[9/15/06] The Wicker Man

Ah yes, The Wicker Man, one of my all time favorite movies. Hard to classify yet it has that something that most movies dont have, originality. It is one of those movies where I dont like to explain it to people, they have to watch it for themselves without any prior knowledge to the plot to fully appreciate it. So much to my amazement and dissapointment I was watching TV when this trailer for this new flick came on and it looked vaugely familiar. It happend to turn out to be a remake of The Wicker Man. Why? The movie was never really that popular in the first place, in fact it lost money for the film company yet, as with alot of great movies, it generated a cult status in the underground scene, so thats probably why they remade it, but I dobut it will go anywhere. So now this movie, which I feel is 100 percent perfect the way it originally was and have enjoyed it's hidden greatness, has now been CGI'ed and retooled for the a-creative generation. Yes the generation that loves hip-hop music, which routinly swipes the melodies of past artists, has now gotten a movie remake of a classic, again (see Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Psycho, The Omen, The Fog, Day of the Dead and so on). It is a shame that this generation gets bombarded with remakes and remixes without fully knowing that the things they see and hear have been done before. I remember when the band The Wallflowers did a remake of my alltime favorite David Bowie song "Hero's" and all these people i knew just thought it was brilliant and when I told them of it's original source they were amazed that they never heard it or was told that the song they are hearing is not in its original form. So for all you that are going to see it, I urge you to check out the original, if you cant find it in you video store let me know and I will loan it to you, but you got to live in Mpls/St.P.because the version I have is in a Limited Edition case, yeah, thats how much I like it.

And one more small rant. Snakes on a Plane. Now I know some of you are saying, "But Stu, Snakes on a Plane is right up your alley, why are you complaining?" First, because complaining is what I do best. Second, is because this is a shameless attempt a big Hollywood to try and cash in on the B movie genre. The music industry did it with punk music, big lables rejected them until they saw that they made money so they gobbled them up (see the early nineties and Grunge) and mass marketed them over and over with different faces but the same sound and now punk's name is forever tainted. So the movie industry would never touch these types of movies, people would present them and they would turn them down so they would have to go straight to video through Roger Corman or Troma and possibly gain a cult status through word of mouth, which when it would work it would be great because the right people would get it and it would beloing to them, not everybody. So now with Snakes on a Plane they are heavily marketing this movies as a cult, B movie before it even was in the theaters. And being in the theater is another thing, B-movies dont belong in theaters,at least not in big name theaters, they belong on the shelf in you local family owned, not the Hollywood or Blockbuster, video shops.

So what I ask of you is to stay away from the big theaters and visit you local small joint like the Uptown here in the Twin Cities or join NetFlix, they have a slew of movies that dont get the red carpet treatment or go to Amazon and take some chances. I did with the Wicker Man and I was very happy I did. Of course you will probably get your share of lame ducks but then again, hasnt almost every movies that has been churned out of the hollywood crap machine been a lame duck in the past few decades?

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