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The only reason to remake a film is if something new can be said or new insights can be found, or if it would just plain be fun to do so. But none of these are demonstrated by Showtime’s On the Beach, a pointless, overlong update of the 1959 classic that wasn’t exactly crying out to be updated. If this is how boring humanity can be, good riddance to us all, I say.
Though it does not land overtly in the supernatural realm, Passion of Mind certainly seems to be part of the trend in psychological dramas, like The Sixth Sense and the upcoming What Lies Beneath — call it X-Files Lite. The worlds of Marie and Marty have a fantastical unreality about them — the France and the New York of their parallel lives have the clean beauty of illusion. Their homes are exquisitely decorated; their wardrobes are note-perfect for their respective lives. Either world could be the fantasy… or perhaps they both are.
Can it be a coincidence that both of the big new flicks this Memorial Day weekend — the kickoff for Hollywood’s first summer movie season of the twenty-first century — are basically Hong Kong action movies? The people who think about these kinds of things — current-events journalists, mainly — have already predicted that if the 1900s were the American century, the 2000s may well be the Asian century… but they were speaking economically and politically. I guess it’s probably inevitable that Asia would start to hold some cultural sway in the West, too.
Disney is well known for playing fast and loose with history in its recent animated films, but this is ridiculous. Dinosaur not only throws together dinos separated in time by millions of years, it also gives the big lizards little buddies in the form of lemurs, when everyone except your local creationist knows that higher mammals did not evolve until long after the dinosaurs went bye-bye.
Or, When Bad Things Happen to Rich People. Children of East Coast privilege, cynical Ben (Rob Morrow) and idealistic Adam (Jake Weber: U-571) are life-long friends, having endured the horrors of New England summers, Fifth Avenue winters, and an Ivy League education. But when Ben finds himself suddenly drawn to Adam’s coolly distant wife, Nina … more…
It’s been about 36 hours since I stumbled from the theater where I was tortured with Battlefield Earth, and the psychic wounds are only beginning to show themselves. I may never fully recover. Though it shamelessly rips off Planet of the Apes, Independence Day, Total Recall, and almost every other science fiction flick ever made, this is mostly its own brand of hell on Earth. I was expecting bad, but Battlefield Earth far surpasses my wildest dreams of sci-fi turkeyness. Stick a fork in this one, man — it’s done.
Maybe you’ve heard of The Omega Code. This is the ‘Christian thriller’ that shocked Hollywood last year by breaking into the box office top 10, if only momentarily, playing on only a handful screens across the Bible Belt. Why Hollywood was shocked is a bit of a mystery: The independently produced The Omega Code is illogical, anti-intellectual, tedious, and absurd, but no more so than any given Adam Sandler movie. Why should religious folks be any more discriminating than the vast secular majority? A real shock would be if, say, The Insider was such a blockbuster that Mattel cashed in with Jeffrey Wigand inaction figures.
Is Gladiator an action movie? Is it an historical drama? Is it a sweeping epic? Yes. Like The 13th Warrior, this is a thinking person’s action movie. Like Braveheart, this is a story of a brutal era told with stunning realism. Like Terminator 2, this is a violent movie that indicts our appetite for violence. Like The Matrix, this thrills on both a visceral and cerebral level.
You cannot make an historical drama on film anymore and expect to be taken seriously if you sanitize and Hollywoodize the reality of the situation. That wasn’t the case in 1960 when Spartacus was released, but its prettified depiction of the harsh conditions of slave life — indeed, of life for everyone — makes it difficult for me not to crack wise about the film. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate it, or recognize its high standing in the history of film or the collective memory of film lovers.
Men: can’t live with ’em, can’t leave ’em by the side of the road. So says a friend of mine. But that’s precisely what Mary Panton does — leave a man by the side of the road, that is — in Up at the Villa, one of those movies about the surprise of suppressed passion bursting free that I can never get enough of.
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