Tourists flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, to see the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, dance the samba and cheer their favorite team at Maracanã Stadium, one of the world’s largest football arenas.
The city has also provided the backdrop for many movies, including this weekend’s animated feature Rio, the story of a domesticated macaw (voiced by The Social Network’s Jesse Eisenberg) from small-town Minnesota who follows the bird of his dreams to the carnival city.
Rio has been a go-to location for filmmakers for years. To paraphrase 70s soft rockers Pablo Cruise, “Whoa oh ohh… When my baby’s budget permits, We go to Rio. De Janeiro.” In The Producers, the crooked wannabe embezzlers plan to fly to Rio once they have bilked Broadway out of a million bucks. The city served as the background to Mickey Rourke’s erotic adventures in Wild Orchid and James Bond was famously attacked by the metal-mandibled Jaws on a cable car at the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in Moonraker.
Although shot completely on location at Paramount Studios on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, Road to Rio, the fifth of the Bob Hope – Bing Crosby “road” pictures, makes good use of stock footage and set decoration to create a suitably exotic setting.
This time out, the guys are vaudevillian stowaways on a Brazilian-bound ocean liner who rescue heiress Dorothy Lamour from an unwanted arranged marriage.
The movie is notable for the music (it contains the last on-screen singing performance by The Andrews Sisters) and Der Bingle’s English lessons to the Portuguese street performers. To help them pass as American he teaches them the hipster phrase, “You’re in the groove, Jackson.”
A grittier look at the Brazillian city is offered in City of God (original title: Cidade de Deus), named after one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods. Following the stories of two boys—one who becomes a photographer, another who adopts a life of crime—it was shot on location in the violent favela. Director Fernando Meirelles later said if he knew the dangers of filming in the Rio favela in advance he wouldn’t have made the film.
Finally, a sunnier look at Rio life comes in Blame it on Rio, a 1984 Michael Caine film Roger Ebert described as having “the mind of a 1940s bongo comedy and the heart of a porno film.”
It’s a dangerous business trying to recapture movie magic, but Hollywood execs keep trying.
Thirty years ago, Dudley Moore introduced us to Arthur, a lovable but drunken millionaire playboy about to married to a wealthy heiress he did not love. “I race cars, play tennis, and fondle women,” he said, “but I have weekends off, and I am my own boss.”
The movie, Arthur, was a giant hit, coming in fourth in the year’s box office, earning four Oscar nods, winning two and spawning the number one hit Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do). It’s available on DVD and holds up very well, which is why it is a bit baffling that a remake of the same name is hitting theatres this weekend starring Russell Brand.
Remakes, of course, are nothing new. Hollywood has been recycling ideas since the beginning. For example, Cecil B. DeMille remade his own 1915 film The Golden Chance as Forbidden Fruit just six years later. The difference is that back then there was no portable archive of movies available on Blu-ray or streaming video. Take a good story, repackage it and hopefully do well at the box office. Later, in the pre-home video years, remakes were a way to breathe some life into older movies.
But times have changed. Now, via Netflix, On-Demand and Blu-ray, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to seek out and see movies like the original Arthur. So what’s the point of the remake? Well, for one thing, it’s a perfect role for the impish Russell Brand and, for another, it’s always great to see his co-star, Helen Mirren, on screen. And who knows? Maybe it’s better than the original. It wouldn’t be the first time.
With so many remakes — past, present and future — perhaps philosopher Raoul Vaneigem was right when he said, “Our task is not to rediscover nature but to remake it.”
Recently a poll found that more than one in five British cinema-goers preferred comedy to any other film style. Action/adventure films placed second, with romantic comedies rounding out the top three. That trio of genres eats up most of the space at the movie theatres, but there are hundreds of other kinds of films.
This weekend, Sucker Punch opens in theatres, a women-in-prison film directed by 300 helmer Zach Snyder, reviving a genre thought to have gone the way of nunsploitation and Pauly Shore movies.
Of all the sub-sub genres, the women-in-prison movie has to be one of the least appreciated… at least in recent years. There was a time when these stories of women in lock up, at the mercy of cruel prison guards, proudly took up screens in drive-ins and second-run houses. With names like Caged Heat and Barbed Wire Dolls, these movies, along with kung fu and blaxploitation flicks, kept many a grindhouse in business.
WIP films have been around since the 1930s, but didn’t become popular until the 1950s when cautionary tales like Agnes Moorehead’s Caged and Ida Lupino’s Women’s Prison mixed and matched hardened criminals with sadistic guards.
It wasn’t until Spanish exploitation filmmaker Jess Franco hit upon the misogynistic recipe of mixing babes, bars and bondage, however, that the subgenre was officially born.
His first WIP movie, 99 Women (featuring the voice of the demon child in The Exorcist, Mercedes McCambridge), sparked a revolution in sexploitation films.
One of the early stars to emerge from the WIP heyday was Pam Grier. Starring in The Big Bird Cage and The Big Doll House—“Their bodies were caged, but not their desires. They would do anything for a man. Or to him.”— Grier became, as Quentin Tarantino called her, “the first female action star.”
No WIP exploitation film ever won an Academy Award, but at least one of their filmmakers did. Today, Oscar -winner Jonathan Demme is known as the man behind Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, but buried deep down on his resume is his big screen debut, Caged Heat. In addition to the obligatory violence and nudity, Demme added a storyline about prisoner abuse through medical experiments.
“Jonathan took that assignment,” remembers producer Roger Corman, “and said: ‘This is gonna be the best one ever made.’ Jonathan took the genre, worked with it, and made something exceptionally good.”
Usually, on-screen E.T.s are presented as either nurturing, evolved beings from another planet, sent here to help mankind, or vicious world domination types, intent on colonizing or destroying Earth. But movies often encounter a third kind of movie alien, the goofy intergalactic visitor.
In this weekend’s Paul, nerd superstars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost play Brit sci-fi geeks on a pilgrimage to some of America’s UFO hot spots. Along the way they help Paul (voice of Seth Rogen), an irreverent alien with a taste for silly gags and Bob Dylan jokes, get back to his home planet. Think of it as E.T. for frat boys and you get the idea.
In the world the movie creates, the idea of a wisecracking alien makes perfect sense, but adding an E.T. doesn’t always fit so well. Take Meatballs Part 2, for instance. The addition of Meathead, a grey, rubber-skinned alien sent to Camp Sasquash to earn an Earth merit badge, hardly improves on the original Bill Murray classic.
The fun -loving aliens of Earth Girls Are Easy are put to better use. The movie’s plot is best summed up by manicurist Valerie (Geena Davis) as she enlists her friend Candy (Julie Brown) to give the aliens a makeover: “A UFO landed in my pool and they captured me but we made friends and I fed them Pop-Tarts and… we’ve got to cut their hair.”
Once shaved, the former red, blue and yellow-furred wookies look a lot like Jeff Goldblum, Jim Carrey and Damon Wayans and are ready to hit the L.A. clubs in search for love. They may be aliens, Candy says, “but they can still be dates!”
In Phil the Alien, Rob Stefaniuk plays a stranded space-shape-shifter who hides in plain sight on Earth as the singer of a Christian rock band. Best line? “I’m staying with a beaver,” says Phil, “down by the brook.”
One of the most memorable movie aliens is Mathesar, the haute-contre voiced Thermian leader played by Enrico Colantoni in Galaxy Quest. Learning everything he knows about Earth from television transmissions, he turns to the cast of a cancelled sci fi show to help save his planet.
Favourite scene? When one of the actors, Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver), explains that TV shows are not “historical documents” she says, “Surely, you don’t think Gilligan’s Island is a…”
“Those poor people,” Mathesar interrupts, moaning in despair.
Superstar astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”
For more than a hundred years, the idea that life could exist on the fourth planet from the Sun has been a sci-fi staple. In 1898 H. G. Wells wrote the most influential Martian invasion novel of all, The War of the Worlds, later adapted by Orson Welles into the most famous radio show ever. In a less serious vein, Marvin the Martian, a cartoon character voiced by Mel Blanc, gave us the catchphrase, “This makes me very angry. Very angry, indeed.” Years after Marvin’s 1948 debut he made another appearance as the mascot on the Spirit rover sent to Mars.
This weekend, Martians invade movie theaters in Mars Needs Moms, the story of little green marauders who kidnap human moms, joining a long list of Mars movies.
The 40-foot tall Martian in The Angry Red Planet, a low budget 1959 flick, was actually a 15-inch tall puppet made from elements of a rat, bat, spider, and crab. The campy creature was later featured on the cover of the Misfits’ album, Walk Among Us.
A few years later, Robinson Crusoe on Mars used Death Valley as a substitute for the barren terrain of Mars and was so low budget it recycled props from other movies. The aliens are seen dressed in the spacesuits from Destination Moon and Martian spacecraft were borrowed from The War of the Worlds.
The year 2000 was a big one for Martian movies. Red Planet, starring Val Kilmer, Carrie-Ann Moss, and Benjamin Bratt as astronauts sent to Mars when Earth’s efforts to colonize the planet are disrupted, features cinema’s first computer voice to be completely computer generated.
Also released that year was Mission to Mars, the Brian De Palma film about the first manned mission to Mars. The movie flopped domestically—it only has a 25 per cent Rotten Tomatoes rating—but was chosen as one of the top pictures of 2000 by Les Cahiers du cinema.
Not all Mars movies are actually set on Mars, however. Despite its title, Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, the comedy duo never actually makes it to the red planet. First their rocket lands in New Orleans, then Venus, where the Venusian women are all played by Miss Universe contestants.
For someone who once famously said, “You would have to kill me and prop me up in the seat of my car with a smile painted on my face to get me to go near Hollywood,” writer Phillip K. Dick certainly has a good Tinsel Town track record. Films based on his novels and short stories have made more than $1 billion, a figure that is bound to increase with the release of this weekend’s The Adjustment Bureau.
Based on Dick’s short story Adjustment Team, the film stars John Slattery as a mysterious Adjustment Bureau agent who must keep star-crossed lovers Matt Damon and Emily Blunt apart. It follows along with at least one tradition typical of Dick’s Hollywood adaptations—a title change.
Blade Runner was based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale became Total Recall and Next, the Nicolas Cage movie, was loosely based on the short story The Golden Man.
“Phil often commented that he couldn’t write good titles,” said Dick’s ex-wife, Tessa. “If he could, he would have been an advertising writer instead of a novelist.”
Blade Runner is arguably Dick’s most famous film, but an early draft of the script so displeased Dick he went on the offensive, deriding it as “Phillip Marlowe meets The Stepford Wives.”
Later, however, when shown 20 minutes of special effects shots, the author came on board, saying the footage of Los Angeles in 2019 looked “exactly as how I’d imagined it.” Ironically, director Ridley Scott later let it slip that he had never even read Dick’s book.
Total Recall also had a similar rocky development from page to stage. Early on, David Cronenberg was attached to write and direct but walked from the project when producers told him they wanted to change the story into something akin to “Raiders of the Lost Ark Go to Mars.” Eventually it was made as an incredibly violent Arnold Schwarzenegger film Roger Ebert called “one of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.”
Despite the fact that Dick died in 1982 of a heart attack, interest in his work remains unabated. Disney is planning an animated adaptation of King of the Elves and Ridley Scott is reported to be producing a mini-series based on The Man in the High Castle for the BBC.
Type in “visitor from hell” on Google and you get about 12,900,000 results in 0.17 seconds. There are ghost stories, a site for a traditional Irish band called Visitor from Hell and stories about unpleasant house guests. But I was more interested in actual visitors from hell. Celluloid demons, tortured souls and devilish characters that somehow manage to slink back from the depths of movie hell to visit us here on Earth.
Nicolas Cage, who emerged from hell in 2004’s Ghost Rider, comes back from the depths for the second time this weekend in a movie called Drive Angry, playing a dearly departed father back on this mortal coil to avenge the death of his daughter. According to that movie, hellions rarely escape and return to Earth, but a quick look at other hellhound films reveals a different truth.
Lots of actors have played Earthbound versions of Satan. In The Private Lives of Adam and Eve, Mickey Rooney played Old Scratch as a piano-playing jokester in red long johns and a straw hat with horns. Tim Curry played the Devil on TV in an episode of Dinosaurs called “Life in the Faust Lane,” and years before he became an Academy Award-winning composer, Danny Elfman did a strange Cab Calloway impression of Satan in the very odd film Forbidden Zone
But the most diabolically playful Devil to hit the big screen has to be Jack Nicholson as Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick. As a mysterious character who grants wishes to three excitement-hungry widows, Nicholson made the wicked character unforgettable, but he wasn’t the first choice for the role. Bill Murray was.
Probably the most famous representation of hell on Earth came in the form of one of the devil’s underlings, Pazuzu, who inhabited the body of poor little Regan (Linda Blair) in The Exorcist. The images of Blair spitting pea soup and doing a 360 head spin have become the film standard for possession.
Not all of hell’s citizens are out to do us harm, however. Director Guillermo Del Toro turned his favourite comic book into two fiendishly fun action movies—Hellboy and Hellboy 2: The Golden Army—starring Ron Perlman as the World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator, a red skinned demon named Hellboy who helps mankind by bumping back against the things that go bump in the night.
A couple of years ago, Liam Neeson reintroduced North American audiences to the joys of the Euro-trashy-thriller. In Taken he played a retired undercover agent who rips Paris apart searching for his kidnapped daughter. “I’ll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to,” he said.
The French tourist attraction was left standing, but he laid waste to the rest of the city in the movie’s wild action scenes.
Neeson is back this weekend in Unknown, another Euro-thriller that sees him cut a swath through Berlin while trying to get to the bottom of a deadly mystery involving identity theft, shadowy assassins and, of course, European carnage.
Euro-thrillers are characterized not just by their exotic locations, beautiful stars and international intrigue but by an attitude. They are about glamour, style and over-the-top stories.
A catchy title is also important. The 1967 Euro-heist flick 28 Minutes for 3 Million Dollars wasn’t much of a movie, but the name was a grabber. Ditto Agent for H.AR.M., an outlandish Eurospy movie with a bad guy who bears an uncanny resemblance to Pee Wee Herman. More fun is an Italian sci-fi comedy caper called Kiss the Girls and Make them Die starring Mike Connors (later famous as detective Mannix on TV) in a James Bond rip-off that’s almost as good as the real thing.
Then, what’s a great Euro movie without a cool score? Movies like 1967’s spy parody Kiss Kiss… Bang Bang featured a playful, loungetastic Bruno Nicolai score that sets the scene perfectly, and Ann Margaret’s songs in Appointment in Beirut can only be described as kitschy-cool.
The next ingredient is a wild premise. It doesn’t get much stranger than Bandaged, a German film about a deranged man who transplants the face of his late wife on his deformed daughter. Or how about LSD Inferno? In it the bad guy—an inventively named Mister X—wants to dose everyone in the world with acid.
After that, all that’s needed is a great villain—like Adolfo Celi and his criminal organisation T.H.A.N.A.T.O.S. in OK Connery—and some gadgets—like Mission Bloody Mary’s rooms that double as microwave ovens. Then top with hot leads like Matchless’s Patrick O’Neal, who plays a secret agent who can turn invisible or Daniela Bianchi, the former Miss Rome who va-va-voomed her way through 15 films, including From Russia with Love, and you get a unique and fun night at the movies.
People have a love for garden gnomes that is gnot gnormal. The colourful terra cotta lawn decorations pop up in everything from Travelocity commercials to R.L. Stine’s Revenge of the Lawn Gnomes to Coronation Street to the Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets videogame and, of course, in tacky garden displays. Since ceramic gnomes were first manufactured in rural Germany by Phillip Griebel in 1847, these strange little creatures have carved out a pointy-hatted niche in popular culture.
This weekend, they take over movie theatres playing the leads in a reimagining of Shakespeare’s most romantic play. In Gnomeo & Juliet, two star crossed gnomes, voiced by James McAvoy and Emily Blunt, must overcome prejudice for their love to bloom.
This is probably the most gnometastic movie to ever hit theatres, but it isn’t the only one. Gnomes have had supporting roles on screen for years.
The most famous movie gnome is the hapless travelling gnome from Amélie. In the film, Audrey Tautou tricks her father into following his dream of touring the world by stealing his garden gnome and having a flight attendant friend send pictures of it posing with landmarks from all over the world.
The worldwide popularity of the film kicked off a resurgence of gnome love, and in 2002 International Gnome Day was instituted and is now celebrated on June 21 in a dozen countries. The travelling gnome also became a popular motif and was featured in the Matthew Good Band video for Anti-Pop, the videogames Half-Life 2: Episode Two and The Sims 3, and on the soap opera Neighbours.
The garden decorations of Gomeo & Juliet aren’t the first animated big screen gnomes. In Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Wallace the inventor installs gnomes in all the gardens in his town to guard against pests. Each garden gnome is equipped with a swivelling head and fire engine red eyes that light up when it senses rabbits or other garden invaders.
Gnomes are used to tragicomic effect in The Full Monty when Gerald (Tom Wilkinson) is distracted by some gnarly dancing gnomes during an all important job interview.
Also amusing are the airborne gnomes of Teenage Space Vampires, but the little creatures take a sinister turn in Slumming, a nasty horror film that is definitely not Better Gnomes and Gardens approved.
Tourists flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s second largest city, to see the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, dance the samba and cheer their favorite team at Maracanã Stadium, one of the world’s largest football arenas.
