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Thursday, February 07, 2008



I mourn...I weep


What could affect me so?

THIS.

Perfect is not good enough. No. Whollyodd has to make it better .

The Day the Earth Stood Still is perhaps the finest of the Cold War SF thrillers. Michael Rennie as Klaatu plays a dispassionate messenger with Hard News for Planet Earth. Now we have Keanu as Klaatu, likely performing to win an Aspy rather than an Oscar.

Whollyodd's addiction to remaking is painful to watch, especially as the remakes are normally dim comparisons to the originals, sprinkled with the occasional breast and the odd coprology. (Perhaps heaped rather than sprinkled.) Of course CGI special effects will abound, making the movie even MORE betterer than the 1951 classic.

In the Robert Wise film, during the creepy initial opening of the saucer, the door and ramp appearing from a seamless surface was accomplished in a lo-tech manner, and well. The entire saucer was covered in a rubberized coating, which split along the opening of the doorway. Beautiful effect, done (comparatively) on the cheap. No CG will equal that. Maybe light beams will emanate along the seam as it opens. Oooooooooh....

I really LIKE SFX work, CG or otherwise, when done effectively and well. The Remastered StarTrek TOS is a case in point.Some of the updated FX are useful and well done. The CG planet seen from orbit scenes are generally an improvement. SOME of the ship updates are pretty neat...the NCC-1701 is less wooden, but seems overdone. The best ship work I've noted is the Botany Bay from the "Space Seed" episode. Very detailed, and it looks like a ship adrift in three-dimensional space. I have seen some real crummy work, too, but no concrete examples spring to mind, so overall the Trek upgrade is favorable. But did it need to be done? "Because we can" may not be the best reason to remake something that was excellent, or even just good, to begin with.

Perish forbid that anyone in Whollyodd do an original story. We're on the third remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers , now. I still can't eat capers.

5 comments:

Rigel Kent said...

Keanu Reeves? That's'excellent' man. Don't be bogus Aardvark.

MacLaren said...

What the freaking heck?

Why would they REMAKE THIS FILM?

It's like REMAKING PSYCHO!

Wait - they did that too.

Damn Hollywood!

The Aardvark said...

It already is.

Anonymous said...

But then you've got the good remakes, like the '95 rendition of Sahara, with Jim Belushi instead of Bogey. (Man, the first version was BAD.)

Anonymous said...

The reason they keep remaking the old films is simple. The producers & directors & writers all learned from the same professors that learned along side the greats of yesterday - Lucas, Speilberg, Carpenter, or Howard.

Everyone is so "into" post-modernism that they really believe that "there are no new ideas." Everything has already been done before. They have no original ideas because they don't believe that any new ideas exist.

This "art theory" was when I lost my fascination with "establishment" art. I almost didn't make it out of art school with my brain intact.