I've been thinking lately that if the best way to avoid more remakes is to push for something more "original", maybe it's time to look into some unadapted fiction that's just begging to be translated to the big screen.
There's a lot of Philip K. Dick fiction that went wrong (mostly short stories), and a handful that went right (Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, the debatable Total Recall), and a whole lot that would never work as movies. However, I think that there's a cracking good movie to be made from The Man in the High Castle.
If you've never read the book, Dick posits an alternate world where the Axis powers win World War II, and America is split in half: the West Coast is controlled by Japan, the East Coast by Germany, and the middle is a sort-of No Man's Land. In this world, a mysterious author somewhere in the occupied U.S. writes a book about a world where the Allies win the war, and he's considered enemy number one by the Nazis.
The Man in the High Castle does juggle several characters, but is easily the most straightforward novel by Dick, possibly even more than Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. If the film was taken very seriously, made not as a "what-if" sci-fi film but as a wartime drama with a cast that didn't wink at the camera, Man in the High Castle could be a great adaptation with little or none of the alterations that normally mark PKD books-turned-movies.
But what do I know? I mean, I think The Secret History could be a great movie too, if handled by someone like Ang Lee. Unfortunately, people don't know the names of those books. They do know Bad Boys, The Fantastic Four, and Predator. Name brand recognition wins, even if there's a lot of excellent material waiting in the background.
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One Mike Judge creation shills for another:
You know what? Even though it's shameless self promotion, I'm going to give it a pass because it brought back Beavis and Butthead. If I'm not mistaken, that may be the same basic animation from the MTV Music Awards, but any return of B&B is okay by me.
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Vote, you swine! Also, leave me your comment about what to drop so we can move this voting into interesting territory!
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