The Screengrab : bangkok dangerous

DVD Digest for January 6, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week brings a cavalcade of crap from the lean seasons of 2008. But if you’re willing to wade through it, there are treasures to be found.

DVD of the Week: The best news in a relatively slow week is the much-anticipated arrival of two very different films by the great British director Michael Powell. For years, fans of Powell and his longtime collaborator Emeric Pressburger have yearned for a DVD of one of their greatest films, 1946’s Stairway to Heaven, also known as A Matter of Life and Death. Finally, the film has arrived in a new pressing from Sony, complete with an introduction by longtime Powell fan and friend Martin Scorsese and an interview with film scholar Ian Christie. But wait, there’s more! Paired in the set with Stairway is Powell’s late-period film Age of Consent. I have yet to see the film, which by most accounts is fairly minor Powell. Yet how can one possibly resist a movie that stars James Mason and a luscious young (and often-nude) Helen Mirren, set against some lovely Australian settings? Not me, that’s for sure.

This week’s most notable recent releases on DVD are a pair of 2008’s highest-profile pot-themed movies- David Gordon Green’s Pineapple Express (Sony, also Blu-Ray) and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness (Sony, also Blu-Ray). Also this week is the fiction debut of documentarian Jessica Yu, Ping Pong Playa (Image, also Blu-Ray), plus a quintet of shame: Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Vin Diesel in Babylon A.D. (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Pacino and DeNiro cashing their paychecks in Righteous Kill (Anchor Bay, also Blu-Ray); Disaster Movie (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray), the latest in the seemingly deathless cycle of cut-rate parodies from the Friedberg/Seltzer team; and the right-wing spoof/jeremiad An American Carol (Universal). Whew.

This week’s big TV on DVD is Battlestar Galactica Season 4.0 (Universal). And in Blu-Ray only news, this week sees the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong (Universal), the pigskin drama Friday Night Lights (Universal), and Season 1 of Showtime’s Dexter (Paramount).

Bangkok Ludicrous: The Perils of English-Language Remakes

Leonard Pierce — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:45:00 GMT

This week saw the debut of Bangkok Dangerous, a bizarrely titled remake by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun of the bizarrely titled Bangkok Dangerous by Danny Pang and Oxide Pang Chun. The main differences between the two films are that the original was in the Thai language; the star of the 1999 original, Pawalit Mongkolpisit, played a deaf-mute with a slightly less ridiculous haircut than Nicholas Cage sports in the remake; and the second version stinks like the underside of a refrigerator.

Alison Willmore at IFC.com, in left-handed honor of Bangkok Dangerous, prepares a list of other English-language remakes of foreign films by the original directors, and in so doing, illustrates that, though the filmmakers are gambling that a U.S. release will net them the fame and increased audience foreign films rarely receive, it's a sucker's bet. Such movies are almost invariably disasters, from Les Visiteurs, a blockbuster French comedy remade in 2001 as the moronic Just Visiting to the pointless reboot of Michael Haneke's Funny Games in 2007. Perhaps the most disastrous of these movies was The Vanishing, a witless remake if George Sluizer's heart-stopping 1988 thriller Spoorloos that completely deflated all the tension and menace of his original. (Sluizer's latest movie was a Rob Schneider vehicle, which is cruel and unusual punishment even for a man who did The Vanishing.)

One of the shocking revelations in Willmore's list is that, despite her excellent reputation as an actress, Naomi Watts is virtually the queen of the junky English-language remake. Not only did she star in the arbitrary remake of Haneke's Funny Games (eating up a big chunk of the $15 million cost of the film it utterly failed to recoup at the box office), but she also played the lead in The Shaft, Dick Maas' dopey remake of his 1983 horror movie about a killer elevator. No, really.

Related Posts:

Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous

Funny Games: I Laughed, I Cried, I Puked

Morning Deal Report: Calling All Ghostbusters

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Summer is definitely over as far as the weekend box office is concerned. When the top movie of the week is Nicolas Cage in Bangkok Dangerous, you know things are a little slow. Taking in only $7.8 million was still good enough for first place, as Tropic Thunder fell to second with $7.5 million. The total weekend gross is expected to be around $66 million, which is what The Dark Knight was taking in at lunch hour just a few weeks ago.

Who ya gonna call? Well, if Ghostbusters is the answer, I’m not sure I even want to know the question. But Variety reports that Columbia Pictures is serious about rounding up the old gang for another round of spook hunting. “The studio has set The Office co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson…The scribes just wrote Year One, a comedy that was directed by Ramis.” I can see Bill Murray being hard up for cash given the news of his divorce but, really, do they expect to be able to lure Ernie Hudson back?

Ed Norton, Susan Sarandon and Richard Dreyfus will star in Leaves of Grass. It’s not an adaptation of the Walt Whitman poetry collection, but rather “a comedic thriller actor-turned-filmmaker Tim Blake Nelson wrote and is directing.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, “Norton is portraying twin brothers, one an Ivy League philosophy professor, the other a small-time and brilliant marijuana grower. The professor is lured back to his Oklahoma hometown for a doomed scheme against a local drug lord (Dreyfuss) that unravels his life.”

Related:
Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous
Ghostbusters III, Sort Of

Trailer Review: Bangkok Dangerous

John Constantine — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:59:00 GMT

First of all, Bangkok Dangerous is a hilarious name. The sixth grader who lives in my brain starts giggling every single time I look at it. It sounds like a caveman warning you to be cautious while traveling. Second of all, am I insane or is Nic Cage starting to look like the Crypt Keeper wearing a Gene Simmons wig? Casting directors, I am telling you, the man is aging. Stop trying to make him look like he’s 30. He isn’t.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the trailer. Looks like Bangkok’s dangerous! There are assassins and slave trading and coups and gangsters and all kinds of stuff. At first, this comes off as being in the same tonal vein as the underrated Lord of War, a serious look into the life of a hired killer giving Mr. Cage ample opportunity to look sad. It shifts gears after the first minute into a big popcorn flick. While watching, I started to question whether or not Cage is a draw for this sort of thing. After all, The Rock came out twelve freaking years ago. Then I remembered that the National Treasure movies made twelve mumbillion dollars. On the whole Bangkok Dangerous looks like it might be alright. If you’ve got one a gift certificate lying around come summer, and you’ve already seen Indiana Jones, Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Speed Racer, The Hulk, and every other flighty action movie in theaters, this might be a good choice.

Morning Deal Report: Knowing Nicolas Cage

Peter Smith — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 16:00:00 GMT

The ever-amusing Nicolas Cage will star in Knowing, a new thriller from Alex Proyas (The Crow, Dark City) (oh, and I, Robot), as "a teacher who examines the contents of a time capsule unearthed at his son's elementary school. Startling predictions in the time capsule that have already come true lead him to believe the world is going to end at the close of the week and that he and his son are somehow involved in the destruction." That sounds just about stupid enough for Nicolas Cage to participate. Nicolas Cage trivia note, courtesy of IMDb: Cage titles in the works include "G-Force," "Amarillo Slim," "Time Share," "Electric God" and "Bangkok Dangerous."

Joan Allen joins Lasse Hallstrom in a remake of the Japanese film Hachiko, A Dog's Story.

Paul Rudd will star in I Love You, Man. Presumably a Paul Rudd biopic.

— Peter Smith