in the world:

Psycho (1998)
You've Got Mail (remake of The Shop Around the Corner)
The Vanishing (remade and given a happy ending for some reason)
The Ladykillers
Quarantine (remake of [REC], not even a year old when remade)
Get Carter
The Wicker Man
Godzilla
The Amityville Horror (remade to look like a J-Horror flick)

Kindle 2

Anyone out there ever heard of Amazon's Kindle 2? It is a tablet that displays and can read aloud books that you download from Amazon.com's Kindle library. The device costs $360, but the books you download cost about $10 a piece. There is a library of almost 250,000 books right now, and the Kindle 2 has 3G wireless connectivity so you can download books on the go without a PC.

I also said that the Kindle 2 has the ability to read aloud your new books to you.

Except that it might not have that ability, even though Amazon.com already advertises it as so. The only exception is that Amazon.com has said that if the book's author has not agreed to let their book be fed through the translator, that particular book will not be able to be read aloud.

See the Author's Guild of America thinks that if your Kindle 2 can read your book aloud to you then that's a violation of copyright.

But that's a recent adjustment, and the Kindle 2 had previously shipped with no caveat. Please read this article before buying a Kindle! It makes very good points about why the machine is a waste of your money at this point.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/31/cory-doctorow-kindle

Remakes

A loyal reader has brought up a tidbit that I wasn't planning on addressing, but now may as well write about. This bit of news is the scheduled remake of Stephen King's It. I get a lot of horror new on a daily basis, so it's hard for me to remember that everydaay, average non-horror watching folks don't know what movies are up on the remake chopping block. Before I take a specific look at It, here are some movies getting remade soon:

Funhouse
Plan 9 From outer Space (considered by many ot be the worst movie of all time)
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Monster Squad

Scanners
Escape from New York
Martyrs
The Orphanage
Let the Right One In
The House on Sorority Row
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (again)
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Hellraiser
Faces of Death
Evil Dead

Child's Play
The Birds
Children of the Corn
The Wolfman
Re-Animator
Predator
The Thing
Rocky Horror Picture Show

And that's a partial list!  But getting back to It, I'm against the remake because the original mini-series was given the best possible chance to be successful.  There's no way that a theatrical version of It could do well.  The book is 1000 pages long, and the TV version from 1988 had a running time of 198 minutes.  I sat in the movie theater for 191 minutes, but that was a whole different animal.  No one that I know of is going to sit in the movie theater for 3 hours+ for a horror movie.  Why not?  you ask.  I'll tell you.

If the movie is good (unlikely), the production company won't be able to make enough money by having a movie that long.  In order for a movie to make money everyone has to go see it, not just horror fans.  Combine that with the fact that for a 3 hour film there are fewer showings in a day and you're already making less money than on average IF THE MOVIE IS GOOD. If the movie is bad (very likely), then no one's going to watch it anyway, even horror fans.  We'll just wait for DVD. 

Current word is that Tim Curry is being courted to play Pennywise again, but no official news yet on that front.  Here's the major gripe of mine:  The televised mini-series sucked.  I liked the actors, but the production sucked...big time sucked.  It wasn't scary by any standards and didn't do the amazing book any justice at all.  The book is terrifying and great.  It put Stephen King on a pedestal next to Ray Bradbury for me.  They are the two best authors when it comes to writing convincing child characters.

The new movie will blow.  The mini-series had all the time in the world to work with the story and it blew.  The movie will be shorter and therefore even more snipped and cramped and therefore worse in quality.  That's just how I feel.

Subtitle change

I told you I'd let you know when Magnolia commented on their subtitle changes for Let the Right One In. They have commented.

“We've been made aware that there are several fans that don't like the version of the subtitles on the DVD/BR. We had an alternate translation that we went with. Obviously a lot of fans thought we should have stuck with the original theatrical version. We are listening to the fans feedback, and going forward we will be manufacturing the discs with the subtitles from the theatrical version.”

Fantastic, unless you already bought it. But, sometimes waiting for a little bit works out in your favor.

Fun/Serious Stuff

Sometimes, when I see something that I want to rally behind a little bit, I get pseudo-political on this blog and try to get you guys aware of some stuff you might not know about. Boingboing.net, a favorite site of mine for lots of reasons, has been following closely the movements of the British government as it takes steps to "protect" its citizens from terrorists. The British government is doing everything from creating networks of CCTV cameras in large cities to arresting people for taking pictures of buildings or manhole covers.

The other day a couple of posters came out prodding citizens to report any suspicious activity in their neighborhoods to the police. Does this sound like a government-run neighborhood watch? Yes. Might that be a nice idea? Sure. But really, what's going to happen, as it always does, is that certain people will start reporting all sorts of crazy things, and nosing around in other people's business looking for "clues". Also, the tighter the laws get, the more restless people get. I can't believe we haven't figured this out right now. If the terrorists win by making people change their lifestyles, then terrorism has won out in London. Muse on this old adage if you will: Locks only keep honest people out. I've put that in this blog before, but it's true for so many different forms of control and censorship. I don't care if I overuse it, it's an awesome statement.

Anyhow, Cory Doctorow over at boingboing.net called for people to submit Photoshopped ads poking fun at the anti-terrorism posters up in London the other day. So I submitted one. It's the fourth poster down. The one with the muppet.

You can see the posting here.

As serious as the over-tightening of British laws is, I'm still really excited to have something I did postedon a website I visit every day. It's so cool!

The original posters can be found here.

WTF?!

A movie that a lot of horror fans, and increasingly a lot of movie fans, have been routing for, and positively responding to, is Let the Right One In, a Swedish vampire film from 2008. If you live in Ithaca, NY, as I do, you could have seen it at Cinemapolis [- The Movie State]. The DVD came out last week with a major flaw. I wanted to buy it, but wanted to hold off for a bit...and I'm sure glad I did.

According to this article at Icons of Fright, the subtitles are all wrong. When I say "wrong", I mean abridged, elided, shortened and mangled. A lot of the tone and humor of the original script are lost in this mishap. No one from Magnolia DVD has made a statement, but when they do, I'll post a follow-up.

I know that not many out there will care, but it brings up a valid point: Who can you trust to correctly relay the spoken-language information from the screen to the audience? I don't speak fluently in any language other than English, so I have to rely on the translator to give me the most accurate subtitles they can. Just by listening to the people on screen talking as I read along I know that it's not always word-for-word, but there has to be an effort made.