I can understand why Hollywood, terrified of risk and threatened by originality, likes to bankroll proven safe concepts with built-in advertising. But remaking The Wicker Man boggles me. The original is amazingly beautiful, stark and creepy — one of my favourite movies — but it can’t possibly be well-known enough to trade on the name recognition, and the entire premise is so specific to the UK that it can’t possibly remain intact. (Judging from the car crash and CGI bees in the trailer, it doesn’t.) And while Scorcese or Cronenberg might be able to put a fresh spin on Cape Fear or The Fly, does anybody really expect anything from Neil LaBute any more? Says LaBute to the New York Times, “If ‘The Wicker Man’ is a thinking person’s horror film, that’s great.”
Apparently, Warner Brothers has just as little faith, since they’ve refused to screen the film for critics, or even for Robin Hardy, the director of the original. Hardy apparently had to bring in his lawyers to get his name removed from the promotional material. Also rather pissed off is Christopher Lee, who did the original for free and regards it as the best film of his career. Of his role in the original: “What do I think of it being played by a woman, when it was played by a man in 1972, as part of a Scottish pagan community, and now it’s played by a woman with the same name? What do I think of it? Nothing. There’s nothing to say.”
- Link>> to NYT article abut the remake
In addition to my new start-up job, I have quite a bit of work to do for a project I’m working on with the Vancouver Art Gallery. Which means that instead of playing in the sun like the rest of Vancouver this long weekend, I’m locked away with my PowerBook writing ActionScript code, a task that would be much less time-consuming if I knew ActionScript.
So the start-up I’m working for is in a converted nineteenth-century brick warehouse in Yaletown, which is an interesting experience. Yaletown, for those not familiar with Vancouver’s neighbourhoods, is the ultra-trendy downtown yuppie neighbourhood, a high-density mixture of expensive condos, tech start-ups, tony fashion boutiques and chic restaurants. It would be pretty hypocritical of me to denounce it, given that I work there and all, but I will say that the Yaletown lifestyle looks… exhausting. Physically, financially and quite possibly spiritually.