Everything Old Foreign is New Again
To the entertainment writers and movie critics who have grown cynical in the face of the seemingly endless stream of sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots hitting theaters these days, the recent news that Charlize Theron will be starring in an English-language remake of Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance is just another sign that Hollywood is fresh out of ideas. However, according to the writer of the adaptation, William Monahan — who took the already exceptionally good Chinese crime thriller Infernal Affairs and turned it into a script worthy of Martin Scorsese and the Academy called The Departed — that couldn't be further from the truth:
[Screenwriting is] the only popular literary form we’ve got left. Adaptation is a very traditional and honorable endeavor in writing for dramatic performance, and if people don’t know that it leads to a hell of a lot of originality and invention in the right hands, well, I’m not going to provide a reading list."
Monohan describes screenwriting as "drama in English" and said foreign movie remakes are the equivalent of Shakespeare taking foreign stories and doing his own "departures from the material." While we have a hard time comparing the vast majority of foreign movie remakes to Shakespeare, there have been several exceptional ones over the years and even a few that managed to surpass the foreign originals. Turn off the subtitles and help us choose the best English-language adaptations of foreign movies.
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Posted 12.03.12 by BrentJS 
Arnie wasn't lying when he said, "I'll be back."
The Austrian Oak, Arnie, the Governator, Ah-nuld, ...whatever you call him, Arnold Schwarzenegger is in a class all to himself. Born in Thal, Austria, in 1947, Schwarzenegger rose up from his humble background as the rebellious son of a local police chief in post-War Europe to dominate the world of professional body-building — three Mr. Universe and seven Mr. Olympia titles between 1968 and 1980 — and then he set his sights on Hollywood. Despite one mouthful of a last name and a thick accent, Schwarzenegger tackled Hollywood with the same zeal he put into bodybuilding, becoming Sylvester Stallone's chief competitor for the title of '80s action mega-star, starring in a string of monster hits that, all told, have earned over $3.8 billion at the worldwide box office.
After climbing as high as he could in U.S. politics (limited by the fact that he was born overseas), Schwarzenegger is once again in the entertainment business, popping up in a cameo role in Stallone's ode to he-man action movies, The Expendables, before playing a more significant role in The Expendables 2. Schwarzenegger will team up with Stallone again in the action-thriller The Tomb, take on Mexican drug lords as an aging small-town cop in The Last Stand and is rumored to be involved in some way with a planned fifth movie in The Terminator franchise. Whether Schwarzenegger's second act in Hollywood has a hope of matching his first remains to be seen, but let's look back on the movies that made him great and pick the best ones.
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Posted 10.07.12 by BrentJS