Kill Bill -- and maybe Vladimir and Igor while you're at it

By Steven Zeitchik

MGM is bringing back the '80's -- again. The "Red Dawn" remake that first surfaced on the lips of Mary Parent and Harry Sloan at a Cannes panel is storming ahead like the Russkies took the Colorado mountains (in the movie).

The studio that's already wreaking havoc on Netflix rentals everywhere by signing up new versions of "Robocop," "Bill & Ted" and "Poltergeist" is serious about remaking the John Milius cold war dystopia/revenge fantasy/shoot-em-up-actioner/geoplitical metamovie.

At THR's Jay Fernandez reports, Carl Ellsworth, who wrote "Disturbia" and "Red Eye" (isn't that what you get after a red dawn?) will try his hand at the new screenplay. Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator on franchise movies from Bourne to Spider Man, will tackle the remake as his first directing gig.

Readers of these here blog posts know how remakes fascinate; exec motivations to greenlight them are typically a complicated mix of genuine nostalgia and easy double-dipping. One similarly gets a sense of both when it comes to cold war movies. The decisions to make these pics is informed in part by the thinking that if you put a big title from a previous (but not too previous) an era back on the screen you can lift a certain marketing burden, since people haven't really forgotten the original.

And yet the desire to resurrect a story that emerged in a more innocent time (ah, for those halcyon days of Cuban missile crises and Geneva summits) is honest; things really were simpler 25 years ago, at least cinematically, when enemies were enemies and a geopolitical crisis was nothing Sly Stallone or Dolph Lundgren couldn't handle.

So how will the new look at the red threat compare to the old one? Well, for one, it won't be quite as red.

"The tone is going to be very intense, very much keeping in mind the post-9/11 world that we're in," Ellsworth told Fernandez. "As 'Red Dawn' scared the heck out of people in 1984, we feel that the world is kind of already filled with a lot of paranoia and unease, so why not scare the hell out of people again?"

MGM isn't the only minimajor with a back to the future vibe. No, Marty and Doc aren't reuniting for a trip in the DeLorean. But this one involves almost as dynamic a duo -- Harvey and Tarantino, who are teaming up againm, this time for a WWII movie that answers the question: 'What movie title is even less digestible than 'Grindhouse?'" The answer: "Inglorious Bastards," which TWC confirmed it would produce and distribute domestically, with a shoot set for the fall and a release likely next year.

This picture, about a group of WWII soldiers behind enemy lines, is a remake of sorts; it's based on a 1978 movie from the Italian director Enzo Castellari, though the script will be all new from Tarantino.

So basically 2009 will be a year of a lot of wars -- a Cold War, World War II, etc.

Hey, at least they can't say Hollywood is ignoring military conflict.

Comments

[Mickey Slevin, ModernMoviegoer]

You can't say Hollywood is ignoring military conflict, but you can say for certain that they should. With the terrible earnings of Iraq films this year, you would think they could think of something else. Sure WWII and the Cold War are not current, but since this war is grinding on, maybe the war movies shouldn't.

[Liz]

I'm not following Mickey's "real war = no war movies" argument. One could argue that an important purpose for war movies is to increase public awareness.

Script reviews are glowing, so this might be the next Pulp Fiction. I'm looking forward to it.