Stupid remakes #347
Hollywood and Nicolas Cage set to burn Wicker Man
Here’s another Scottish based movie that’s about to get the Hollywood treatment and be totally ruined I’m sure. Not only are they throwing a big name actor who has had a run of bad luck of late at it, but they’re also boxing it up and shipping it over to the States. Grrr! Hackles are up. I’m building a wicker DVD player to buy this, put it in and burn it.
Nicolas Cage’s next picture will be director Neil LaBute’s remake of 1973 thriller The Wicker Man, with Millennium Films, Equity Pictures and Emmett/Furla Films producing, reports Variety.
LaBute adapted the screenplay, in which a sheriff investigates the disappearance of a young girl on a remote island off the coast of Maine. His hopes of unraveling the girl’s disappearance become increasingly uncertain when he discovers evidence of pagan rituals.
The fact that anyone wants to remake The Wicker Man is bad enough, but relocating it to Maine - or anywhere in the US - is ridiculous. How do these people expect to pass off the idea of a pagan society that has survived under a veneer of Christianity when none of the population has any pagan roots to start with?
Moronic is not too strong a word for this film.
Sunday 06 Mar 2005 | Paul | The Pit
Well, we have really scraped the bottom of the barrel here. A remake of an already classic film.
Hollywood really has hit rock bottom and this derisory offering only serves to highlight the deperation that the studios find themselves in, why do they not go the whole hog and remake Citizen Kane or the Magnificent Ambersons and be done with it.
And, sorry, who exactly is Neil La Bute? A Mamet/A Miller wannabe who writes didactic, verbal chamber music for anyone dumb enough to wrap it up as something profound, see his latest offering on the west end with David Schwimmer, Some Girls, some shite. If he had an ounce of credibility he would have avoided the Wicker Man by a country mile, sadly like every director whose reputation is based on something they have not really achieved (ie: a good film or play) he would have passed the WM over, no, he thinks he can do better, what utter folly and like a disaster that is already forseen this will do nothing for his reputation(if he had one to begin with) and sink without trace.
Sadly, this typifies the malaise with american cinema, its great period was the seventies when true independent cinema (inc: US) shone so brightly, now it trundles on like a bad marriage that hates itself but cannnot call it quits!
I will sit back with the original version thank you and leave this one to the pagans to burn, if they did exist in Maine then they would be sharing the Island with lepracauns and trolls. a least with these inventions their is some honesty not like this masquerade.
Marcus Whitfield