Of the two needless men-on-a-mission remakes I read last year, John Fusco’s Seven Samurai was far less objectionable than Scott Rosenberg’s Dirty Dozen; all told, it was probably the guy’s best work since the not-half-bad Young Guns II. What I didn’t like, however, was the audacious use of Akira Kurosawa’s title to sell the umpteenth redo of his classic text.
But Harvey Weinstein isn’t going to let those title rights go to waste, so even though it’s been nearly eight years in the developin’, there will be another Seven Samurai. And, as I wrote last year, it’ll be modernized and dumbed down in the best 1980s tradition (thus rendering the title completely inaccurate, but who’s gonna gripe aside from beard-stroking film critics?). As for when, The Weinstein Company is, according to Variety, targeting fourth quarter ’08 for the start of principal photography, with a probable ’09 worldwide release. Oh, goody.
Before Samurai, there will be Shanghai, Mikael Hafstrom’s World War II drama starring John Cusack, Ken Watanabe and Gong Li. Barring setbacks, Shanghai is scheduled to start shooting in May, and should be completed in time for the ’08 prestige derby. I eagerly look forward to sleeping through it.
Seven Samurai and Shanghai are the products of The Weinstein Company’s $285 million Asian Film Fund, which was amassed as a result of the brothers’ astonishing ability to purchase hundreds of quality Chinese movies and shelve them for years and years. Clearly, Asian cinema has no greater friend than Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Long may they meddle and dilute!
14 comments
Boo. And hiss.
I don't care for the remake – I can ignore it at will and just molest my Criterion collection dvd – but the fact that Bob and Harvey continue to pillage Asian cinema, only to do jackshit with the films, irritates like a motherfucker. Fuck those guys!
Glad to see some semi-love for Young Guns II.
Please don't fuck this up
Two Young Guns II mentions in two different articles in one day. Yoo-hoo, I'll make ya famous!
Fuck the Weinsteins. Fuck them in their fucking hairy fucking asses.
another remake, just watch the original or samurai 7, or the AMERICAN REMAKE a little film called THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. I mean three films, one story. Stop all plans on this, and just release a the FULL THEATRICAL GRINDHOUSE ON BLURAY.
The meddle-and-shelve Weinsteins largely died when they left Miramax. Sure, there's still meddling from time to time, but they've done a better-than-expected job of getting titles released, uncut, since the Weinstein Company got rolling. The problem is with the titles that DIDN'T carry over to The Weinstein Company. Miramax has released precicely ONE of their still-vast HK catalog since the Weinsteins broke north – and it was the abysmal LEGEND OF ZU aka ZU WARRIORS. No PEKING OPERA BLUES, no DRAGONS FOREVER, no repaired reissues of titles they ass-raped in the past like DRUNKEN MASTER II or SUPERCOP. At least the Weinsteins are half-assing it. Miramax isn't doing shit. And Warner Bros. is the most useless of the bunch, having been sitting on the mid-to-late 90s Golden Harvest library since, well, the late 90s – refusing to release any titles beyond the occasional Spanish-dubbed TV screening. THE BLADE and PEDICAB DRIVER are classics that deserve full-on multi-disc special editions (look up the Sammo Hung-Lau Kar-Leung fight from PEDICAB DRIVER on YouTube, I implore you), but they get nothing but Telemundo. Any studio willing to bury gems like Daniel Lee's …TILL DEATH DO US PART and Johnny To and Wai Ka-Fai's seminal TOO MANY WAYS TO BE NO. 1 can lick my unwiped ass.
I'm speechless….
I'm curious as to how modern they'd attempt to make Seven Samurai. I mean will it be all asian actors or all asian actors except BRUCE WILLIS as the leader (oh god no)? And Magnificent Seven did a nice job Americanizing the hostage situation at the opening of Seven Samurai, but how could it be modernized and maintain the significance? For that matter how can it be modernized? 7 mercenaries saving the Sunnis from the Shiites?
Frankly I'm okay with just Seven Samurai and Magnificent Seven. Samurai 7 can die in a fire. It went from decent to awful in 3 eps and then completely lost the point of the story by the end. At least it had sword wielding robots.
Seven Samurai in modern times, without samurai or, apparently, Japanese people. Though, to be fair, the warriors in Kurosawa's original weren't samurai either, they were ronin. And "Ronin" was a decent thriller, even though the characters were only metaphorically ronin.
Ok, let’s see if I can match the cheese factor of the Weinsteins. So the story will be set in the 2000’s and will focus on 7 freelance mercenaries (ronin), and probably of different national origins to further enhance that multi-cultural ‘feel good’ feeling, and they will have to defend some dirt hole in <insert middle eastern country> from <insert some random oppressor>. Oh wait, maybe they could be in Africa liberating some blood diamo…..people from harsh oppressors.
Mercenaries in Africa liberating people from harsh oppressors…tell me this is a Wild Geese remake.
Pompous asses! Why don't you try and find scripts with fresh ideas instead of remaking movies that are already perfect.
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