A Few Notes on Movies of the Near Future 155
BenderFan writes "The first review of the next Futurama DVD, The Beast With a Billion Backs (out in the US on June 24), has appeared online. And the reviewer liked it — a lot."
(I hope it's as good as Bender's Big Score.) Read on for reader submissions on two other upcoming movies. The Day The Earth Stood Still (with Keanu Reeves, but also John Cleese) is due out in December, and a movie version of Philip K. Dick's The Owl in Daylight is currently being drafted by Tony Grisoni; the interview linked below is appropriately surreal.
Etienne writes "Tony Grisoni is a British screenwriter who has co-written several Terry Gilliam's films (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Tideland, Brothers Grimm and Lost in La Mancha).
He is currently writing the screenplay for 'The Owl in Daylight', based upon the book Dick was planning to write just before he died. The movie is produced by Electric Shepherd Productions, which is run by Anne and Laura Dick, PKD's daughters. Paul Giamatti is co-producing and will take the part of Philip K. Dick."
bowman9991 writes "Keanu Reeves' big budget remake of the 1951 science fiction classic 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' has all the right ingredients to be his biggest hit since 'The Matrix.' SFFMedia asks whether we are looking at another classic or a disastrous Hollywood star studded rehash? Now that the cold war anxieties from the original movie have been replaced with the threat of environmental catastrophe, will Keanu become some type of extraterrestrial Al Gore and ruin the movie?" (John Cleese plays Klaatu's giant 8-foot robotic pal called "Gort.")
I hope it's significantly BETTER (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What a useless review. (Score:5, Insightful)
Quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hope it's significantly BETTER (Score:5, Insightful)
There's an awful lot going on and the plot is pretty complex; I really don't think you can get a full appreciation for it on a single run through - not that is necessarily a good thing.
hey moron (Score:1, Insightful)
A movie that needs no remake (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, so an argument could be made that this is the right time to remake this movie, even if it guaranteed to be worse given the Mr. Revees has trouble acting his way out of a paper bag, and it just gets worse when he is acting across from someone that is truly competent(see A Walk in the Clouds).
The fact remains that there are any number of sci-fi horror movies that are more suited to his abilities, could benefit from better special effects, and are screaming for remakes. Simplying going through the MST3K list would net a treasure trove of easy money films.
wow (Score:1, Insightful)
And please don't start with the tiresome "it played like 3 episodes, not a movie" argument. They intended to do that. They want 3 episodes to be able to air on 3 nights in syndication. That's the only type of comment more tiresome than your type of comment.
Re:wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It has nothing to do with the fact that the movie "played like 3 episodes" -- and you throwing that out there is a complete red herring as the GP said nothing about that. In my opinion, it just wasn't quite as snappy. Had some individually really good parts, but the whole thing just didn't seem as seemless. And no, to be clear, I'm not complaining about the episodic nature of the film--I'm talking about individual scene changes.
Seriously, I don't understand your reply at all. I mean, I understand fanboyism on the Internet and all, but why be so invested in whether other people like a movie or TV show you like? Other people liking or not liking it shouldn't diminish your enjoyment of it at all!
Comment removed (Score:1, Insightful)
Disaster (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm voting for disaster. Let's take a look at some of the changes:
The original Klaatu - Played by Michael Rennie, a virtually unknown actor outside of the UK at the time, which gave him credibility as an alien when he stepped out of the spaceship.
He also had to be both menacing when delivering his warning/ultimatum, and compassionate as he goes among earth's people to learn more about them. Eventually he bonds with a little boy and his mother.
The new Klaatu - Keanu Reeves has received massive exposition, thus ensuring that people see Neo stepping out of the spaceship.
Also, he has the dramatic range of a cinder block.
The original theme - It dealt with timeless concepts such as our distrust for different cultures and our natural propensity toward aggression. Which is why it has endured to this day.
The people whom Klaatu represents aren't worried that we kill one another, their fear is that we extend our aggression as we step out into space.
The new theme - With the new environmental theme, apparently they are now terribly worried that we destroy the planet and thus ourselves. Or that we start littering space.
The original Gort - Silent, soulless, impersonal, ruthless and menacing.
The new Gort - John Cleese!
Also, I'm sure some of the original's somewhat Orwellian undertones of Klaatu's people creating a race of robots and giving them irrevocable power to control any and all acts of aggression will also be lost. As will his admission that their system, and their own society by extension, isn't perfect. Everything is black and white these days.
But hey, I'd love to be proven wrong since it's one of my favorite sci-fi movies, but somehow I'm skeptical.
Re:Philip K. Dick Movies (Score:4, Insightful)
I just recently read "We can remember it for you wholesale", and
Can we subtract from the list? (Score:5, Insightful)
And you think they could get Mote in God's Eye right? Yeah, it's a tempting thought, but you know by revision 3 of the script, Hollywood would have turned the Moties into Ewoks.
Poorly written (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Philip K. Dick Movies (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, they left out a lot, but they added some things of real significance too..
Actually, Blade Runner is the only PKD "adaptation" that I like better than the original story. By removing things like Mercerism, they were able to pare the story down to its essence, and make Deckard a replicant. Which if you think about it only makes sense - like they're going to be using actual people to do dirty work like tracking down escaped replicants? Hardly.
It's actually a little surprising to me that PKD overlooked (or just chose to forgo) that angle, especially when you consider A Scanner Darkly's plot, of stories like Second Variety..
So while Blade Runner might be kind of a poor adaptation of Do Androids Dream, it's a pretty brilliant story in its own way.
Re:wow (Score:4, Insightful)