From Star Trek to Get Smart; from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Friday the 13th; from planned remakes of everything from The Karate Kid to Arthur to Romancing the Stone to A Nightmare on Elm Street, this past year has seen the completion or the launching of movie remakes at previously unimagined levels. [...]

Hollywood has reacted quickly to the worldwide blockbuster weekend success of Get Smart with a huge announcement that Sony has secured the remake rights to classic TV skein Happy Days. John Davis of Davis Entertainment (Daddy Day Camp, Norbit, Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, Fat Albert) will produce for Sony who will distrib after [...]

This bit of remake hysteria will make my dad spin in his grave, and he’s not even dead yet. Some day, far into the future, when my dear old pop has been laid peacefully to rest, he’ll start spinning, retroactively, simply from the absolute wrong-headedness of it. All because Cinematical and a host of others [...]

Please join me in welcoming to the Institute for Mind-Bludgeoningly Obvious Movie Marketing the actress Anne Hathaway as our guest lecturer today!
Polite applause.
Of course, Ms. Hathaway has really come into her own in the last six years, having parlayed astounding success in saccharine family movies into a rather studied and measured public persona of absolutely [...]

Variety is reporting that Queen Latifah will headline a New Line remake of the 1984 comedy All of Me in which a wealthy but cold heiress is brought back from the dead to live for a while inside the body of her lawyer. Steve Martin and Lilly Tomlin starred in the original, but if you [...]

Let’s recap: several days ago Kurt Russell, when asked his opinion of the Escape from New York remake that had been announced, reacted with anger, profanity and more than a little bit of Macho Actor Ego Bravado. And now, just a day or so later, Russell seems to have been reined back from the angry [...]

See, here’s the thing: if Hollywood insists on creating unwarranted and needless remakes, I reserve the right to mock them unfairly and in a completely biased way.
A movie still from one of the greatest thrillers ever made: The Hitcher, 1986
At left: Creepy. Unhinged. Confident.
At right: Terrified. Desperate. Miserable.
Overall image: Unsettling. Moody.
And now, from next year’s [...]