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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Having counted 'TDTESS' as an all time favorite movie since first seen in the 1960's on TV as a midwestern farmboy on my parents old Admirial BW TV learning of this "remake" was not good news.
This remake of 'TDTESS' had to be very very good to equal or to better the 1951 cult classic. From the high traffic this remake is getting in promotion over past few weeks it was already not hard to see it was going to fall short. To succeed in anyway over or above carefully cherished boyhood memories of the eerie opening scenes and music of the original would be a very steep ascent to achieve.
This fifties era sci-fi classic may have had deeper messages about atomic war or the evergreen Red Menace of the early 1950's but for this American midwest farmboy this movies portrayal of otherworldly spacecraft--a robot capable of melting tanks and artillery and those fantastic scenes of the spaceman(incomparably played by Michael Rennie) walking up into a mysterious spacecraft with split opening/slide-out ramp and with a wave of his hand powering up those superb Hollywood sci-fi sets of the spacecraft's interiors were and are the best.
Who needed Technicolor or CinemaScope when the soundtrack was so otherworldly theramin eerie and Gort could do what no robot has done as well since?--namely scare the beegeesus out of the USA and a young impressionable American farmboy.
This was a dangerous remake to attempt based on this midwestern farmboy's cherished memories of the original.
If this one could not be absolutely done with excellence it was better to not have done it at all.
Gort would know what to do. Gort's visor would raise up and that revealed flickering light would power up within Gort's head.Some healthy imagination will take you the rest of the way to what befalls this failing and failure of a remake of this all time sci-fi classic...be sure to include the original sound fx in and around just this one scene while doing so.
Michael Rennie was ill
The day the Earth stood still,
But he told where we stand
And Flash Gordon was there
In silver underwear
Claude Rains was the Invible Man...
Man, I was confused at first. When O'Hehir mentioned a wooden alien I thought he was referring to Keanu.
Ya know, you WOULD think that we would respond in an adult way to a UFO landing on the White House lawn, but our response to 9/11 suggests that we WOULD just start shooting missiles at it.
Forget "The Rocketeer." Rent "Mulholland Falls." There is a sex scene between her and Nick Nolte (!) that is simply mind-blowing. No wonder critics back then were calling her the "modern Marilyn Monroe"! And the movie surrounding the sex scene is a damn good one, woefully underrated, with an awesome cast (Connelly, Nolte, Chaz Palmenteri, John Malkovich, Andrew McCarthy and on and on).
John Carpenter's The Thing
"A Boy and His Dog," made by Sam Pekinpah's pal, L.Q. Jones
Is one of those stories
With real meat on its bones..
This movie sucks.
but not as grate as star trek the hiden valley II: the undiscovered county
The only one I would select
Would be the very impressive
Colossus "The Forbin Project"
...which is generally what happens when you short characterization for gore/FX...
Whether you think his remake was strong or weak
Hollywood just keeps on rollin' out CGI Sominex
Which is why "They Live.."
And "...you sleep..."
This sounds like good, mindless, special-effects entertainment and will get me and a friend out of our houses, (please God, please!) during the interminable Christmas. I don't care about the female stick insect in it, and I don't care much about the lame update of the story. But I DO care to gaze upon Keanu Reeves. Still knockout gorgeous after all these years. There are so many ugly men in the movies now, Keanu is like a diamond in a tray of cubic zirconia, at least looks-wise.
was very good...instead of remaking these SciFi classics, I with they would just re-release the originals at the theater.
Yeah, the original Russian flick
Is a space oddity and way out odyssey
Way beyond any kind of weak CGIed out
Cheap card trick...
My 13 year old son, who loves most movies, agrees, saying of the remake: "That was a stinker."
In this universe
There are many unknowns
But a 13 year old kid always knows
When he's just taken a trip
Into the bad movie zone
I want a science fiction head trip at the theater, not a video game
I'm with you all the way
I want to see a film with brilliance
And eerie imagination
That fills the mind and senses
With astonished wonder and facination
Not just another string of empty offerings
Full of pretty cinematic pixilations
I hadn't seen the original in a few years so I thought it would be worth seeing within 48 hours after seeing the remake, and I was shocked at how good the first film was, better than I remembered, and how dismal and witless the remake turned out to be.
The main fault is changing the through line. Michael Rennie's Klaatu has come to warn earth against its violence and never stops trying to speak to leaders who can listen. Keanu Reeves gives up much too easily, and his mission is less sensible.
Then there's the character of the two Klaatus. Michael Rennie is bemused, compassionate, curious, and angry when need be. Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu as an emotionless cypher who apparently has done much less research on earthlings than his previous version has.
From there, it's a steady devolution. The new spaceship is lovely and shiny, but we don't get to go inside as we do in the 1951 version. The new little kid is whiny and one-dimensional and doesn't move the plot forward; the original is curious, spunky and plays a significant role in the story. Even Professor Barnhardt's equation has some meaning in the original movie since it's related to "celestial mechanics," but in the remake it's just there on the blackboard and proof of Klaatu's intelligence. And the music is forgettable, unlike the gripping Bernard Herrmann score.
I loved the almost noirish feel of the original, while the remake felt muddy and wasn't really beautiful to look at scene-by-scene.
I relished the wit and literacy of the screenplay, but there was barely a line in the new version that didn't seem clichéd ("We can change! We can change! We can change!")
Last but not remotely least, there's Gort, who actually serves a purpose in the original, and looks scary since he's not CGI. Watching the 1951 version left me curious to see it again some time; watching the remake just left me feeling suckered.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
