- Well, if somebody was going to remake Oldboy - and that's an inevitability given the quality of the film and the hesitancy of Americans to watch films with subtitles - I, for one, am glad to hear that Spike Lee is the man behind the camera. Not to speak ill of Steven Spielberg, but the only movie he's been involved with in the last twenty years even close to the grittiness of Oldboy was Munich, and I have no idea how he would have handled the, ahem, twists and turns of the film.
Spike Lee, on the other hand, is going to bring something to an American version of Oldboy that is going to be fresh and unexpected. That's one of the things I love about Spike Lee films, which are criminally under-represented here in the Blogorium. I'll have to fix that. In the hands of anyone else, a movie like Inside Man could be just another generic heist / cops and robbers film, but Lee infuses it with personality, keeps the stakes up, makes the film interesting. And that's arguably as "mainstream" or "slick" as a Spike Lee Joint ever got. I'm actually very excited to see what he does with the material, and in the meanwhile Park Chan-Wook's first English language film is also on its way. Next year could be very intriguing indeed.
- Speaking of remakes, I really don't understand this next one. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is a genuinely compelling documentary about a subject you'd never think would be worth spending 90 minutes with - the high score of Donkey Kong. Watch it on Netflix right now - it's available for instant viewing. I'll wait right here.
See? I was surprised too, and I went into it with more than a passing interest in arcade games. The director of the film, Seth Gordon, who is out promoting his new film Horrible Bosses, mentioned to Playlist that New Line is planning on remaking The King of Kong, but as a mockumentary, ala The Office or Christopher Guest's films.
This doesn't make sense at all; if you're going into The King of Kong looking to laugh at the awkwardness of two guys jockeying for the position of "all time high score in Donkey Kong," it's not like you won't find that in the movie itself. There's no need to remake the film in order to further mock Donkey Kong enthusiasts, and it overlooks what The King of Kong does so well in the first place: it takes Billy Mitchell (the champion) and Steve Wiebe (the challenger) and over the course of the film creates a "David vs. Goliath" struggle over something as trivial as an arcade game. And you're swept up in it, because it's important to them and Gordon conveys that clearly.
If you make it a mockumentary, then Billy Mitchell might as well be played like Ben Stiller in Dodgeball. And that's probably how they're going to approach it. But why? Is New Line convinced that if they put out a movie that people can easily find, but sell the same premise as a "look at these losers" comedy instead of a documentary, that this is somehow preferable? That it's somehow going to bring out people who didn't see The King of Kong in the first place?
- This is probably the most trivial thing I've never understood about geekdom, but I left it off of Saturday's piece because it isn't just geeks that do this. When the time comes for the newest sequel or entry into a franchise (Harry Potter, Twilight, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Bourne films), people come flooding into used stores looking for the other films. Now, I understand this - it makes sense to want to re-watch the last chapter before jumping in. If that were strictly the case, I could totally overlook how silly it is to wait until the week before the movie comes out to come rushing in (when we are invariably sold out because people who have the foresight to plan ahead have beaten them to the punch). But that's actually less of the case than one would think.
I worked at a used book store from 2006-2009, and when, let's say, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince came out, people came rushing in not only for copies of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but for ALL five movies that preceded Half Blood Prince. Because they wanted to start the series (for themselves or with their kids) three days before the next film opened. The books, I totally understood, because you have plenty of time to sit down with them, so when The Deathly Hallows arrived (the only book our store ever ordered new), it made sense we'd run out of previous chapters. Trying to cram the first five Potter movies into three days in order to not feel "left out" of the pop culture phenomenon of this weekend is asinine. Getting angry because you lack the sense to consider finding these movies when they were readily available and not waiting until everyone else on Earth is also looking for them is not my fault. People would freak out at us because we were sold out, as was every big box retail store, all because they waited and waited and waited and now it's too late.
The same thing happened with The Bourne Ultimatum, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Spider-Man 3, Ocean's Thirteen, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Dark Knight, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and perhaps the greatest exercise in futility with a week to go - The X-Files: I Want to Believe. No, really; someone tried to find every season of The X-Files in order to "catch up" in time for the movie.
I haven't ever understood this mentality and I can't imagine I ever will. It's true that the Cap'n has been known to wait to close to the last minute to finish projects, but when it comes to getting "caught up," especially in pop culture, if I don't have the time to do it or haven't planned ahead to do so, I'm not going to try to cram it in at the last second to be a part of the herd in theatres. I can wait, which is admittedly a rarity in this instance, but it beats the aggravation of knowing I waited too long.
- I'm not sure when the world became so sick of pre-movie trailers on DVD and Blu-Ray. That includes me, by the way; when I see anything other than the menu for the movie I want to watch come up, the Cap'n instinctively hits the "skip" button, and grouses when the disc is encoded to prevent skipping. I can't remember the last time I watched the previews before a DVD or BD. I attribute this to two main causes: 1) most of the time people watching a disc at home are watching a movie they've seen before, or are at least keen on getting to before the distractions kick in, and 2) many of the trailers are for movies we've already seen advertised dozens of time, or are for movies that have been out almost as long as the disc we're watching.
Universal tried to do something novel and prompts online streaming of new trailers before your film (and the dozens of legal mumbo jumbo) begins, but I usually skip that too. I want to watch the movie, and even the novelty of Anchor Bay's trailer programming - which focuses on catalog titles that someone might enjoy if they like this movie - is seen as an impediment.
I bring this up because it's something very different (at least for me) when it comes to VHS. While fast-forwarding through the trailers is something I'll sometimes consider doing, the trailers in front of movies I've looked at recently on video have been more like an archeological expedition, full of fun discoveries, than a nuisance. A tape I was looking at for a film called Drive-In Massacre begins with a trailer for Another State of Mind, a punk documentary along the lines of The Decline of Western Civilization. I didn't know Another State of Mind existed, so it was a pleasant discovery and now I have another movie to look into. That a punk doc appeared before a schlock-o-rama horror movie is one of the charms of VHS that didn't seem to carry over into the digital realm. However, it's not the "retro" quality that drives this cognitive dissonance; after all, I own several DVDs that are nothing BUT trailers. I just can't quite decide why so many of us are impatient with the oldest form of exposing ourselves to other movies.
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