Screenhead

It’s the Berenstain Bears.

Seriously, you remember this stuff?  If you were a child of the eighties like me, you might even remember that they’ve been in cartoon form since way back then, and apparently have had other versions since.  In fact, I’ve got YouTube of the original Berenstain Bears theme below.

Welcome back to the EIGHTIES.  Represent.

But anyway, someone–and here I’m referring to Night at the Museum director Shawn Levy–has apparently had the bright idea to take these childhood icons and turn them into a movie.  And somehow, a little part of me died inside when it remembered what Hollywood did to the Chipmunks.

There’s no word as yet on release dates, but somehow, this sounds like another grandiosely bland attempt on Hollywood’s part to wring a few fast bucks out of our childhood by gunning for name recognition indiscriminately and hoping for the best.

Well, this is a cataclysm waiting to happen, now isn’t it?  Seems that someone’s decided it might be a good idea to take a news story about some pirates in Somalia and make it a movie.

Meanwhile I’m out here clutching my head because from the feel of it my brain is trying desperately to escape my skull and hop a bus to go somewhere where they’ve never even HEARD of movies.  Maybe some underground bunker somewhere where it can hole up with some Chaucer.

So Billy Ray–and in case you were thinking Cyrus, no, but wouldn’t it have been hilarious if it had been?–is writing up a script based on next April’s memoirs of Richard Phillips, a ship captain rescued from Somalian pirates.  Billy Ray is actually responsible for writing State of Play, which we covered here some months ago, and if the Somalian pirates movie turns out anywhere near as good, we should actually be in for a bit of a treat for a change.

Of course, the down side is that Billy Ray also wrote Flightplan and Suspect Zero, so there’s a better than fair chance this is going to suck.

Fans of the Che Guevara road movie The Motorcycle Diaries will be pleased with this news. Director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera will team up again, this time to adapt the modern American novel ‘American Rust’, penned by Philipp Meyer. Scott Stuber (The Break-Up, Role Models) will produce.

American Rust is Meyer’s first novel, and it tells the tale of two childhood friends, Isaac and Billy. Set in a dying steel town in Pennsylvania, a murder is committed that involves the boys, and through betrayal and arguments, leads to a split in the friendship that may affect the rest of their lives. The novel has been lauded by critics, with comparisons made with the likes of Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner.

While The Motorcycle Diaries was an entertaining film, many criticised it for distorting events to glorify and idealise the young Che, despite the reality being far from that (and of course the problem that the revolutionary became overly vicious in his later years). Meyer’s novel is praised for its ability to find drama in the drab and downbeat lives of a decaying community, and if a film adaptaion merely tries to replicate the main plot points, it may indeed miss the point of the tale. Regardless, it will be an interesting prospect so see how a Brazilian director and a Puerto Rican writer take on a story of an American community.

It’s not every day we get actual for-real documentaries out here, but when Wyrd Studios sent me a copy of their upcoming newest, Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown, I figured it was about time we branched out a tick.

This is a massive work about the life, times and career of widely known and widely read H.P. Lovecraft, and includes a vast trove of pictures and interviews with horror authors and other figures.  When you see Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro within five minutes of each other, you know you’re in for an absolute doozy.

Frankly, anyone with even the vaguest interest in the work of H.P. Lovecraft is going to be absolutely struck by this movie.  You will learn anything and everything you’ve ever possibly wanted to know about H.P. Lovecraft, and most of it will likely amaze you.

Of course, if you DON’T have the vaguest interest in the work of H.P. Lovecraft, then this will have no use or hold no interest for you.  It’s a shame that a movie so deep and so well researched will hold interest for only a relative handful of people.

However, the Screenhead Ten Scale never cares about marketing, and thus hands Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown an eight out of ten for being a great example of documentary work.

As tempted as I am to bust out “what is this I don’t even” in the description of my reaction to the news about the upcoming adaptation of Freaky Monday, I’m going to try and refrain from obscure references.  Because frankly, this thing’s obscure enough all by itself without me adding a further cloud of obfuscation on top of it.

So here’s the deal–most of us know Freaky Friday, that goofy Disney cruise where the mother and daughter briefly switch places in a bizarre astronomical phenomenon that is neither very well explained or makes much sense.  Anyway, the duo spend a while swapped until they gain some perspective on each others’ lives or some such–it’s not like I watched it–and now, they’re going to tackle the sequel.  It’s called Freaky Monday, and the swap is not between a mother and daughter, nor a father and son if you guessed that, but–and brace yourselves, because this is like the new gold standard for sheer WEIRD–a girl and her English teacher.

No, seriously.  And before you ask, no, I have no idea when it’s coming out yet, but when I do, so will you.

If you’ve followed the career of Jerry Bruckheimer, you know he’s not exactly the type of guy to, say, stand around waiting for something to happen.  The guy’s career is downright massive, and widely varied.  But something he’s been trying to do for nearly two decades now is finally about to come to pass–he’s working on converting the novel Apaches into a movie.

This particular quest has left a whole lot of poeple downright stymied, but Bruckheimer’s got the chops if anyone does.  See, the novel itself is about a bunch of cops who go rogue and pull some serious vigilante time.  Cops make great vigilantes because they have a pretty good understanding of the law and police procedure, you see.

Hopefully, this is the time that Bruckheimer manages to pull it off, because Apaches sounds like it could be a pretty awesome title, once they get everything worked out.

Sometimes pairings are so strange they just might work. Who would have thought sweet and sour could combine to make such a tasty Asian sauce? So what sort of film we will see with the combination of writer/director Gus Van Sant (pictured left) and cult novelist Brett Easton Ellis? Van Sant is known for a mix of engaging dramas (Good Will Hunting) and pretentious experimentations (Gerry), while Ellis is the oddball responsible for the darkly comic novel American Psycho and the socially critical Less Than Zero, both adapted already into films. And together they are working on an adaptation of a Vanity Fair article.

The article, entitled “Golden Suicides”, concerns New York artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake who separately commited suicide in 2007, after growing increasingly paranoid that they were being followed by Scientologists. Last year Ellis agreed to write a script but now Van Sant has come aboard as consultant and possible director. It’s great to see these two big names attached to the project. It’s also worth noting that when Van Sant deals with true stories, like Elephant (loosely based on the Columbine killings) and the biopic of Milk, he makes something very special.

Fresh details have recently emerged about the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean installment, On Stranger Tides, and they’re actually pretty interesting.  In fact, it’s possible to glean an admittedly rather tenuous concept of the plot at this point, based on earlier reports and the current news.

They’ve optioned a book which is also called On Stranger Tides, but the book’s actually about a puppeteer that turns pirate, Jack Shandy by name, who’s out to stop evil pirates (is there really any other kind?) from taking over the Fountain of Youth.

Remember how, earlier, there was some talk that Johnny Depp might not be back for part five?  Well, what if this Shandy character ends up taking over?  They’d need Jack Sparrow to handle four, which is planned to be thus, but five could be handed over to Shandy without much trouble.  Would people follow Shandy?  That depends on how well he handles things in four.  But that’s a definite possibility–even if we’ll have to wait a while to see how it all comes off.

I will admit, before I segue into today’s movie review, the 2009 remake of Children of the Corn of which Anchor Bay provided a copy, that it’s been a while since I last saw the original Children of the Corn, a movie that featured a young Sigourney Weaver.

But the remake, while not really how I remember much of it, did at least manage not to suck.

Children of the Corn takes us back to Gatlin, Nebraska (which makes it doubly ironic that this was shot entirely in Iowa) where a group of children live.  This group of children has killed off all the adults in town , as directed by their theocratic leader, a tiny preacher in short pants by the name of Isaac.  Isaac, aided and abetted by his sociopathic cohort Malachi, control the town full of children with an iron fist.  But when outsiders appear in Gatlin, this may be a test for the children–but will they pass?

Now, there are SIGNIFICANT differences here between the remake and the original.  The remake, for example, casts Burt as an insane Vietnam veteran who runs amok and kills a few kids by the time he’s done.  Isaac, in this movie, is not the stubby shrieking psychotic personality he was, but is now a young preacher that seems almost placid in his duties.  For those of you who love the original and can’t abide any changes, don’t even bother watching this one.  It won’t be the same movie, though it will be within the same ballpark.

However, there do at least seem to be more parallels between this version and the original Stephen King short story, so that’s a very definite plus.

The remake is good, just not in the same way as the original.  Fans of the original who don’t mind a few changes will likely be just fine with the new one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, meanwhile, is fairly forgiving of this reasonable facsimile and hands it a seven out of ten for being a satisfying watch, if not exactly respectful of the original canon.

Yeah, I know…most of us Venom purists out there (of which I happily count myself among) were pretty convinced that casting Topher Grace as Eddie Brock was some kind of insult, either that or the result of the studio being utterly convinced we all had the mental candlepower of certain kinds of fish.

But I got one real good reason to cheer up and look forward to that Venom movie–two of the writers come from Zombieland.

Ohhhhh yeah.  One of the freakiest looking action horror titles of the year and they’ll be writing the Venom movie.  Apparently the script is already in Marvel’s hands, and from here it’s all a matter of getting it produced.  The current suspicion is that Spider Man 4 will actually be used to set up the Venom movie, so it’ll be at least two years before Venom actually gets a watchable big screen experience.  Ah well…we’ve waited longer for worse, and I’m definitely looking forward to this one.