Occasional?

It's not about authenticity. It's about non-white actors getting almost no major roles in movies, not even roles that are specifically written as non-white.

Also see Romper Stomper for an awesome performance by young Crowe.

I love the implication that his mother knew she'd better extract that promise before she dies.

"My name is Rollo Tomassi. You killed my father. Prepare to die!"

Time Machine was almost certainly not fun to make. By all reports the shoot was a nightmare.

The Academy picks a poor winner every second year and a terrible one every five, so "Better than the Oscar Winner" is not exactly a small field.

Haven't seen the original, but I can certainly second your recommendation of the remake. Neat little community-devolves-into-bloody-chaos horror flick.

Did anyone ever?

It seems completely unnecessary to point out the comment/avatar synergy, and yet here I am.

I wouldn't use the phrase "heads-up" in any Cronenberg-related context.

Agreed. The Carpenter version works so well because it brings back the paranoia from the original story. I really like the Hawks version. It's a claustrophobic film about a group of people trying to fight a monster. But the Carpenter version is about a group of people trying to figure out which of them is a monster.

I think the other problem with Bad Day at Black Rock is that the story is so dependent on savaging the social mores of its time. It really is a great great movie, but it would take a fantastic scriptwriter to make it work today.

I loved the 3:10 remake until the last act when Russell Crowe starts killing his own men for no ostensible motivation other than "hey, I quite like the guy who is trying to take me into town to get hanged."

Willis can do grizzled and cantankerous all right, but not like Matthau could do hangdog.

I was surprised by how much I liked the new Jungle Book. It's still not really true to Kipling (but the episodic structure of the original stories would never work as a coherent movie), it almost but doesn't quite manage to excise the racism from the '67 version (let alone the Kipling originals!), I have no idea why…

The entire story of the first base was told indirectly in the Carpenter version anyway — right down to the axe in the wall, and knowing halfway through the film that you're seeing the events play out all over again. Frankly, making a prequel could not have added anything useful to the story almost by definition.

Have they? What's to stop the thing infecting the next group of people to investigate?

I don't think anyone's defending Carpenter's merchandising, I think we're saying it doesn't really detract from the film itself and the film's commercial failure means you'd have to go out of your way to experience it anyway.

Even though I prefer the original Japanese Ringu, the Verbinksi version is one of the very few American remakes of international movies that I will defend as a pretty good film on its own merits, but…