Selling Sicko, Rocky Horror and more
Tim Curry in The Rocky Horror Picture Show courtesy 20th Century Fox
The cult of Rocky Horror, the selling of Sicko, a remake of 13 Tzameti and more movie questions answered.
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FlickChick.
See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in
Movie Talk!
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Question: Do you think The Rocky Horror Picture Show would still be considered a classic if the midnight screenings with audience participation had never occurred? Lisa
FlickChick: I'm not sure that anyone considers
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) a classic now, but it's a major league cult item and I don't think that would be the case had it not been for the audience participation factor. I can tell you from my own experience that I saw it when it opened and thought it was simultneously dull and camp, and that some of the voices especially
Susan Sarandon's were so unsuited to the music that they were hard to listen to. Granted, I saw the original Broadway production of
The Rocky Horror Show and that definitely colored my take on the movie: It was an electrifying show.
I saw
Rocky Horror Picture Show for the second tome at the Waverly Theater in New York sometime in the late 1970s, and it was an entirely different experience: The energy from the audience made the film play 1000 times better.
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FlickChick.
Question: Have you seen the lastest print and TV ads for "Sicko?" Why in the heck are they marketing it as the comedy of the summer!?! People dying due to lack of health care -- now that's a knee-slapper! How does Michael Moore feel about this? Or is it a ploy to get people into theaters? KM
FlickChick: All movie advertising is a ploy to get people into theaters. Advertising
Sicko as "the documentary that will make you alternately mad and depressed about the state of American healthcare, especially the insurance industry" is not the way to put asses in seats, as they like to say in the industry. Quoting Leah Rozen of
People calling it "Hilarious" much better. And that's not a deceptive pull quote she loved the movie.
I don't know for a fact how
Michael Moore feels about the ad campaign, but I feel perfectly confident saying that someone who's made a career of playing the court jester knows the wisdom of the old showbiz advice "you gotta have a gimmick." The gadfly who makes you laugh stands a better chance of making himself heard than the gadfly who wallpos people with just the facts -- that's why people were so stunned when
An Inconvenient Truth (2006) did the business it did. But the fact that it starred Al Gore did wonders for the film's profile, and with movies -- especially documentaries -- having people know you're out there is half the battle. And again, that's where Moore's sly buffon act is so brilliant: Even people who
despise him are aware of his films.
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FlickChick.
Question: I saw a foreign film that I think was made in the 1970s or '80s It was mainly set in a movie theatre where a western was playing, and a man in the audience is shot. The police investigate and eventually they realize that anyone who sits in a particular seat gets killed by the cowboy actor on screen. Everyone I describe this movie to tells me I'm out of my mind, but I swear I remember seeing it! Help! Eric
FlickChick: People are mean and you're not crazy. Although I've never seen it, it's pretty clear to me that you're describing a made-for-TV Italian movie called
Circuito Chiuso (1978) the tile means "closed circuit." It's been described as a "metaphysical giallo" and the plot seems to be as you describe it: A man is shot and killed while watching a spaghetti Western in a Rome cinema, and as the police investigate, the only answer that makes sense is that the victims were shot by the character onscreen. Believe me, if I ever see a copy anywhere I'm going to snap it up!
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FlickChick.
Question: I've heard there's going to be an American remake of
13 Tzameti, a movie you recommended in your
DVD Tuesday column. My question is, of it was so good in the first place, why would someone want to remake it so soon? It's not the same as remaking an old movie that a lot of people haven't seen or that looks dated because of censorship in the old days. -- Curious
FlickChick: There is an American remake of
13 Tzameti in the works, called simply
13. Which is actually the original title: "tzameti" means "13" in Georgian, so "13 tzameti" actually meats "13 13." But I digress.
The why is pretty straightforward: Americans are allergic to foreign films. I wish it weren't so, but it is. There are American producers who've carved a solid career out of finding and purchasing remake rights to foreign films whose stories they think would play well for US audiences if only they didn't have those pesky subtitles. French comedies have proved fertile ground, though the remakes rarely live up to the originals
3 Men and a Baby(1987), a remake of
3 hommes et un couffin (1985) is a rare exception as have Japanese horror movies.
The good news here is that as things stand now, writer-director Gela Babluani would be remaking his own film, which means it stands a chance of not being homogenized for American audiences. Babluani has also said that if he
does remake
13 Tzameti, he's going to tinker with the story which is good, because it's hard to imagine a filmmaker managing to keep up his or her initial enthusiasm when making the exact same movie for the second time. I think that was part of the problem with
The Vanishing (1993) Dutch filmmaker
George Sluizer's remake of his own
Spoorlos (1988) and
Nightwatch (1998), Danish director Ole Bornedal's remake of his own
Nattevagten (1996) I also think the ending of
The Vanishing had to be altered because of pressure from studio executives who found the original too hopelessly downbeat.
And I think one of the reasons
Takashi Shimizu's
The Grudge (2004) turned out so well is that Shimizu picked and chose choice bits from all the
Ju-On films: The pieces were the same, but they were recombined. And he reworked the story slightly to accommodate the American remake cast; having the film revolve around Americans in Tokyo, with all the cultural dislocation implicit in the situation, put a slightly different spin on the story.
The bad news, at least from my perspective, is that Babluani has talked about doing the remake in color. I think the stark B&W of the original film is part of what makes it so icily disturbing. And rumor has it that a lot of A-list American actors are interested in playing the lead, including
Leonardo DiCaprio,
Joaquin Phoenix,
Tobey Maguire and
Heath Ledger. That would, of course, be good for box office, but I think the fact that the lead in the original is played by an unknown -- George Babluani, Gela's brother lends his situation a more chilling "it-could-happen-to-anyone" air.
Fingers crossed.
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FlickChick.
