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In the wake of a lawsuit filed by Mike Tyson's tattoo artist, Warner Brothers has announced that they will likely alter the Tyson-like ink that Ed Helms sports on his face in The Hangover Part II for the movie's DVD release later this year. Which got us thinking -- what other digital alterations would we like to see made to recent films? Thanks to the magic of computer technology, we can fix some key problems and -- who knows? -- maybe make a better movie in the bargain.
The first trailer for the Planet of the Apes prequel/remake/reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, has hit the Internet, and it looks pretty great. That's mostly because it looks nothing like Tim Burton's overwrought remake of Planet from 2001, but also because it seems to borrow as much from recent horror films as it does Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, the 1972 film that it partially draws on. Here are the other movies I couldn't help but think of as I watched the trailer.
Disney has acquired the rights to Agatha Christie's meek-old-lady-solving-crimes property Miss Marple and plans to turn it into a feature film reboot starring... Jennifer Garner, who is only 38 and primarily known for kicking people while wearing lingerie on Alias. So they're going a different way with it! A younger, and hence, more attractive way with it, which sounds like a financially sound trend that could really take off. Might we suggest even worse old people recasting/reboot ideas? Yes. Yes we might.
In all the hoopla over the new trailer for Super 8 (which looks like J.J. Abrams taking on The Goonies, a.k.a. awesome), people have happily forgotten that yesterday saw the debut of the first full-length trailer for The Smurfs. Now, I'm only a moderate Smurf fan, but I've been dreading this movie since I first heard about it, because I knew it would be a train wreck of Garfield proportions. Unfortunately, the trailer does not seem to be proving me wrong, as there are numerous elements that have dreading the day I will be forced to see it for review purposes. As a sneak peek of that review, here are the things I found the most annoying, terrifying and disgusting about the trailer.
Can you believe it's been almost 20 years since The Bodyguard came out? Whitney Houston was a youngish 29, and not yet crazy, and Kevin Costner played the man hired to keep the threatened pop singer safe. Well, now plans to remake the movie have resurfaced, and Warner Bros. is looking to cast an international pop star in the lead role. While Rihanna was suggested for the part almost two years ago, nobody is attached to this new iteration, so we thought we'd envision how the story might be tailored to today's biggest stars, and who might be hired to protect them.
It's one of the great crimes of Hollywood that there was only one sequel to Chevy Chase's 1985 mystery-comedy Fletch, especially since there are actually nine books about reporter Irwin M. Fletcher, plus two about his son, and the sequel wasn't even based on any of them. One of Chase's greatest roles, Fletch was a charming, cocky chameleon, with a list of aliases as long as his arm and a snarky response always at the ready. After years of us dreading a Kevin Smith-directed reboot, Warner Bros. has acquired the rights to the character, and we're excited to think about who might take over the director's chair, not to mention the highly sought-after role. Ben Affleck, Jason Lee and Josh Jackson have all been attached in the past, but we've got our own set of nominees.
Remake Total Recall? Blasphemy. Granted, Paul Verhoeven's 1990 re-imagining of the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" wasn't exactly faithful to the source material, but then, neither was Blade Runner, and both are masterpieces in their own way. With Colin Farrell stepping into the lead role in the film, which will take place entirely on Earth, they might as well change the name entirely, and leave Recall's legacy untainted. Or, better yet, remake these other Arnold Schwarzenegger films that could stand to be updated for the new century.
Watching the trailers for Yogi Bear makes my eyes hurt. Not only because of the computer-generated fur on Yogi and his pal Boo-boo, but because I'm picturing the horrible future that awaits us if the movie succeeds. Snagglepuss! Huckleberry Hound! Quick Draw McGraw! All of these funny-voiced animals are on the list of Hanna Barbera creations that could conceivably get a crack at the big screen if Yogi does well, and while I have fond memories of those characters, I simply can't see how any of them would make good movies. The worst part? Hanna-Barbera made hundreds of cartoons, not all of them starring animals, and some of them would make amazing movies. In fact, Warner Bros. is developing a movie based on the adventure series Jonny Quest for 2012 -- granted, they first tried back in 1995, but this time I hope they'll be able to make it stick. Here are some other HB properties (yes, even a few talking-animal 'toons) that I think would be great big-screen spectacles.
The Three Stooges are dead... long live the Three Stooges! After a feature film re-introducing the characters was announced a couple of years back by the Farrelly Brothers, the project fell into limbo, and the movie's high-profile cast -- Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Jim Carrey as Larry, Moe and Curly, respectively -- drifted away. Now, it's set up at a new studio, but it still needs a new batch of Stooges! Since we want to see this thing get made, for good or ill, we picked our brains to come up with actors in that general age range who could play the roles, then tried to come up with some younger alternatives, since the movie supposedly starts out showing them all as kids. Hey, the younger they are, the more hits they can take, and the more sequels they can make -- assuming this movie isn't a terrible, terrible idea. (It might be.)
As far as titles go, "Fair Game" is pretty generic, and it's been used for a variety of films over the years, from a romantic comedy to an Australian movie about poaching to, most famously, the action-film debut of one Cindy Crawford, famous supermodel and terrible actress. The latest Fair Game is a political movie about the Valerie Plame affair, and while the name comes from Plame's own autobiography, we can't help thinking about Crawford and William Baldwin running away from explosions in tank-tops every time we hear it. One would think the new movie would suffer from sharing a name with a film that almost won three Razzies (fortunately, Showgirls also came out that year), but it might benefit from the association, because while the two films don't seem to have that much in common, this one looks like it could use a little bit of what the old movie had in spades: sex, violence and debatably witty banter. Let's see how the two stack up.
MOST RECENT POSTS
Post-Hangover Digital Tweaks We'd Like To See
Rise of the Planet of the Apes: Five Movies the Trailer Reminds Us Of
Jennifer Garner as Miss Marple? We Can Think of Worse
The Smurfs Trailer: What We Hated, What We Smurfed
Singers We'd Like to See in the Bodyguard Remake, and the Men Who Guard Them
Fletch Lives Again, But Who Should Star and Who Should Direct?
Schwarzenegger Remakes We'd Rather See Than Total Recall
Hanna-Barbera Cartoons That Deserve Movies More than Yogi Bear
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