Well I'm happy ;-)

According to the Strange Culture blog, George Clooney has been picked to play The Lone Ranger opposite Johnny Depp as Tonto. Someone waft me with a damp newspaper please  . . .

Surely they jest

Apparently, fans are not keen on the idea of Simon Pegg appearing in the latest Star Trek film as the character of Scotty because of his background as a comedy actor. There's a certain irony in that because anyone who has ever heard a real Scottish person speak would say that James Doohan's accent was pure comedy.

Tackling zombies with a pair of Val's knickers

Call me picky, but when I see a glaring error in a film it rather spoils the whole thing for me, and this is the case with the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.

I admit I'm not a fan of zombie films at the best of times, but this one was going along nicely until, for some reason, the writers decided to leave poor, old Andy trapped in the gun shop. I say decided, because that whole sequence was completely unnecessary. As any child who has ever watched Blue Peter knows, Andy could easily have been rescued by the simple implementation of a bosun's chair which could have been constructed using material found around the shopping centre.There would then have been no need for anyone to leave the building. Admittedly, this would have made the film somewhat shorter and less exciting but infinitely more realistic - if you can use that word to describe a piece in which the dead come back to life and attack the living.

I wonder if that is why very few zombie films are made in the UK. Maybe, having spent our childhoods absorbing this kind of knowledge, we would find it only too easy to tackle hordes of brain eating corpses.

Oh, and if you happen to be a zombie, or know any who are feeling a bit lonely, try Zombie Harmony, the free online dating site for the shuffling dead.

A remake of Papillon - is it a good idea?

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, still better late than never.

A Spanish production company plan to remake the 1973 film Papillon which starred Steve McQueen as a man wrongly imprisoned for murder. The original, an adaptation of the allegedly autobiographical novel by Henri Charrière, is viewed by many as a classic, mostly because of the wonderful rapport between McQueen and his co-star Dustin Hoffman.

Having read the book and seen the original film, I'm not sure if a remake is necessary. It would be good for the story to be brought to a new audience because, true or not, it is an amazing adventure. However, I'm not sure that it would be possible to find anyone who could fill the shoes of either McQueen or Hoffman. And, of course, any actor who does step up is bound to find himself being compared, possibly unfavourably. Having said that, I think if anyone could do justice to the role of Charriere it could be George Clooney, but I don't have a clue who could play Dega.

You can read more about the Papillon remake here and here. And if you have any thoughts you would like to share, why not leave a note in the comments.

Are remakes always rotten?

There is a scary rumour doing the rounds that Madonna plans to remake Casablanca. I must admit, as a rule, I'm not a fan of remakes of films which were actually good the first time round. It just smacks of arrogance. Obviously, some films do benefit from advances in technology - for example, John Carpenter's 1982 remake of The Thing from Another World, does improve on the original - but many do not, and Casablanca is in the latter category. So why bother?

I agree with Filmstalker that the idea does sound like a good one but will it work? Maybe it will be a good film, but even so it will still suffer from constant comparisons with the original which is so enormously popular.

What do you think? Are remakes always bad? Do you think this particular one will work? What are your favourite or most disliked remakes?