Category Archives: Movies

‘Blindness’, from novel to screenplay to film

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More than ten years after it was published, Jose Saramago‘s Nobel Prize-winning Blindness is about to hit the theaters (release is set for October 3rd by Miramax). In the story, people are suddenly stricken blind. Key words: epidemic, government, quarantine. I’m all for end-of-society stories, so I’m onboard for this flick. The book was first published in Portuguese (1995) and then English (1997) and won the Nobel Prize in 1998.

For more, check out the slick website put up by Miramax. Great open. For the journey to story took from novel to screenplay to screen, the LA Times has an interesting column that came out this week (Joe Penhall, who adapted McCarthy’s The Road, is quoted in the article). The film stars Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore (it also opened the 2008 Cannes Film Festival). You can read Guardian (UK) review of the film here. Peter Bradshaw gave the film 4 stars.

Remake the Rocky Horror Picture Show?

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Every great story gets retold by the next generation, right? Some even make it from stage to film, and back again. Well, my vote to redo 1975’s Rocky Horror Picture Show would probably be the same as my vote was on remaking Hitchcock’s Psycho.   No matter what the director, some movies are just too good to tinker with.  Still, MTV plans to revamp the cult classic. No word if they’ll allow popcorn or toast to be tossed about the theater.  For your viewing pleasure, here’s the original trailer:

Susan Sarandon is the only voice I’ve heard against the project. According to the NY Post, the original flick grossed $140 million since it hit the theaters.

Damn it.

“Fear Itself” debuts, a “The Last Winter” look

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I finally caught the debut of NBC’s Fear Itself. Between Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who and the horror flick The Last Winter, I hadn’t had the chance. Reviews were mixed on the Fear Itself premiere episode, written by the show’s creater Mick Garris. CBS’s Swingtown beat Fear Itself in the Nielsen Ratings, getting 5.23 million viewers (18-49 yr-olds) and a 2.0 rating/6 share to CBS’s 8.68 million, 2.8/8.

Writing good horror for the networks is always a tough go.  I would have liked to have seen the first episode breathe a bit more, but who knows what kind of hurtles the production team faced.  The main vampire was creepy, but I went back and forth with the sirens’ motivations.  But then again, it is network TV.  Until the networks open up… This week’s episode is Spooked, with Eric Roberts, directed by The Machinist‘s Brad Anderson.  It’s a bad-cop-in-haunted-house bit.

Meanwhile, the horror movie The Last Winter is a great isolation thriller. One of the tough, early hurdles a speculative fiction writer faces is suspension of disbelief. The Last Winter may actually suspend too well, and when director/writer Larry Fessenden finally shifts gears from global-warming-and-its-consequences straight into creepy town, it takes the viewer a moment to adjust to the idea the film is actually a supernatural horror flick.

While comparisons are there, The Last Winter is not Carpenter’s The Thing, thankfully Fessenden didn’t try. But it’s one of the best stabs I’ve seen in the horror genre at a very current fear–oil and global warming–and what the heck humans may be doing to the world.

Universal remaking “Death Race”

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I just love coming across news like this, especially after a family weekend when my groovy sister turns me on to a Tarantino movie like Death Proof with Kurt Russell. In the spirit of Grindhouse movies, Universal is remaking Death Race 2000. You may remember the 2K killer death count car race flick from 1975, complete with David Carradine and Sly Stallone? It was a Roger Corman production, where drivers scored points for taking out pedestrians.

You can check out more on Paul W.S. Anderson’s (AVP, Resident Evil) Death Race at Bloody-Disgusting.com. The horror website has interviews with Anderson, stars Jason Statham and Natalie Martinez as well as a visit to the set. Here’s the plot from imdb:

Ex-con Jensen Ames (Statham) is forced by the warden of a notorious prison (Allen) to compete in our post-industrial world’s most popular sport: a car race in which inmates must brutalize and kill one another on the road to victory.

In the spirit of ADHD, the movie brought back memories of W.C. Fields road rage scenes in the 1932 movie, If I Had A Million. One last note, don’t forget to set the DVR to record NBC’s Fear Itself, which debuts this Thursday at 10 p.m.

Guillermo & Gaiman to team up?

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Since I’m on a Guillermo del Toro run, here’s another for all you Marvel web slingers out there: Not only is Guillermo del Toro in the running to do The Hobbit, he’s also in line to create a Dr. Strange flick. Remember the Doc from Marvel comic books? Funky SOHO mansion, cool cape, Master of the Mystic Arts ala Steve Ditko? And the word on the street is del Toro wants Neil Gaiman to write the screenplay.

If you’ve read Gaiman’s The Sandman comic books or graphic novels, you’ll know why this would be a perfect fit. Groundbreaking stuff, back in DC’s early Vertigo days. And for all you purists out there — too bad, but del Toro says he won’t be using the cape. We’ll have to wait and see about Wong.