It’s bad enough Hollywood remade Planet of the Apes. And The Omen. And what they did to Bad News Bears they should never, ever, ever be forgiven for.
The Mechanic remake? Why? Walking Tall? Again, why?
And now this, which, frankly, may just be the worst insult of all…
Or, well, the second worse.
By the way: they already re-made Point Break. Only they called it The Fast and the Furious the second time.
Going with their progressive strength, unoriginality.
That’s just embarrassing. The original is great, but it’s still a high end guilty pleasure more than it is a cinematic masterpiece of some degree. Really impossible to recreate, let alone improve upon something like that. But if Hollywood wants to keep pissing their money away, I can’t say that I care altogether much.
Remake Dirty Dancing?! Has someone drilled a hole in the head of every screenplay writer in Hollywood and let all the original ideas drain out?
Oh. #3 was referring to Point Break. I don’t know if I’ve ever even watched Dirty Dancing all the way through. Or maybe I’m thinking of Footloose. Or maybe I’m thinking of both. Dancing movies and me, not so much.
Exactly, Abe – why in the name of God would you remake a dance movie?
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The zero-point where the imminent cultural irrelevance of Hollywood became obvious, which may or may not coincidentally have dovetailed with the point where they went all-in on the progressive agenda, was 2002. Hollywood re-made Point Break with girls, as Blue Crush. Only this time, instead of the POV of the individual/outsider kept out by the tribe, the surfing-sewing-clique is pressuring their own to reject the outsider.
I forgot about the Straw Dogs remake.
Blocked it out. Again, why? If you change the plot and are trying to make a different point, why not just make a different movie?
BTW, Hollywood’s father of over-exposed shakey-cam cheese Tony Scott is re-making The Wild Bunch.
They are attempting to harness the cult following of “Point Break,” and they will fail. “Dirty Dancing” will fail, too. After that they can try for “Road House.”
Either way, those doing the remakes are ignoring the Swayze factor. The fact that he was in these movies matters to the people who like them.
And Red Dawn. Makes me wonder if there isn’t a Road House remake idea floating around out there, too.
Zombie:
Jesus, BuddyPC.
I’d heard they were remaking Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, with Benecio del Toro in the Warren Oates role. I hope that died on the vine.
What is this, rip off Peckinpah year.
Geoff —
I thought the same thing but the new Killer Elite is different from Peckinpah’s.
Well it wasn’t one of his best anyways, but “The Wild Bunch” should not be remade.
Alright, I’ll be the bad guy- I actually liked Statham’s The Mechanic a lot more than the original. That said, the parties responsible for the blasphemy that is the new Red Dawn should be drug out in the street and shot. I mean, its my generation’s Citizen Kane for Heaven’s sake.
If you change the plot and are trying to make a different point, why not just make a different movie?
Maybe the suits won’t make with the cash unless they’re pitched a “sure winner,” which means the movie already made big bank in a previous incarnation.
Original idea, you say?
Untested idea, they say, and the light for your project stays red forevermore.
the new Footloose has the look and feel of a movie made for ABC Family I think
but at least it doesn’t have action superstar Taylor Lautner in it
why in the name of God would you remake a dance movie?
As rhetorical questions go, I’m fond of “Why would you make a film of a Broadway play of a film about a Broadway play?” (i.e., The Producers)
The original film, classic. Probably the best thing Brooks ever did. All subsequent iterations of it are redundant.
The new Mechanic wasn’t bad — although it cops out at the end, naturally.
But it wasn’t necessary, and no, you can’t replace Jan Michael Vincent and Charles Bronson. Can’t be done.
I heard they were going to remake Tombstone, and they were looking at Andrew Sullivan to play Wyatt Earp, and Glen Greenwald to play Doc Holliday.
Wasn’t Mark Schlereth in the Red Dawn remake?
I’m going to have to find him and piss in his Stinkin’ Good Green Chile.
You sure that wasn’t a Peter Greenaway movie JD?
Better Off Dead, starring Will Ferrell.
I want to see Convoy remade. With the same exact cast, save those who are now tits up.
In the remake, though, I want them to be driving a bullet train — and their nemesis is a small town TEA Party sheriff and his racist extremist cronies.
Up next: the remake of “Hot Fuzz”.
Should that happen, the world will have to end. That movie would be so self-referential, we’d all have to disappear up our own backsides, leaving behind (as it were) a black hole (as it were) to rival the one at the center of our galaxy (as it is)(as it were).
(BTW, “Hot Fuzz” is the greatest cop movie of all time. Just sayin’)
here’s another remake starring “white roofs” chu
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@27: Dude! The preferred nomenclature is “Tango Uniform” Americans.
Well, at the University of Wisconsin, anyway, where they’re preferred to “High-reflectivity” Americans, and “Slopehead” Americans.
i wanna see a remake of duel with a baracky looking dennis weaver being pursued by a tractor trailer with a gadsen flag
@29: “White” roofs?
Don’t you mean “Genocidal European-Amerian The Man Hating on the Brothers” roofs?
Oh. Right. You might have a hard time selling *those*.
@28: Hey, cracka-lacka, wouldn’t that be an “African-American” hole?
Which, see how that self-referential thing works?
The universe may end, TONIGHT!!!!
The Mojave Solar Project is a solar-thermal design. Those actually work pretty well, as long as you have good sunlight, and in Southern CA you usually do have good sunlight. It still costs more than coal, of course, and won’t work at night, but peak use is during the day, especially during the summer.
This is not another instance of solar panels, which are only reasonable when you don’t have the infrastructure to carry power.
In other words, considering that CA refuses to build any new nukes or coal plants, it’s not a bad idea. However, until we figure out good ways to efficiently store large amounts of energy, solar power can only be an addition to the grid, not a primary.
Hollywood delenda est.
Right now I pay about $1200 / year for electricity.
A rooftop solar panel grid costing about $20,000 (tax impacts worth about $12,000) would allow me to replace half my GA Power dependency with solar power.
So, $600 per year (assuming perfection elsewhere) of savings, implying payoff on 14 to 15 years.
In 14 or 15 years, we may have our own personal spacecraft transporting bits of solar plasma to meet our needs.
Solar power is too long-term an investment for me. Better a home generator powered off propane: I’m happy enough with GA Power, except for the once every five-years=or-so ice storms. I can get a house-wide UPS for about $5k.
Duel is a fantastic movie. Fantastic and underrated.
Trivia: the sound of the truck going off the bluff is the same sound used for the exploding shark in Jaws.
Oh. Double spoilers. BEWARE!
They were going to remake Cross of Iron and set it in Iraq with the James Mason role rewritten as General Petraeus, but then the bastid went and won on them…
Abe & LtC,
Here you go…
And I’m still mad I’ve never been to one of these: Point Break Live!
Have to find some place with a good stash of Soviet tanks since Yugoslavia isn’t around. Maybe in the Middle East somewhere then the Germans could be Israelis and the Soviets the Arabs. Now if there was just a war that the Arabs won.
BTW one of my favorite scenes is the tractor factory fight with the opening where they take out the mortar second.
Solar thermal uses mirrors focusing the sunlight onto a large water container, which heats the water to make steam, which drives a turbine. It takes a lot of mirrors to make it work, and computer control to keep them focused. I imagine you could also use a curved mirror focusing on a pipe, which might be what they are doing in the Mojave Project (think of a section of a long tube running lengthwise, more than half the tube cut away, reflective on the interior, and a thin pipe running in the same direction, right at the focal point of light hitting the curved surface).
Solar panels, which directly convert the photons to electricity, are only cost-effective when you have no other source of power, and their efficiency is pretty low since they only use the sunlight that falls on them. I wouldn’t bother putting them on a roof, since they require regular cleaning and would be easily damaged. I would buy a backup generator first to keep the essentials (refrigerator and air conditioning, depending) working.
Drudge has a link up to OFA’s crowd-sourced attack machine. From now on when denouncing yourself, please fill out the appropriate form. No self-denunciations will be considered to have fulfilled the statutory language of a correct self-denunciation unless signed and dated and accompanied by a letter from your precinct caption explaining your future volunteer status with OFA.
This is going to be such a fun election season.
“LTC John posted on9/13 @ 4:11 pm
Remake Dirty Dancing?! Has someone drilled a hole in the head of every screenplay writer in Hollywood and let all the original ideas drain out?”
The answer is “Yes”.
Insty:
“If you see anything, report it fast and furiously!”
LOL… ouch!
29. newrouter posted on 9/13 @ 6:32 pm
here’s another remake starring “white roofs” chu
Energy Department expects solar energy project to create 900 jobs
September 13, 2011 | 2:46 pm
The U.S. Energy Department hopes that a new solar energy project will result in about 900 construction and permanent operations jobs.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu said today that his department had finalized a $1.2-billion loan guarantee to Mojave Solar for the development of the Mojave Solar Project. When complete, the 250-megawatt solar generation project in San Bernardino County will increase the nation’s currently installed concentrating solar power capacity by approximately 50%.
“…after Solyndra we’ll make another debacle and another debacle!” You see, this is my life…”
Hmm. Perhaps there is something to the idea of updating classics.
Better Off Dead, starring Will Ferrell.
Jaysus, JD, I only got that far in the comments and jumped down here to condemn you for polluting my brain
You might as well say “Breakfast Club” with Tina Fey
Remake Dirty Dancing?! Has someone drilled a hole in the head of every screenplay writer in Hollywood and let all the original ideas drain out?”
Not all … I have a very good friend who is a screenwriter … and after what the studios sometimes put him through, many of those holes are NOT self-inflicted.
I think Better Off Dead and Will Ferrell are a perfect fit. But I’m a h8r.
I have not yet seen a Will Ferrell movie.
Gone with the Wind with Lindsay Lohan and Will Smith as Scarlet and Rhett.
Would be fucking huge, I’m telling youj.
Great idea, B. Moe! All we need to add is a giant robot spider!!!!
What next, an Endless Summer remake with Matt and Ben? They could replace the goofy dialog with earnest remarks about the poverty in all the countries they visit.
Speaking of surfing movies, I really enjoyed Soul Surfer, the true story of the surfer gal who got her arm chomped off by a shark and turned pro anyway. The movie is quite sentimental, even sappy, and yes, entirely predictable–all of which was fine with me. Excellent performances by Helen Hunt and Dennis Quaid as the parents help a lot, as does the tight editing.
Here’s something that jolted me: The most radical thing in the movie was not the chomped-off arm–which they do show missing for the second half of the movie so you will get the point about what she accomplished. No, the killer shark thing is pretty ho-hum in 21st century America. What’s really, really unusual about Soul Surfer is that the lead character and her entire family and circle of friends are portrayed as–gasp–happy, healthy Christians. They have a church right on the beach where they pray and sing–no predators, crazed killers, or church leaders with evil plans. SO RADICAL!
Hey, they’ve remade Footloose, so it’s definitely the end of the world as we know it.
With Dennis Quaid in John Lithgow’s original role, what could possibly suck about it?
On the upside, there’s another degree of Kevin Bacon now available.
Then there’s the remake of The Killer Elite.
Next year I’m betting they redo The Eiger Sanction and Mr Majestyk
For 2013, they’re reviving the TV series Blossom, with Mayim Bialik as Joey Russo and Jenna Van Öy in an encore of her original role.
Speaking of bad remakes, I hear the new Conan bit like the poisoned fangs of Set.
If you’re going to remake Conan, the only person to play Thulsa Doom would be Samuel L. Jackson.
“Contemplate this on the Tree Of Woe. Crucify this muthafucka!”
Point Break remake gossip: Taylor Lautner as Johnny Idaho, and the embalmed corpse of Patrick Swayze as Johnny’s skateboard.
Some liberties were taken with the plot, apparently.
Easy Rider, starring Ben Affleck and Alec Baldwin.
You absolutely rocked that one, JD.
I do what I can.
You know what would be a cool remake? Somebody should remake The Warriors, setting it in the Middle East so as to serve as an allegory about misguided and foolhardy foreign adventurism. But setting it in the present day is too heavy-handed, and besides anti-war movies haven’t done good box office. So what we do, is we set it in Antiquity, use Greeks and Persians instead of Americans and Iraqis in the place of the original’s street gangs.
Anchorman is worth a watch, cranky.
I suppose one nice thing about bad remakes is that they inform ignoramuses like myself that the original exists.
I kind of liked Stranger Than Fiction. Also, I have seen and liked Elf, but only because I have young children. I started watching Step Brothers once but turned it off and erased it from my DVR after maybe 15 minutes. Just not funny.
Anchorman and Talladega Nights cracked me up. I am not ashamed to admit that.
For a Will Ferrell movie, does Megamind count? ‘Cause I figure if I don’t have to look at his double-digit-IQ face, it shouldn’t count.
And the irony of Will Ferrell voicing an evil genius is so ironic.
And I am not ashamed to note that Old School was hysterical.
He cracked me up in Zoolander.
I’m holding out for Eddie and the Cruisers, with Michael Cera as Eddie.