JUNKFILM

Remakes Remakes Remakes
What is it? I’ve bitched enough on this blog for the month about remakes, so I’ll just delve into the news of it.

With Hollywood taking a break from the 70s, they have found films in the 80s to exploit: Red Dawn, Clash of the Titans, Adventures in Babysitting, Robocop, A Nightmare of Elm Street, Friday the 13th, The Karate Kid, Weird Science, Arthur, Footloose, Flashdance and The Thing.

Fox has hired “Eagle Eye” scribe Daniel McDermott to pen the script for a “Romancing the Stone” remake. Oh no….Shuddering…

Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment are currently talking with John Carpenter to acquire the rights to remake “They Live.” While previous remakes of Carpenter’s works have been tremendous flops (”The Fog,” “Halloween” and “Assault on Precinct 13″ ) none of the had Roddy Piper and the infamous line: “I’ve come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.”

Back to Heroes
Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies creator, Bryan Fuller, is close to a 2 year deal with Universal Media Studios which would bring him back to the TV show Heroes on the writing staff. Fuller wrote for the first season, which would be why it was so damn good. Dead Like Me is fantastic. And this also explains why season 3 of Heroes sucks so horrendously.

Dark Horizons said, “Fuller, who is wrapping post-production on the final episodes of “Daisies’” 13-episode second-season order, would officially come on board “Heroes” starting with Episode 20.”

On a note about Dead Like Me
For a while now the movie has been up in the air. But it would seem last week a date has been set for the release of the straight-to-video “Dead Like Me: Life After Death,” and that date is 17 February 2009 as quoted on the IMDB site for the movie.

It seems everyone is coming back except for Rube and there is no mention of Kiffany. I have heard rumors that Rube (Mandy Patinkin) left the show over personal reasons and that might have been a major reason the show was canceled.

Leave a good thing alone
George Lucas was seen at the American Cinematheque’s 23rd annual award presentation honoring Samuel L. Jackson. He was interviewed and asked from good, informative questions. Much to my dismay, they were all answered:

Is he seriously looking at an Indy V? “We’re looking for a “MacGuffin,” which is an object that he goes after. They’re very hard to come by.”

Will Marion and Mutt be involved? “It really depends on what it is Indy goes looking for and then how the story falls out of that, and then how convenient or inconvenient to have the group there.”

Will we see “Star Wars” in 3D? “Oh yeah. The technology is very difficult. It exists - it’s just extremely expensive, and so what we’re trying to do is figure out a more practical way of pulling it off.”

And let’s end this bad boy off with some awesome news:
J. Michael Straczynski (scribe of She-Ra, The Real Ghost Busters, Jeremiah, (the upcoming) Silver Surfer, (the upcoming) Ninja Assassin) has told MTV News that the film adaptation of World War Z will be a global event rather than the zombie film cliche of a tight niche of people trapped, trying to survive.

Straczynski emphasizes, “The scale of what we’re doing here is phenomenal…it has that international feel to it” he says. One example? “You’re in India with hundreds of boats trying to get out of there with a tidal wave of zombies.” He says the film is “[just as] political as the book was.”

He finalized the script during the summer, but held off on fine tuning until a director was attached. Now that Marc Forster (”Quantum of Solace”) is attached to the film, notes have been given and Straczynski is fine tuning it now.

So what is the good news? We all knew World War Z was being made into a film. He’s doing what my friend John and I have been saying to do for over a year now. There is only one way to make this film correctly. If you’ve read the book, you know what we mean. If not, the entire book reads like a reporter is traveling around the world to interview people. It reads like a giant mass interview among tons of people, each separate. Straczynski says, “We follow this guy all over the world as he goes on these interviews, and he has his own personal story as well. You’re cutting between the past and the present, how he got to this point.”

He gets it. Now don’t fuck up the best book I have ever read.