Snake Plissken Lives! (And Leave Him Alone!)

To put it simply: it's a bad idea. With a couple of notable exception -- the Kurtzman/Orci Star Trek and the Nolan Batmans -- reboots and remakes always seems to end badly. Consider Mission Impossible, Charlie's Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Halloween, Superman, Bewitched, Psycho, and on and on. And to steal a phrase from the military, when it comes to future projects, like the upcoming A-Team reboot ... confidence is not high.

But once in a while, once in a while you can see a glimmer of hope.  And if Claude Brodesser-Akner's article over at the New York Magazine web site is even half right, there seem to be a slim possibility that  the remake/reboot of John Carpenter's thriller / science fiction / post-apocalypse / action/adventure classic, Escape from New York will not totally suck.  As Claude reports:

"We learned that in order to land the rights, New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken "must be called 'Snake'"; "must wear an eye patch"; and that he would — and we're not making this up — "always be a 'bad-ass.'"; So, if you ever catch the new Snake watching Grey’s Anatomy or complaining that the senator isn't "emotionally available," just know that somewhere, some poor development exec is about to be carted off to jail."

You can read the details of the reboot here, and buy the original here. And hey, turn that anticipatory frown upside down, lovers of Snake Plisskin! It might turn out okay!

Credit Where Credit is Due Department: First word of the New York column came to us by way of columnist/blogger Sarah Weinman's terrific Twitterfeed and Blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.  Well worth bookmarking, following, feeding, and caring for.

 

Riese: Gorgeous, Professional and ... Sssssslllloooowwwwwwww...

There are ten zillion web series out there now, and let's face it: most of them are pretty bad.  And the vast majority of them also fall into Rush territory: sf, fantasy, thrillers, mystery, suspense.  Which makes the
bad-osity that much harder to ignore.

The bad-osity isn't entirely because of the low to subzero production values.  In fact, a few -- like the classic, ever-clever The Guild and the lesser-known but pretty damn funny I am NOT Infected! take advantage of the "Hey, we're on the interwebs!" aspect or the non-existent budgets (though The Guild has gotten pretty fancy-schmancy in the last series) as parts of the story itself.  Others are totally obsessed wtih the capabilties of ridiculously inexpensive CGI or the specific sub-sub-subgenre they're part of or spoofing, and some are just plain obscure on purpose (does anybody understand Circle of 8?  Really?)

And then there's Riese, that falls somewhere in between.

Riese (and no, I don't know how to pronounce it. In the three episodes that have been released so far, no one had said it out loud) is a gorgeous wanderer, a mysterious warrior-woman in a damp and misty forest-world that looks slightly sword-and-sorceresque and a little post-apocalyptic. (The medical facilities, for instance, look much like a modern-day health center; the weaponry is pure Society for Creative Anachronism).  She's running from the oppressive religious government run by "The Sect," and they clearly want to get her, too. Oh, and she pals around with a big, beautiful wolf.  Yeah: a wolf.


Riese has production values as high as anything you'll see online, even stuff from the big boys like Paramount Digital and Joss Whedon.  And it's not quite as impossible to follow as some of its kin.  But the pacing?  Slooooowwwwww ... and after three episodes, each about 9 minues in length, we STILL don't know anyhing more a out the main chraacter, really, or the "Sect" that seems to control this mildewy medieval world.(It has that same damp deep-north-forest look that all Canadian series shot out-of-doors has; it owes more to Jeremiah than to Mad Max.

The costumes are great, the production design in general -- especially the matte painting -- is lovely.  But come ON, people, STEP IT UP SOME, willya?  A little less of the ominous and portentous, and a little bit more kickin' ass and telling us who's doing what to whom.  Not to mention how to pronounce "Riese" and why all the women are dressed like extras from that bad Flash Gordon remake froma couple years back.  And if y'all can learn the basic idea of the set-up and the pay-off, the teaser and the cliff-hanger ... well, these nine-minute episodes would seem a whole lot shorter, and we'd be much more inclined to continue.

In oh so many of these web series, you can tell in the first two minutes whether or not the show is worth your time.  Riese definitley is.  Probably.  Potentially.  But pretty soon now, it's going to have to be something other than just pretty to look at. It's going to have to do something, too.

Quite Possibly the Worst World-Whacker Ever Made. Seriously.

Asteroids, comets, moons, planets smashing into Earth and ending everything -- everything.  You'd think the all those celestial bodies ramming into each other, ending in total extinction events, would have enough inherent drama and visual potential to make a bunch of great movies. 

Apparently not.  Global annihilation just isn’t enough anymore.  You gotta go big, son, really big. 

At least that's what the makers of Impact, an 'original' (and never has the term been used so loosely) new miniseries on ABC seem to think .  It's everything but the kitchen sink, and bits and pieces from every bad world-whacker since 1951, all rolled into one big sticky ball, starring the guy from JAG and the babe from Species.  Check out the trailer…

Impact

An asteroid hitting the moon and sending it towards Earth?  Not enough.  So ... having a fragment of a brown dwarf star "hiding behind" that meteor shower, embedding itself in the falling moon, so now it weighs more than Jupiter?  Better, but still ... Okay, have some of the moon-parts moving a zillion times after than the bulk of it, so they arrive, like. minutes after the collision -- and more than a month before the rest of it?  You're getting there.  Okay, okay: have the moon-dwarf-star-thing so hyped up on "electromagnetic energy" (yeah, we don't know what that means either) that it actually overwhelms gravity, so people and trains and stuff can go floating into the air at random points and time -- whenever it's dramatic.  Okay, now we got a movie.

Unfortunately, it's a really awful movie, with bits stolen from every previous bad world-whacker of the last sixty years, from When Worlds Collide (1951 – Barbara Rush!  John Hoyt!  Really cool spaceships!) to Meteor (1979, the first truly awful star-studded extravaganza, with the likes of Sean Connery and Natalie Wood, among too many others) to Asteroid (1997, TV.  A pre-Katrina fantasy with Michael [Terminator, Aliens] Biehn as an actually heroic FEMA Director) to the nearly simultaneous entries of Deep Impact (1998, a true weeper with Tea Leoni being all serious and Morgan Freeman as a – get this-- inspirational black president! Ha!) and the still-embarrassing Armageddon (1998, Bruce Willis as a drilling expert who saves the world but loses his life and Ben Affleck at his most ineffectual [okay, except for Daredevil] has a long and distinguished and/or embarrassing history in literature and film.  Thinking back , there really hasn't been a good movie about the subject yet.  And judging by Impact ... there still isn't.

Not that the battle is over: far from it.  The very first world-whacker, When Worlds Collide, is slated for the remake express, directed by Stephen (GI Joe, The Mummy) Sommers  with a scheduled release date of 2010.  Look ouuuuuuut!