Father Geek here with a story from Dublin... by way of Paris... Ozymandias our ever watchful eyes in the British Isles sent in the following this morning. It concerns remakes of 2 of my absolute favorite Brit Flicks from their golden age of comedy/drama...
Hello People, Edgard here... Ozymandias just sent us
this news about two remakes coming your way.... To be
totally fair, I got this story also from another
source (MiB) this Week-End but - mea culpa - I did not
add it to the Euro AICN News because we had already
covered the possible Robin Williams/Will Smith
collaboration... but there's also a bit more here on
the next Coen film. anyway Ealing Films fans will be
either happy or really pissed at this; here's
Ozymandias (and please MiB, again forgive me)...
Ozymandias reporting in this Tuesday... Stumbled on this whilst surfing the Daily Telegraph's website Click Here To Visit - it's in part a follow up to the story I sent you guys a while ago about the remake of "Kind Hearts and Coronets" but it also includes details of the new Coen Bros flick:
Ozymandias reporting in this Tuesday... Stumbled on this whilst surfing the Daily Telegraph's website Click Here To Visit - it's in part a follow up to the story I sent you guys a while ago about the remake of "Kind Hearts and Coronets" but it also includes details of the new Coen Bros flick:
NOT content with Americanising British military history in films such as U-571, The Patriot, which has led to cries of 'hide the history books', and the forthcoming The Colditz Story, Hollywood is now planning to remake two of Britain's best-loved comedies, the Ealing Film classics The Ladykillers and Kind Hearts and Coronets.
In Kind Hearts and Coronets, racial tension in modern America will replace the gentle satire of the English class system at the heart of the original Ealing film made in 1949.
The black American actor Will Smith has been approached to play the murderous Louis Mazzini, originally played by Dennis Price, the heir born on the wrong side of the tracks who, in a series of hilarious scenes, kills eight members of his distant kinsmen in the D'Ascoyne family, all played by Sir Alec Guinness, who stand between Mazzini and the family fortune and a title.
Robin Williams, the American comic actor with the child-man personality and, in his past, an addiction to cocaine, will repeat Sir Alec's feat by playing the D'Ascoynes. In another improbable rehash of Ealing history, the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, renowned for their touchingly original but frequently violent films, have started writing a new version of The Ladykillers.
The original, directed by Alexander Mackendrick and also starring Sir Alec, along with Peter Sellers, Herbert Lom, Cecil Parker and Katie Johnson, was made in 1955 and was the last of the great Ealing comedies before the studio went into decline. Much of it was filmed in a house in King's Cross.
Sir Alec was one of a team of thieves who passed themselves off as a group of musicians to allay the suspicions of their frail old landlady as they planned a raid on a London rail terminus. When she rumbled them, they decided to bump her off but, typical of the Ealing brand of farce, it was she who survived and they who met nasty ends.
The Coen brothers, who directed films such as Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing and Fargo, are writing the new version for Disney but will not say yet whether the remake will be made in America or Britain or who will be cast in it. The remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets is to be directed by Mike Nichols for Universal.
The director, who hopes to start shooting before the end of the year, says he will change the central theme of the Ealing original. He said, without giving further details: "That was fundamentally about class. The new one will be about race."
The approach to Smith has led Hollywood observers to presume that, in the new version, a black Mazzini will seek revenge on a white family as a historic act of retribution for white America's longstanding mistreatment of blacks. The two remakes received a lukewarm response in Britain.
Sir Alec said: "I am too old now to care greatly and it may be that the new films will be all right. But remakes do have a horrible habit of destroying great pieces of work directed by wonderful men. Those two films had marvellous directors. I do, at least, hope that they give them different names."
Duncan Kenworthy, producer of two of Britain's best recent comic films, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, was equally unimpressed and said remakes were a symptom of the cutthroat nature of the film industry. He said: "When you look at the top US films they are now nearly always properties that audiences already know.
"I think it's a bit of a shame. As for remaking Kind Hearts and Coronets, it sounds like they are using a classic vehicle and not respecting it. It doesn't sound like an idea that has arisen out of respect for the original but out of a desire to make a popular movie. Previously, you had to make a good movie. Now you have to make a big impact on its first weekend of release."
Hollywood's plundering comes at a time when the fortunes of Ealing are about to be revived. The studios were recently bought for £10 million by a consortium comprising Fragile Films, the company that produced the Spice Girls' film Spiceworld, the property developers Manhattan Loft Company, and The Idea Factory, a San Francisco digital development company.
The partners say they will pump £20 million into the studios and make 20 films in the next five years. The first two will shoot shortly. Lucky Break, directed by Peter Cattaneo, who made The Full Monty, has been written by Stephen Fry and is about prison inmates who put on a musical in order to mount an escape. It will be released next year with the credit "Made at Ealing Studios".
The second film is Mel Smith's High Heels and Low Lives, written by Kim Fuller, who wrote Spiceworld. The romance of Ealing, which made other classics such as The Lavender Hill Mob, The Titchfield Thunderbolt, Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore, has never faded.
Mr Kenworthy says his next film, The Parole Officer, starring Steve Coogan, about an honest parole officer who has to commit one crime to prove his innocence in another, is an Ealing film in all but name. He said: "We think it has everything that was so good about the Ealing classics."" H3>This is a tall order to fill. In my mind The Ladykillers is the greatest of the Ealing comedies but maybe the Coens and one of the few teams in the US capabale of doing it justice...
