Casino Royale is the bastard step-child of the James Bond franchise. When Ian Fleming sold the rights to the first Bond novel, leading to its use on the TV show Climax! (where Barry Nelson was the first actor to portray the famous spy), he couldn’t have guessed that this would be one of the […]
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century is the theatrically-released pilot for the similarly named television show starring Gil Gerard as Buck and Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Deering. As I mentioned in my review, Flash Gordon (made around the same time) tried to recreate the comic strip on the big screen. Buck, on […]
The original, 1968 version of Mel Brook’s The Producers and its 2005 remake naturally have a lot in common. But there are almost as many differences. As I mentioned in my original review, the biggest change is the expansion of the storyline to include a love story for Leo.
These changes alter the dynamic […]
As I think I’ve mentioned before, there are several different ways to bring a television series to the big screen. The two most common ones are to extend the original series (Star Trek, The Munsters) and to “re-imagine” the series (Mission: Impossible, Lost in Space). Other types include the recreation (The Beverly Hillbillies, […]
It’s hard to really get across how disappointed I was with Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There are among my favorite books of all time. (No, really.) Any production has a high bar to clear as far as I’m […]
I’ve previously covered 2005’s King Kong and wrote a full review here, but I thought this time around I’d do a kind of contrast and compare, tale of the tape kind of thing alongside the 1998 version of Godzilla. So let’s see how they stand up to each other.
Approach
Godzilla took the more common road […]
Dick Tracy is Warren Beatty’s big-screen adaptation of Chester Gould’s famous comic strip character. Coming only a year after Batman, it is easy to see why it was kind of overshadowed by that much higher profile film. But despite some similarities (composer Danny Elfman, for instance), they are very different projects with very […]
The suits over at Disney must have been feeling pretty good about themselves when they released Aladdin. They had just come off the enormously successful Beauty and the Beast (the only animated film ever nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture) and seemed to be on a roll. With much of the […]
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is my favorite film by director Terry Gilliam. In it, I feel that his growth as a filmmaker since his work on Monty Python and the Holy Grail finally came to fruition. After essentially making three films with the same focus and worldview (Jabberwocky, Time Bandits and Brazil), […]
Treasure Planet should have been a big, fat success story for Walt Disney. It’s based on one of the best adventure stories of all time, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, it has incredible visuals and it features a strong voice cast. But, in the end, it was all for naught as the film […]
THX 1138 is George Lucas’ theatrical expansion of his student film Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB . It is also the film that ruined Francis Ford Coppola’s first American Zoeptrope film studio.
But the film itself is great. It is, in many ways, the anti-Star Wars: a small, personal story of one person in […]
I previously reviewed Fantastic Four for thelogbook.com (the review can be read here), so I won’t go into great detail, but I will say that I still really like this movie. It’s certainly not among the greats of the comic-book-to-big-screen field, but I think it’s a fun, entertaining movie.
Particularly, I like the interaction […]
Daleks’ Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. is the followup to the successful Dr. Who and the Daleks. Like its predecessor, Invasion is based on an original serial from the BBC TV series Doctor Who, in this case, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. Also like the first film, this one is a condensation of a […]
Hercules is an interesting entry in the Walt Disney Feature Animation canon. Directed by Ron Clements and John Musker (previously of The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid and Aladdin) and with music by Alan Menken, it reunited much of the creative team behind two of the greatest films in Disney’s “Renaissance”. After […]
Fourteen years after Ishirô Honda opted to use a man in a suit instead of stop-motion to animate Kong in 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, producer Dino De Laurentiis made the same decision for his big budget remake, King Kong. But, frankly, that’s not where this epic film falls flat. No, the suit […]
Dr. Who and the Daleks is the big screen adaptation of the second Doctor Who serial, “The Daleks”. It takes a lot of liberties with the story, mostly with the characterization of the lead character, who is here known literally as “Dr. Who” (on the show, he is almost always called “The Doctor”) and […]
Heaven Can Wait has always been one of my favorite films and it’s the one that made me an unabashed fan of the great Charles Grodin.
But there’s so much more to this film than just that. Heaven Can Wait (for those of you who don’t know) is a re-make of a popular (and excellent, […]
You know, I held off watching another film way too long out of some weird sense of not wanting to watch something “unworthy”. But as time has gone on, I’m settling in to watching what I would’ve watched anyway.
First of all, I’ve been on a huge “Hitchhiker’s” kick since last year, when my sister […]
Viewed December 11, 2006
The Year Without a Santa Claus is a remake of the classic 1974 Rankin-Bass production that details the events when Santa decides to give up the gift-giving, feeling he’s unappreciated by the world. Now, the smartest thing the producers of this movie did was not release it to theaters as they […]
Viewed November 19, 2006
The Parent Trap is the remake of the 1961 Haylie Mills film of the same name. It introduced the world to the talented and not-yet-troubled Lindsay Lohan and helped usher in Disney’s recent live-action family comedy successes.
The setup follows the same basic outline at the original film: twin girls are separated […]
Viewed September 30, 2006
I can’t even begin to go into the long, strange history of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.* The short version is that in 1982, three kids of about twelve or thirteen years of age began remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark, shot-for-shot. Finally completing the film in 1989, […]
Viewed September 22, 2006
Happy New Year is a strange little film. Starring Peter Falk as Nick, a jewel robber, it shifts between whimsy and drama with such abandon, it’s easy to get lost in its wake.
Nick and his partner Charlie (Charles Durning) plan elaborate heists that involve complicated impersonations (and impressive makeup). Their […]
Viewed July 28, 2006
Well, I’ve already watched the original Love Affair and its first remake, An Affair to Remember. Unable (so far) to track down a copy of the Warren Beatty / Annette Bening version of Love Affair, I’ve moved ahead to the most recent take on the story, the Bollywood film Mann, which […]
Viewed July 10, 2006
I’m not going to lie to you. Movies like Nicholas Nickleby are not particularly high on my ‘to-see’ list. (I know, looking at what I’ve seen so far this year, you’re shocked.) It’s not that I have anything against “costume dramas” or anything. As Sense and Sensibility proved, […]
Viewed June 27, 2006
I put Superman Returns at a big disadvantage before I saw it. I watched Richard Donner’s 1978 film Superman right before going to the theater. Now, normally I wouldn’t place that kind of pressure on a film. I didn’t watch any of the 90s ‘Batman’ movies before seeing Batman […]
Viewed June 26, 2006
The Punisher is the second attempt to bring the hard-edged Marvel Comics character to life. The previous version of The Punisher from 1989 starred Dolph Lundgren in the title role and was a decent, if not exactly original, effort. This new version had a much larger budget and, after the […]
Viewed June 23, 2006
Boy was I ready to dislike the remake of Mighty Joe Young. My every instinct told me that it couldn’t live up to the original. And it doesn’t. But it comes an awful lot closer than I expected and is a decent film in its own right.
The biggest problem […]
Viewed May 19, 2006
The Ghost Breakers is a fun outing starring Bob Hope. It doesn’t exactly break any new ground, but it catches Hope in his full stride, with an excellent supporting cast.
The story revolves around a typical Hope device: the somewhat cowardly dupe caught in the tide of bigger events. In this […]
Viewed March 27, 2006
After watching and thouroughly enjoying the original Love Affair, I became determined to watch all of the remakes before the 356 Films project is over. First up is perhaps the most famous incarnation of the story, An Affair To Remember.
It’s always interesting to see how different filmmakers handle what is essentially […]
Viewed February 28, 2006
I had so completely prepared myself to be disappointed by The Producers that I was shocked by how much I liked it. Whoever was in charge of marketing this film should be fired. I watched it with a modest-sized audience in a discount theater and they never stopped laughing. […]
Viewed February 13, 2006
There’s always an interesting dynamic when you watch a film that has already built up a strong cult following before you get to see it. Such was the case for Withnail and I, and such is the case with Napoleon Dynamite. I was already aware of the “Vote for Pedro” […]
Viewed February 2, 2006
The melancholy Dane’s thoughts on acting and their relevance to Hamlet (2000):
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you,
trippingly on the tongue.
In other words, don’t mumble, like Ethan Hawke and most of the cast does throughout the movie.
But if you mouth it, as many of our
players do, […]
Viewed January 11, 2006
Since I will be writing a full-blown review of King Kong for theLogBook.com, I’m going to just state a few observations about Peter Jackson’s $200M remake.
If Peter Jackson loves the original King Kong (1933) so much, why did he feel the need to change it’s fundamental theme and why does he portray […]
Viewed January 8, 2006
Beast from Haunted Cave has a classic Roger Corman backstory. Apparently, Corman was busy preparing for a war film, Ski Troop Attack (1960) to be shot in South Dakota. He figured that since he was going to be on location anyway, why not make another picture and double the output? […]
Viewed January 2, 2006
In many ways, The Princess Blade is a typical Japanese action film. It’s got swords, acts of vengeance, betrayal, an old guy with secrets to tell, unrequited love, the death of innocents and lots and lots of blood.
Still, it’s a very stylish film. Based on the classic Japanese comic “Lady […]