Should I see March of the Penguins or Happy Endings today?
If only they'd combined the two... a movie about a penguin masseuse.
ION: The similaritites between
The Island
and the 1970s movie
Parts: The Clonus Horror
(which was shown on MST:3K): [link]
They have the exact same plot.
The Internet Movie Database is considered the definitive source for information about films. On the IMDb's page for The Island, if you click "Movie Connections", it even says "Remake of 'Clonus' (1979)", and if you click on "Movie Connections" for Clonus, it says "Remade as 'The Island' (2005)".
Yet, amazingly, the original makers of Clonus (director Robert S. Fiveson, producer Myrl A. Schreibman, and screenwriters Bob Sullivan and Ron Smith) have been completely shut out, receiving no credit, no compensation, no anything. And that includes never being asked if it could be remade.
Do you need permission to remake a movie? If you remake a movie, do you need to credit the creators of the original?
I think you mean Frank Capra, Hec.
D'oh. But yeah, Cassavetes and Seymour Cassell.
Holy crap, the plot is the same as Parts: the Clonus Horror. I hadn't even thought of that film. MST3K did that one up right proper. Even now I can't see Peter Graves in anything without inserting as many, "...on 'Biography'!"s as possible.
Have you noticed that there's a council of goths running Warner Brothers?
That's because we're everywhere, duh.
John Woo and Chow Yun Fat
Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung Chiu Wai
Divine and John Waters.
Oooh, good one. And I think they did five or six movies.
Wong Kar Wai and Tony Leung Chiu Wai
I was just going to mention that pairing!
I saw 2046 the other night. Interesting movie, nowhere near as good as In the Mood for Love or Days of Being Wild, but really interesting all the same. I lost track of all the music cue, shot, and character moment call-backs to those earlier two films.
I just watched
Do the Right Thing,
and I really liked it. I loved the sense of community the film brought out and Sal's strong sense of commitment to the customers he'd fed for years. And for someone who was just recently crying out about wanting a strong narrative to anchor the story, I didn't mind the meandering, character-focused nature of the movie at all. The whole movie, you're waiting for something big to happen, and you can tell something's
brewing,
but Spike Lee doesn't make a big deal out of it, exactly. He doesn't crank up the foreboding music and ratchet up the tension in small increments. Because most of the tension isn't overt at all. For the most part, it seems like people are happy with how things are. But it just takes one spark to stir everyone up good.
I'm not entirely sure I understand why
Mookie was that spark, though. He liked Sal; he always defended him. He knew it wasn't his fault Radio Rahim was killed. Da Mayor, too, the one who told him to do the right thing, was firmly against any sort of violence. So it was strange that he, of all people, ended up causing the riot.
Saw
Sahara
at the $2 theater this afternoon. Great fun. As good or better than any of the James Bond movies, just as silly, and funnier, too.
