Ari Karpel reports on recent developments in the field of remaking major feature films for foreign audiences. When talkies first came in, it was standard practice at many Hollywood studios to shoot foreign-language versions of new movies at the same time the English-language releases were being made, sometimes with the original stars babbling their dialogue in phonetically learned Spanish. In some rare cases, such as that of the Spanish-language version of the 1931 Dracula, directed by George Melford and starring Carlos Villar as the Count, these instant remakes have shadow reputations among cultists who hold that they're more cinematically inventive than the movies they were spun off from. But the practice died out as soon as some genius invented dubbing. But, writes Karpel, "As film industries in China, Russia, Japan and India have grown exponentially, particularly when it comes to homegrown fare, United States studios have taken the phrase 'Think globally, act locally' to heart. Nearly every studio has set up an international operation for producing and distributing original movies made in local languages. Now a handful of those studios are scouring their catalogs, seeking films (box-office smashes and middling performers alike) to remake for new audiences." For a start, the "Walt Disney Company is turning its High School Musical franchise into a cottage industry, redoing the teen song-and-dance phenomenon one country at a time." The real trick, though, is finding solid material that can be translated into something appealing to foreign audiences but that wasn't such a megaton international hit the first time around that seeing it again with a local cast would strike filmgoers as redundant. Taking that into consideration, a movie like Titanic is less tantalizing than something like the crackerjack 2004 thriller Cellular, with Kim Basinger and William H. Macy, which was recently turned into a a Chinese film called Connected. And then there's Sideways, Alexander Payne's much-loved, middle-aged road comedy starring Paul Giamatti as a failed novelist and alcoholic wine connoisseur and Thomas Haden Church as a TV actor hell-bent on enjoying one last fling before his wedding. A Japanese remake, still called Sideways but with the lead characters' names changed from Miles and Jack to Michio and Daisuke, is currently in production.

Read More...

What made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a hit?: As with other oft-filmed tales like Dracula and The Three Musketeers, every era seems to get the Robin Hood it deserves. The silent era got Douglas Fairbanks, in a role that highlighted his formidable athleticism. In the 1930s came The Adventures of Robin Hood (still the version to beat), in which Errol Flynn turned the classic hero into a dashing rogue. The elegiac seventies brought Robin and Marian, which starred Sean Connery as an older and somewhat sadder version of the character. And by the early 1990s, Robin had morphed into the sensitive-hunk archetype that was in vogue at the time, played by one of its biggest stars, Kevin Costner.

Read More...

For most students, the week of Memorial Day consists waiting for the school year to end, with plenty of last-minute review sessions and random movie screenings in class to fill time before the final. But within the hallowed halls of SLIFR University, it’s another story altogether.

Read More...

You may not know who Jack P. Pierce was, but if you've seen or even heard about the Famous Monsters of Filmland that made millions of dollars for Universal Studios in the 1930s, you know his work.  Pierce, a Greek immigrant who ended up in Hollywood more or less by accident, was the head of the makeup department at Universal Studios from 1928 until 1947, and crafted, on conjunction with stars like Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, some of the most memorable creatures in cinema history. In the days before CGI or even most photographic effects as we know them today, Pierce worked with theatrical equipment, padding, chemicals toxic by today's standards, and inventive use of costumes to create the visual hook of characters like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Ygor, Frankenstein,  the Wolf Man, and the Mummy.

When Universal merged with International after WWII, Pierce fell on ill fortune, and, after several decades working on television and for low-budget big-screen productions, he died in 1968, little-remembered outside of the people who had the good fortune to work with him.  Still, anyone who played such an integral part in defining one of Hollywood's most famous and fertile periods wasn't going to stay forgotten for long.  A DVD documentary about him was recently released focusing on his horror work; the motion picture industry's Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Union has named their lifetime acheivement award for him; and his hands, which crafted so many terrifyingly familiar faces, are featured on an American postage stamp, transforming Boris Karloff into Frankenstein's monster.

Read More...

"Bela Lugosi!" Richard Pryor used to exclaim during his stand-up act. "I bet that guy got some weird fan mail." Indeed he did, but there's now a popular, if arguable, point of faith among some horror fans that nobody thought vampires were sexy until Christopher Lee first draped a cape around his six-foot-five-inch frame and started sinking his teeth into his demure co-stars' necks in the the 1958 Horror of Dracula. (It was his first time playing the Count but his second job for the British horror factory Hammer Studios; a year earlier, he played the monster opposite his frequent co-star Peter Cushing's mad scientist in The Curse of Frankenstein.) In the Guardian, Matthew Sweet discusses Lee, Hammer, and how their version of the classic bloodsucker fits into the vampire filmography. "Lee's performance convinced a generation of scholars that Dracula was a book about sex, and not about vampires." I'm not sure that it can't be a book about both, but Lee definitely put his stamp on the character; he went on the play him in six other Hammer films, as well as sending the character up in a cameo in the 1970 The Magic Christian. By the end, in the 1974 The Satanic Rites of Dracula, the studio, "looking for new ways to revive flagging public interest in fanged Transylvanians, had transplanted Dracula to the fag end of swinging London, where he hung out with a gang of hippie bikers — slaves of the dark side, of pot and of their taste in afghan casualwear." — Phil Nugent