Any words of wisdom for Kaitlyn Leeb, the actress who inherited your role, who already seems to be struggling with the same sort of fan interest?
Be nice to your fans and keep your legs crossed. Blouse open. But legs crossed.
—Lycia Naff, who played the original three-breasted prostitute in 1990’s Total Recall, gives advice to her successor in this year’s Total Recall remake. (With additional props to The Awl’s Tom Blunt for quickly scoring that interview.)
Footloose
Directed by Craig Brewer
Starring Kenny Womald, Julianne Hough, Dennis Quaid, Miles Teller
Rating: Not Available at time of Review
When I first heard almost two years ago that Paramount Pictures was going to produce a remake of the cult Kevin Bacon dance movie Footloose, that it wouldn’t have elaborate dance sequences, and that it would be an “edgier drama” than the original or the musical based off of it, I said that they were off their rocker:
Remember a little movie musical called West Side Story? You know, that one that’s based off of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and won 10 Academy Awards, including the one for Best Picture?
Well, that movie had racial discrimination, gang violence, death by knife, and a near-rape scene and yet also features some of the most elaborate and most demanding choreography ever seen on film, thanks to director Jerome Robbins and his cast of mostly Broadway veterans.
At the same time, however, I like to keep in mind that while yes, there really are very few original plots out there—and way too many tropes—as Multiplex creator Gordon McAlpin recently put it, a good movie is all in how it’s executed.
By the by, there will be plenty of spoilers for the plot of the original Footloose movie in this review; it’s been 27 years since it came out, for crying out loud. However, I will try like hell not to spoil exactly how the remake does things because I want you to be as pleasantly surprised as I was when I saw it.
Ren McCormack (Kenny Wormald) has moved from Boston, Massachusetts to the tiny town of Bomont, Tennessee (population: 19,200) to live with his aunt and uncle after his mother’s death. While attempting to fit in, McCormack learns that a series of strict laws have been put into place following the tragic death of five high school seniors just three years earlier. With the help of some friends, McCormack hopes to overturn the unjust laws so that everyone can feel free to dance.
Newcomer Wormald is enjoying his first major motion picture release as the lead after roles such as “Dancer” in films like You Got Served and even Clerks II and a run in the direct-to-DVD Center Stage: Turn it Up. Unfortunately, I can’t tell from the material whether or not he’s a good actor. Because director Craig Brewer and original screenplay writer Dean Pitchford stuck so close to the original story, I had a very difficult time seeing Wormald for his own abilities because I was too busy comparing him to Kevin Bacon’s performance. Sure, Wormald is a much better dancer, but Bacon definitely has him beat in the acting department.
Where Brewer and Pitchford moved away from the original is where I liked Wormald the most, but I suspect that it’s more due to the fact that they revealed more backstory and delved deeper into the themes of the original than it is to Wormald’s acting abilities. Perfect examples of this are the scenes between Ariel Moore (played by real-life dancer Julianne Hough) and her bad boy race car driver boyfriend Chuck Cranston (Patrick John Flueger) when she tries to break things off with him, and after that when she has her showdown with her preacher father, played by Dennis Quaid. Due to the added bit of backstory which fleshes out Rev. Moore’s motivation for helping push through the restrictive laws and some other scenes which showcase Ariel’s rebelliousness, Hough’s final outburst and emotional breakdown is so powerful that it’s difficult to watch (and not just because it may be triggering to some). By the end of the sequence, I wondered why no one had thought to shove this girl into some serious psychotherapy. It’s because Brewer decided to delve deeper into the themes of loss and grief and how they change a person that the story as a whole became stronger.
I also loved Miles Teller’s portrayal of Willard, Ren’s first friend in town. Teller infuses Willard with such glee and unabashed love for his town and all the people in it that you completely forget that he’s supposed to be a “stupid yokel” and are simply charmed by him. I had a feeling I’d seen Teller somewhere before, and was pleased to learn that he’d been in Rabbit Hole in a much more demanding role—playing opposite Nicole Kidman, of all people. I laughed the hardest during his scenes, and Teller definitely stole the focus from Wormald in every scene they had together. Another bit I noticed and loved was that it was the owner of the drive-in theater and the owner of the cotton gin who wanted to keep rock and dance music alive in the town, a nod to how African-Americans have always tried to keep their music alive when it’s being repressed; this is apparently a common theme in Brewer’s work, as seen in his breakout film Hustle & Flow.
However, in attempting to give Ren more of a backstory, they inadvertently made him “bulletproof”—that is, after two certain scenes, one between Ren’s uncle Wes (Ray McKinnon) and the reverend, and another shortly after between Ren and the school principal (Brett Rice), there is no way that Ren can do anything wrong because thinking so will make you out to be a Bad Person. This turns Ren into a Gary Stu, and while those scenes were emotionally satisfying for the smackdown within, like a Twinkie, you start to realize that the scenes were hollow and full of fluff. As such, the final brawl between Chuck’s crew and Ren and his friends becomes rather anti-climactic, even if Ariel and Rusty do manage to earn their Badass Female Fighter merit badges during it.
“But what about the dancing?” you may ask. “Tell me about the dancing!” For every point that Brewer and Paramount Pictures earned for casting real live dancers as their leads, five points should be taken away for shooting the group dance scenes so haphazardly that you can’t even see their movements. More telling, the storyboarding keeps the camera focused on above-the-torso shots. It’s not like people who are going to see Footloose are going to be turned off by longer and more elaborate dance sequences.
Just as the first flawed Harry Potter movie for me resulted in my making a mental checklist of which scenes made it into the adaptation, which did not, and what things got added rather than fully enjoying the story, so went my viewing of the new Footloose. That is not to say that I didn’t like it. It’s just that one can only have so many Twinkies.
Warning: Common side effects of seeing Footloose, which will go into wide release on October 14, is that you will have the song by Kenny Loggins stuck in your head for days. Everybody cut—!
Arthur
Directed by Jason Winer
Starring Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner
Rating: Rated PG-13 for alcohol use throughout, sexual content, language and some drug references
For someone who started her blogging career on a movie site, there are quite a few gaps in my mental movie database.
Take almost any movie from the early 1980s, for example. As a kid, we didn’t have a lot of extra money to spend on such things, and besides, would you really expect conservative parents to okay a movie night that didn’t include a Disney film? As a result, I never saw the original Arthur with British actor Dudley Moore and could go into the screening of the remake starring Russell Brand without any preconceptions. [Editor’s note: Massive spoilers, ahoy!]
The story, by now, is somewhat familiar: In order to keep the family’s considerable charitable trust from losing investors, man-child playboy Arthur Bach (Russell Brand) is told by his widowed mother that if he wants to continue to have access to the vast fortune left to him, he must marry nouveau riche heiress Susan Johnson (Jennifer Garner). Meanwhile, Bach meets an unlicensed tour operator from Queens named Naomi (Greta Gerwig) who ends up being able to see past his boorish behavior, and the two fall in love. Bach doesn’t want to give up the money because it’s all he has known and it fuels his every whim. He also doesn’t want to marry someone he doesn’t care about and who frankly scares the crap out of him with her domineering ways. What is an eligible young Manhattan scion to do?
Even without knowing anything about the original, or that they made a sequel to it where Moore’s character is married to Liza Minelli’s waitress from Queens, you know that any romantic comedy is going to end with Arthur hooked up with Naomi and not Susan. It’s how the film gets there is what I’m examining in this review.
Immediately after the lovely and whimsical closing credits finished rolling, I knew I liked most of what I’d seen. Brand was charming, there were some fantastic lines of dialogue that got some great laughs in the screening audience I saw it with, and Helen Mirren as Brand’s nanny Hobson stole almost every scene that she was in.
It’s when I got home and started to think about exactly what I was confused about during the last climactic scene in the church that the whole movie fell apart. Early in the movie, we first see Jennifer Garner’s Susan standing next to Vivienne Bach (Geraldine James) at the charity dinner that Arthur misses because he’s too busy getting arrested by the cops for driving the Batmobile (Tim Burton era) into the bronze bull located near Wall Street. That’s where they first hatch the scheme to have Arthur marry her because she would provide a stabilizing influence for him and with her at the helm of the next generation of the trust, the investors would return.
The next time we see Susan, she is striding out of Vivienne’s office wearing an impeccable business suit, and laying down some expository background information which reveals that she and Arthur dated once, and then after a few months of sex, he never called her again. Shortly afterwards, as Vivienne goes over the plan with Arthur, we see magazine covers showing what an awesome woman Susan is for her equestrian accomplishments and charitable work with Habitats for Humanity.
Is it any wonder, then, that I thought that Susan was an executive with the firm who bent the rules once and dated her boss’ son? And that one of the reasons why she agreed to the plan in the first place was so that she could take control of it in a way that she never would be able to on her own? And that control and the fact that it would be a marriage of convenience is something that Susan and Vivienne already discussed?
Therefore, at the end of the movie where when Arthur calls off the wedding, Susan goes on her tirade, and Vivienne stands up for his decision, I had no earthly idea why Vivienne would have heaped so much scorn on Susan for saying her piece or why she would have suddenly decided that it would be better for Arthur to marry for love and not to keep his money. Even during the earlier scene where Hobson goes to intercede on his behalf, we never get any indication that Vivienne is starting to understand her own son or that she has never thought Susan’s intentions were anything but romantic; as such, her sudden change of heart at the wedding makes no sense whatsoever.
Otherwise, this was the perfect movie for Russell Brand to add to his filmography. Knowing now about how they chose to take this movie, he was the only person I could think of who could do this role justice. Perhaps, it’s because he is a media bad boy and is such a larger than life figure that it would be impossible to see someone else in this role. If I were his manager, though, I’d worry about him being typecast, unless that’s all he wants out of his career… and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Greta Gerwig as Naomi is cute and serviceable, but the problems I have with how they handled her character overshadow too much her actual performance. The choice of Naomi’s day job is just a little too improbable for a New Yorker, and that’s what tumbled my suspension of disbelief regarding her character. Granted, the film explains that her father receives a pension and that’s what’s helping pay for the apartment they share in Queens, but even outside of New York City, most struggling children’s book authors I know of have a spouse with a day job or have a separate steady day job themselves. Also–and this is a huge publishing nitpick on my part–most children’s book publishers prefer to hire illustrators separately from writers; this is something Naomi would have known if she’d cared to do a bit of research. (Also, the fact that Susan knew that the Bach corporation acquired the publishing firm who bought Naomi’s book? Is more ammunition for the “Susan is a Bach executive” argument.)
Despite my misunderstanding of Susan’s actual motivation, I still think Jennifer Garner made an excellent antagonist, even if she was only one by default. You could tell that’s the role they intended for her to play when she made a most unwelcome crack at Hobson which seemingly came out of the blue. She has a long way to go before she gets to the level of Bette Davis scene-chomping, but she was definitely a force to reckon with during her scenes.
Equally as forceful and deserving of her top billing was Helen Mirren in the role that fellow compatriot John Gielgud had in the original as Arthur’s most trusted companion, and Hobson’s gender swap is the most interesting innovation that director Jason Winer and screenwriter Peter Baynham brought to the remake. By choosing to emphasize Hobson’s role as Arthur’s “true” mother and contrast her way of taking care of him to Vivienne’s, it brought an interesting spice to all of their interactions. However, you never felt that Mirren was putting on a man’s trousers to play this role; it was hers from beginning to end.
Ultimately, it’s a real darn shame that these actors and others who performed well–including Nick Nolte as Susan’s father, Luis Guzman as Arthur’s valet Bitterman, and John Hodgman’s cameo as a cashier in Dylan’s Candy Bar–were stuck in such a dismal remake. As my former editor once said, remakes can be done well if they bring something new to the adaptation. All this brought to the table was an expired can of spotted dick.
Arthur is out in wide release now, but honestly, you’re probably better off watching the original which is currently streaming on Netflix.
If today you feel a wave of “WTF?” wash over you, check your nearest “Supernatural” fangirl for the source.
For according to Anime News Network and Cinema Today, Warner Bros. and acclaimed anime studio Madhouse are teaming up to turn the hit show about brothers who fight against the dark forces of the world into an animated series.
From the ANN article (because I can’t read Japanese):
The anime project will not only remake the best episodes from the live-action version, but also depict original episodes not seen in the live-action version. Those original episodes will include prologues of the Winchester brothers’ childhood, anime-only enemies, and episodes featuring secondary characters from the live-action version.
The project will be co-directed by Shigeyuki Miya and Atsuko Ishizuka (“Aoi Bungaku Series”), and there’s no word yet on which Japanese seiyuu (aka voice actors) they’ll get for the project.
Warner Home Video Japan will be releasing the 22 episodes on Blu-Ray and DVD in Japan over three volumes starting on January 12, 2011; no work on if there will also be an English-language release.
We here at GeekingOutAbout.com are not at the 2010 Festival de Cannes but that’s not going to stop us from bringing you the news about which films are being picked up for international distribution and which films to keep your eye on:
The festival ends on May 23.
Though I am quick to enjoy a good “nerd rage” on the idea of yet another remake or readaptation being announced, I do have to say that the news that there will be a remake of the Patrick Swayze/Demi Moore 1990s hit Ghost is making me just a little bit giddy–because it’s going to be in Japanese.
From Cinema Today.jp and Nippon Cinema.com—and our friends at Japanator.com—comes the news that Paramount Pictures Japan and Shochiku have handed over the reins of the Japanese remake to live-action drama director Taro Otani (“Gokusen”), and it sounds like they’re fast-tracking it, too with shooting to begin this June with a release in the fall. Taking on the Swayze role will be Korean actor Song Seung Hun while Japanese actress Nanako Matsushima will be stepping into Moore’s shoes.
No word on whether or not producer Takashige Ichise (The Grudge) will be getting an Okinawan-style comedian to play the Whoopi Goldberg role.