Cool News
The Return of Jan De Bont!? He's Remaking A...Johnny Cash Film??
Merrick here...
At the world premiere of Verhoeven's STARSHIP TROOPERS, Harry and I met Jan De Bont.
At that point, De Bont was mulling a massive Science Fiction adventure called GALILEO'S WAKE. If memory serves, 'twas a space adventure about a frantic rescue mission to retrieve disaster survivors on a luxury space vessel of some sort. I'd always understood it to be something of a 'POSEIDON ADVENTURE in space,' but that's my own characterization and may not be 1,000 % accurate.
HARRY: I can't wait for your RV in space movie.
DE BONT: It's not an RV! It's more like a giant cruise liner. In space.
HARRY: Isn't that like an RV without wheels? In space?
That exchange is a close paraphrase, by the way, and has very little relevance to the story at hand now that I think about it - other than being anecdotal. De Bont never made that space movie (which DOES sound kinda cool) - but went on to direct THE HAUNTING and TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE before falling off the directorial grid when that was released in 2001.
But now he's back - which we've heard before, so we should take this with a grain of salt until it actually happens. According to THIS piece at Deadline, he'll helm FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE, described thusly by the site:
...the story follows two men as they execute a terrifying bank robbery. One guys holds the bank manager’s wife hostage and the other tells the manager she’ll be killed in five minutes unless he transfers money to an account of their choosing.
The original (1962) FIVE MINUTES TO LIVE, which starred Johnny Cash, can be found HERE. De Bont also directed the far-better-than-it-should've-been SPEED and the nowhere-near-as- good-as-it-should've-been Michael Chrichton adventure TWISTER, and served as the brilliant cinematographer on John McTiernan's DIE HARD and THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, Ridley Scott's BLACK RAIN, and...well...Bill Cosby's infamous LEONARD PART 6. Which maybe wasn't so brilliant.
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Readers Talkback
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Jan. 23, 2012, 9:14 a.m. CST
And HOW is it that you can film Die Hard, Red October and Black Rain and have Leonard Part 6 in your repetoire too???
by Dogmatic
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He wasn't a bad actor at all. Never saw Five Minutes to Live. Will have to check that out.
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Jan. 23, 2012, 9:27 a.m. CST
I think it was Speed 2 which killed his career.Last time i checked,he wanted
by KilliK
to make a movie about talking food.
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I think Simon West directed the first one.
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Very, very good! Bill Paxton should have been given the chance to make another one!
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So whatever happened to it?
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Let's get in the Suck Zone!
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Now this would be a movie I'd watch.
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Seriously, that movie was so awesome. It may have been that I was a bit younger when that came out, but it was pretty big for me. One of those movies that 'got me into movies'.<p>I heard an interesting rumour about a sequel awhile ago, where Bill wanted to do something about the Great Tri-State tornado. I had to look up what it was all about, but fuck, I'd have been first in line for that. Honestly, IMHO, as long as the whole gang is back in it, it could be about literally the same thing.
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Speed was overrated and the rest of our directorial efforts were crap.
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checking out new TV's. Watched the whole damn thing. Truth.
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Jan. 23, 2012, 10:18 a.m. CST
I watched Speed again a few weeks ago on Blu-Ray...
by Nasty In The Pasty
...and it's still awesome (easilly the best of the "Die Hard In A..." 90's action subgenre). Twister was dumber than a bag of hammers, but a breakthrough in special effects. The Haunting was a gigantic chunk of shit that even a Zorro-era Catherine Zeta Jones couldn't make watchable. Never saw his Speed or Tomb Raider sequels. Jesus, he hasn't directed a movie since *2003*?! Loved his DP work on Cujo.
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Jan. 23, 2012, 10:27 a.m. CST
A couple of years ago he shot Stopping Power for two days in Amsterdam
by Thomas
Before being shut down. Mainly John Cusack jogging through the city, i think it was for the title sequence.
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Jan. 23, 2012, 10:38 a.m. CST
Don't blame the cinematographer for Leonard Part 6
by impossibledreamers
Blame Cosby.
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that movie suuuuuucked.
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Five Minutes To Live wasn't that great of a movie, pretty much a simple bank heist. The only reason this movie is remembered at all today is that JOHNNY MAMAFRICKIN' CASH played the villainous main character, and he's literally the only highlight in watching it (And yes, like most musician-starring movies of that era it features him singing a gloriously out-of-place song). That said, the DVDs of this movie that are available today have crappy video and worse audio, so it's possible that with a good remastering I'd appreciate it more. Placing this into modern times, the titular plot device (an alternate title for this movie was DOOR TO DOOR MANIAC) makes little sense - Cash posed as a door-to-door salesman to stage a home invasion - an antiquated occupation that doesn't really exist anymore. The only way this will be any good at all is if they go totally bugnuts crazy with the concept and put ALICE COOPER in the lead role. THAT would be something to watch.
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His work was legendary for action films, Die-Hard is so beautifully shot, this did transfer to his directing efforts, as they all had great action scenes. Sadly, he sucks at nuance, getting strong performances, what made Speed work is that he just took the Die-Hard formula and put it on a bus.
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Nowhere near as good as it should have been? I wonder what else you were looking to get out of that flick? Always thought it strange how De Bont did Speed and Twister, which were two pretty stand out action flicks (it's hard to remember, but Twister pretty much single-handedly brought the disaster pic back into vogue), then slipped into the bland mediocrity of speed 2, haunting, and Lara croft 2. Hope the guy still has some chops to kick around.
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HARRY: I can't wait for your RV in space movie. DE BONT: It's not an RV! It's more like a giant cruise liner. In space. HARRY: Isn't that like an RV without wheels? In space? DE BONT: Uh... No, an RV and cruise liner are practically NOTHING alike. Are you high?
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Don't you think studio heads just will eventually think this is a good idea? They are stuck right now on board games but this seems like a given to me.
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That would be a good setting to unleash some xenomorphs. Have that sucker on a return trip to Gateway Station, with some Colonial Marine special forces unit boarding to stop the ship, and you got yourselves a good set up for an Aliens film.
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FUCKING TORNADOES! And that asshole English guy with a fake hick accent, he doesn't love twisters, he's in it for the money! WOOOH! But in all seriousness, Speed 2 and The Haunting were fucking terrible.
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I was reading an article this morning about a possible tornado in Alabama. They started talking about a f******* F-5 tornado touching down last April. It reminded me of that freaking movie and how they described it as "The finger of God". Ironic how now we are discussing this as opposed to this possibly bad film that may be coming soon.
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Jan. 23, 2012, 1:23 p.m. CST
Watch it with the Twister 3-d comments. They might make another board game movie.
by Tikidonkeypunch
Dammit Johnson, I'm gonna need your left hand on blue, stat!
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Pity he stopped that ages ago. As a director, he wasn't strong enough to overcome / change bad scripts... Speed 2 and Tomb Raider 2 were so bland it was sad. A director should make sure they have strong scripts... especially when they are going through a good patch like De Bont was at the time... Twister was ok - mainly thanks to the effects and action, but the script could have been better. Speed was amazing!
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...I have an old vhs copy of Door to Door Maniac and, no, it isn't any good. But I'd rather see someone remake a bad film and possibly make it better than a good film and make it worse(or just a carbon copy). Who knows, maybe it's just a starting point. The beginning of Dirty Mary Crazy Larry took elements of this and ran with it, turning it into a wild drive in chase movie. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot also had something similar going on. So who knows, maybe it'll be good. Shit, I thought Die hard on a bus sounded pretty stupid as well, so what do I know?
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Jan. 23, 2012, 2:45 p.m. CST
Anyone who says films have gotten more morally bereft in the last 50 years should watch that trailer
by Jaster Mareel
No, it doesn't show anything, but it's nasty and somewhat intense. It woyuld be much more so if either of the actors could, you know, ACT! Reminded me of Straw Dogs a bit.
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The more I dwell on this, the more I realize this needs to happen and Alice Cooper is the only man to play the part. He's one of the few artists alive whose legendary status is nearly as prominent as Cash's, but so different in genre and execution that it could really feel like a new/old twist. A recurring theme of his solo career has been the "Welcome To My Nightmare" idea of a murderous spidery villain, even prominently in his last couple albums. That could translate really nicely. Plus given the chance he can be a hell of an actor. This will never happen... but if it did it would be awesome.
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God I would love to read one of Harry's screenplays. Imagine the laughter.
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De Bont's top 5... 1. Twister 2. Speed 3. Tomb Raider 2 4. Speed 2 5. The Haunting
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... and I hate to keep hammering this point, but WHY DO YOU READ A WEBSITE YOU HATE?? I just don't get it. Why would you come to a website every day, read all the articles, and then comment that the writer (or writers) is shitty, and that their news is old? You know what I do when I don't like a website. I read other websites instead? The internet's a big place, folks.
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Here's an interesting fact: part of the job of websites like this is to look around the internet, find things that their readers might find interesting, and report it here. Why would the contributors of a site assume that you read every other film site? Some of us (myself included) don't read Slashdot, or Bloody Disgusting, or whatever. It's news to us. Why would you click on an article about a thing you already knew?
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