Ask FlickChick

Question: So, what did you think of the Rob Zombie Halloween remake? One of the best, one of the worst, in between? And on that subject, what do you think are the best and worst remakes of classic horror movies? I thought the new Dawn of the Dead was awesome, and I like the John Carpenter version of The Thing even better than the original. Black Christmas and House of Wax were just pitiful. — Mark
FlickChick: Sad to say, Rob Zombie's Halloween wasn't screened for critics. In this instance, I'm keeping an open mind, since studios are notorious for not showing horror movies — good or bad — to critics. My colleague Ken Fox's review will be here starting Aug. 31, 2007, and I'll probably check it out over the weekend. I mean, I've seen every single Halloween film in a theater the week it opened. After nearly 30 years, why break with tradition now?

I'm generally in line with your thoughts. I think as far as sequels that never needed to be made go, Dawn of the Dead is pretty good, though I still prefer the original. Ditto the 2006 Alexandre Aja remake of Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes (1978) and The Ring (2006; Ringu, 1998). I love both John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) and the original The Thing from Another World (1951).

I also love Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, the Vampire (1978), starring Klaus Kinski, which I think does justice and then some to the pioneering 1922 Nosferatu. And while I think the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is the best, I recently rewatched the 1978 remake and it holds up very well. The Invasion (2007, though it sat around for the better part of two years and was extensively reshot before it finally made it into theaters), the newest version, is absolutely awful — it definitely goes on my list of worst remakes.

Gus Van Sant's 1998 do-over of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) just strikes me as pointless. And much though I hated the 2005 remake of The Fog, I don't think much of Carpenter's 1980 original either. I also don't have much use for The Toolbox Murders (1978), and the remake,
Toolbox Murders (2003), is crap.

I think these remakes are fine, but I'd take the original(s) every time:

The Fly, 1986 (The Fly, 1958)

The Grudge, 2004 (the Ju-On series)

The Blob, 1988 (The Blob, 1958)

Finally, for my money these are the most godforsaken horror remakes of all time:

The Wicker Man, 2006 (The Wicker Man, 1973)

Black Christmas, 2006 (Black Christmas, 1974)

The Haunting, 1999 (The Haunting, 1963)

Village of the Damned, 1995 (Village of the Damned, 1960)

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003 (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974)

The Hitcher, 2007 (The Hitcher, 1986)

When a Stranger Calls, 2006 (When a Stranger Calls, 1979)

House of Wax, 2005 (House of Wax , 1953)

Pulse, 2006 (Pulse, 2001)

The Omen, 2006 (The Omen, 1976)

Please weigh in!

Question: I've been reading about the new movie Bachelor No. 2 starring Dane Cook. Is it just me or doesn't the plot seem exactly the same as Mr. Fix It, which was just released in 2006 starring David Boreanaz. What's the deal? — Michele

FlickChick: Welcome to the wonderful world of Stag (1997) and Very Bad Things (1998).

But first, yes, the general plot of Bachelor No. 2 does seem to bear a striking resemblance to that of Mr. Fix It. The Baseline StudioSystem logline for Bachelor, a big-budget comedy directed by Howard Deutch and scheduled for 2008 release, is "Tank [Dane Cook], a guy hired to take girls on horrible dates so they crawl back to the boyfriends they dumped, struggles with his libido and the meaning of friendship when his best pal needs his help with the girl [Alexis, played by Kate Hudson] who dumped him." Tank's dilemma, as I understand it, is that he falls in love with Alexis. The direct-to-video Mr. Fix It is about Lance Valenteen (David Boreanaz), who makes a living setting up women who've recently dumped their boyfriends — researching everything about them, bumping into them "accidentally," getting them to fall for him and then treating them so badly that they go back to their exes. Then he falls for his current gig, played by Alana De La Garza. No question, the premises sound awfully similar.

And that's how we get back to the big-budget Very Bad Things — directed by Peter Berg and starring Cameron Diaz, a pre-Entourage Jeremy Piven, Jon Favreau and Christian Slater — and the made-for-cable Stag, with Andrew McCarthy, Mario Van Peebles and a pre-Entourage Kevin Dillon. The premises sound awfully similar: In both, the friends of a regular guy (Faveau in VBT and John Stockwell in Stag) arrange a wild bachelor party with strippers. A stripper is accidentally killed, and the black sheep friend (Slater in VBT, McCarthy in Stag) convinces the others that the only way to make sure that all their lives aren't ruined is to hide the body and pretend it never happened. In the aftermath, the friends turn on each other. Stag was made in 1997, a full year before Very Bad Things, and when VBT was about to open, the rumors began spreading that it had been ripped off from the smaller movie. In this case I've seen — and, as it happens, liked — both, and the fact is, the premise is the same but the films aren't. You couldn't tell from a prerelease synopsis, which is designed not to give everything away, but the story that takes up the whole film in Stag is actually only the first act of VBT.

So for the moment I'm going to reserve judgment on Bachelor No. 2 and Mr. Fix It. And if the movies do turn out to be similar throughout, you can bet there's a lawyer waiting to get right on it!

Question: Is the Golden Compass movie based on the first book or the whole trilogy. Also, have you read it and if so, did you like it? — Jason

FlickChick: The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, directed by Chris Weitz and executive-produced by his brother Paul (their previous collaboration was 2002's About a Boy), is adapted from the first book in Philip Pullman's acclaimed "His Dark Materials" trilogy. If it's any kind of success, I have no doubt that we'll be seeing The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass.

I have to confess that I've only read The Golden Compass, though I bought the entire set on the strength of its reputation. It's well written and smart, but it just didn't grab me, though I'm very taken with the warrior polar bears. I do, however, have to say that I've never been a fan of epic fantasy fiction — I got through two of the Harry Potter books, was left so cold by The Hobbit that I never cracked book one of to the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the only reason I've read as many of the Chronicles of Narnia as I have is because they were around when I was a child and beggars can't be choosers.

Question: I was a great fan of Jeffrey Hunter. I would like to know where and what his children are doing now. I think Steele is in film production, but that's all I know. Will you help me? Thanks. — Carolyn

FlickChick: An up-and-coming star of the 1950s whose movie credits include The Searchers (1955) and The King of Kings (1961), Jeffrey Hunter is today probably best know for having played Captain Christopher Pike in the first pilot for Star Trek. Born in New Orleans in 1926, the future Hunter — then Henry Herman McKinnies Jr. — was raised in Wisconsin. A high school athlete, he did a one-year hitch in the Navy (1945-46), graduated from Northwestern University and later attended UCLA. He was rechristed "Jeffrey Hunter" by 20th Century Fox and began his movie career in 1950; in an era of pretty boys ranging from Robert Wagner to Tab Hunter, he was one of the most handsome.

Hunter was married three times. He had one son, Christopher, from his marriage to actress Barbara Rush, and two biological sons — Todd and Scott — with his second, actress Joan "Dusty" Bartlett. Hunter also adopted Bartlett's son from her previous marriage, Steele Richard Bartlett. Hunter got married for the third and last time in 1969, to General Hospital actress Emily McLaughlin; they had no children and he died a few months after their wedding.

Christopher Hunter is a photographer, but that's all I could find out about him — except that his half sister on his mother's side is Fox News reporter Claudia Cowan. Steele Hunter (what a name!) is a grip and works steadily in movies; grips maintain and set up equipment on movie sets — it's a skilled technical position. Todd — who was named Henry Herman McKinnies III after his grandfather but called "Todd" from childhood — graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1992 and is a lawyer. He practices in Madison and seems to specialize in employment law. I couldn't unearth anything about what Scott does; if anyone knows, please speak up.

Jeffrey Hunter died during surgery at the age of 46 of complications from a stroke and the fall he took immediately after; an on-set accident some months earlier may have contributed to the stroke (though he had already had one earlier) and the fact that Hunter drank heavily during his later life may have contributed to general debilitation. Barbara Rush is still alive and working; her most recent credits include several episodes of TV's 7th Heaven. Emily McLaughlin died in 1991 and Joan Bartlett died in 2005.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

Last week it seemed that everything was conspiring to remind me of A Simple Plan: seeing the trailer for the Coen brothers' upcoming No Country for Old Men (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel), stumbling across Stephen King's rave review of Scott B. Smith's second novel, The Ruins, having an argument about what The Bible says is the root of all evil. So rather than ignore the signs and portents, it's my DVD Tuesday pick.

Directed by Sam Raimi and based on Smith's debut novel, A Simple Plan is a terrific example of what may be my favorite kind of thriller, the kind where someone makes a mistake that snowballs until he or she has lost everyone and everything that matters, and all efforts to make things right just make them worse. It's the quintessential noir plot, and while the poor, put-upon victim of cruel fate seems fated to get trapped in some cosmic web, the fact is he or she consistently — masochistically, it often seems — makes exactly the wrong decision, which transforms it from the afflictions of Job into something more psychologically interesting.

Midwestern brothers Hank and Jacob Mitchell (Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, before he got all weird and scrawny) have both stayed in the small, semirural community where they were raised, but otherwise their lives have diverged. Hank went to college, became an accountant, got married and bought a small house with his wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda). Jacob, who's mildly mentally challenged, stayed with their parents on the failing family farm; after their deaths, the farm was sold and he became an unkempt near-recluse whose only friend is mean, white-trash drunk Lou. Hank loathes Lou and doesn't spend much time with Jacob, but it's just his luck to be with both of them when he stumbles across a small plane crashed in a patch of isolated woods. There's a gym bag full of money in the hold — $4.4 million — and the pilot is long dead, so they decide to keep the money; after all, they tell themselves, whoever it belonged to clearly didn't come by it legally. Hank has a plan that will keep them from getting caught, and it starts with telling no one, doing nothing with the cash for a year and then leaving town to spend it. Naturally, Lou tells his girlfriend (who is, if anything, even dumber and trashier than he is), Jacob becomes fixated on buying the one thing Hank insists he can't have — the Mitchell farm — and the seeds of suspicion take root in the fertile soil of personal enmity, class resentment, and alcohol-fueled paranoia.

Amazingly enough, Raimi's bleak, bloody movie is actually a little less dark than Smith's original novel. But it's plenty dark enough, and Paxton (who's finally found the success he deserves in TV's Big Love) and Thornton, who first worked together in the similarly themed One False Move (1992), are phenomenal together. Fonda's metamorphosis from supportive, pregnant spouse to small-town Lady Macbeth is just plain chilling. So check it out and remember the doomed loser's motto: "Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all." — Detour (1945)

Things to consider:

What's your favorite type of thriller and why? Examples?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Taxi Driver
Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Question: Much has been made about Paul Greengrass' handheld-camera work in The Bourne Ultimatum, and the fact that both Supremacy and Ultimatum have been hits makes me certain that filmmakers will keep doing it. But I can't be the only person who gets nauseous watching these films. The incessant movement is difficult to watch. Rarely does the camera stop long enough for the viewer to process a shot... even the quietest moments can't be still. Matt Damon is great and I'd like to say I enjoyed the movies, but when I have to go home and take something for headache and nausea, that can't be good. Am I alone in this? — Daryl
FlickChick: You're far from alone — some critics and a lot of moviegoers have complained about the restless, shaky handheld-camera work and superfast editing in The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) in particular and movies in general.

Filmmakers generally use restless, jittery camera work to establish a you-are-there atmosphere; sometimes it's meant to look as though there's an amateur behind the camera, other times it's just meant to look nervous and edgy. Combining this kind of camera work with rapid-fire editing is a natural for action sequences if you want audiences to feel as though they're in the thick of it, experiencing the same sensory overload as the characters rather than sitting back and watching things unfold at a distance. There's also a line of thinking that the combination of a nervous camera and rat-a-tat editing goes a long way in covering weak performances, lazy staging and inadequate production design; by the same token, it can be a real boon to filmmakers working on low budgets by turning what could be liabilities produced by not having the money to create a polished look into assets — look at The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Cavite (2005). Among mainstream filmmakers, Tony Scott is a repeat offender: Man on Fire (2004) and Deja vu (2006) are real eyeball rattlers and I actually turned off Domino (2005): I wouldn't say I felt nauseated, but it was giving me a headache. But I think the technique works really well in the Greengrass Bourne films, as well as in his United 93.

The only time I ever remember feeling ill because of rapid camera movement was during Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives (1992), and I think a lot of that was that I was forced to sit very close to a very wide screen. Being forced to whip my own head back and forth to follow the action is what did it, and that was actually less about the fact that the camera work was deliberately unsteady as it was Allen's choice to use swish pans in a domestic drama.

Readers: Weigh in, please.

Question: I was wondering if you could help me with this movie title: All I remember about the movie is that it was on TV a lot in the '80s when I was a kid and it had some sort of premise like the movie Rat Race. I remember these groups of people all searching for clues to money. The only parts I think I remember correctly involve a bag of money under a bridge in a fish tank and a clue or something underneath a bridge in a bird's nest. Any ideas? — Phillip
FlickChick: It could be the all-star flop Scavenger Hunt (1979), but I think the better bet is Midnight Madness (1980), which I know got heavy TV play in the 1980s and has a substantial fan club as a result. But I haven't seen it and it's not on DVD, so I can't swear to it.

Question: After seeing Hairspray I was wondering what other film musicals are based on older, nonmusical films that were remade into stage musicals. Little Shop of Horrors comes to mind, but I can't think of any others. — Eric
FlickChick: There aren't a lot. Little Shop of Horrors (1986) is indeed one: It started life as Roger Corman's microbudget horror-comedy The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), became the Off Broadway musical Little Shoppe of Horrors in 1982 and then went back to the screen with new tunes intact.

And The Producers, of course: First came Mel Brooks' aggressively un-PC 1968 film, then the massively successful 2001 Broadway musical and finally the shockingly charmless 2005 musical film. Bob Fosse's 1975 musical theater piece Chicago is rooted in the nonmusical play by Maurine Watkins, which was filmed twice — as Chicago (1927) and Roxie Hart (1942), with Ginger Rogers — and then filmed as a musical in 2002.

These examples aren't quite the same, but they share musical/nonmusical and stage/screen connections:

The Women was originally a long-running, nonmusical Broadway play (1936), then a 1939 nonmusical movie and then a movie musical under the title The Opposite Sex (1956).

The French/Italian nonmusical film La Cage Aux Folles (1978) became a Broadway musical in 1983, but was then filmed as the nonmusical The Birdcage (1996). And the 1956 French stage musical Irma La Douce moved to Broadway — still a musical — in 1960, but became Billy Wilder's nonmusical film (1963). Star Shirley MacLaine was, ironically, then best known for her work in stage musicals like The Pajama Game.

PS: A coworker reminded me of Phantom of the Opera, which was made several times as a straight horror film before finding new life as a 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. It was then made into a movie musical in 2004. Thanks, Gerry!

Question: I have been hearing about a movie called Solstice, starring Elisabeth Harnois and Shawn Ashmore, for about a year now. Have you heard anything about this movie, and if so, do you know when it is supposed to be released? Also wanted to say how much I love the podcast!! — David H.
FlickChick: Thanks, David! Solstice, a New Orleans-set remake of Danish director Carsten Myllerup's 2003 Midsommer, wrapped in May 2006. It was directed by Daniel Myrick, who codirected The Blair Witch Project (1999) and subsequently shot The Objective, which is in post-production. Solstice is being released by Endgame Entertainment and I've seen references to an October 2007 release date, which certainly makes sense for a horror movie. The official site has nothing on it except Myrick's blog, which hasn't been updated since August 2006. I have a call in to Endgame, and I'll keep you posted.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

DVD Tuesday: Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and New York City's Heart of Darkness

Did the world really need a new collector's edition of Taxi Driver (1976)? Probably not, but it's a great excuse — as though one were needed — to recommend a great film. And on top of Taxi Driver's intrinsic merits, watching it again was a fascinating reminder of how much New York City has changed since the mid-1970s. Check out Columbus Circle sans the massive glass slabs of the Time Warner Center, visit the now-vanished Bellmore Cafeteria, and witness the grunginess of Central Park's unrefurbished Maine Monument and the sheer sleazy glory of Times Square before Disney scrubbed the life out of it. There's a shocker in every scene, and that's before Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) starts his personal cleanup campaign. I remember that New York vividly and seeing Taxi Driver brings it all back.

For anyone who doesn't know the plot, it chronicles the mental disintegration of insomniac Vietnam veteran Travis, a loner whose stint as a late-night cabbie drives him right into his own personal hell. Written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorsese (it's one of the many films for which he should have gotten that Oscar), it's a feverish, mesmerizing chronicle of urban isolation and features not one but three unforgettable performances. First and foremost, there's De Niro's tragic, terrifying Travis: Everyone knows the "You talkin' to me" speech — it's great at parties. But in context it's chilling enough to raise your neck hair, no matter how many times you've seen it. Given the mighty heap of hack De Niro has spent the last decade amassing, a look at Taxi Driver or Raging Bull (1980) is a bracing reminder of what he was. Everyone knows now that Jodie Foster is an accomplished actress, but back then she was a 14-year-old child star looking to transition to adult roles — which she did, ironically, by playing Taxi Driver's 12-year-old prostitute, Iris Steensma. And Harvey Keitel had been kicking around the business for a decade when he got his teeth into the role of Sport, Iris' pimp: And he made every moment of it count.

In its day, Taxi Driver was a fiercely divisive film: For every voice calling it a masterpiece, there were complaints that it glorified violence and painted the deranged Travis as a populist hero. I'm in the former camp: Travis' rampage buys him a few minutes of tabloid fame and the gratitude of Iris' small-town parents, but I think it's a willful misreading to imagine that either Scorsese or Schrader glorifies it.

Things to consider:

• Taxi Driver's New York is the New York of Travis' mind. How does his point of view affect the way he sees the city?

• Does depicting violence and insanity on screen necessarily make them attractive?

• Foster was 14 when she played Iris. Is it inherently distasteful to cast young performers in controversial roles, an argument raised most recently apropos the Dakota Fanning film Hounddog (2007)?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Renaissance
Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Question: Someone told me there was a real Jaws guy. Were they messing with me? — Jake
FlickChick: I'm guessing someone told you Quint, the crusty old shark fisherman played by the late Robert Shaw in Jaws (1975), was based on a real person. And he or she was right: It's widely acknowledged that Peter Benchley modeled Quint on Brooklyn-born fisherman Frank Mundus, nicknamed the "Monster Man," and some accounts claim that the seed from which Jaws later sprang was planted when Benchley read a newspaper article about Mundus hauling in a huge great white shark off the coast of Long Island in the early 1960s.

Mundus says he took Benchley out on fishing trips and that Benchley was fascinated by the way he "harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track the shark while it ran to exhaustion." But Benchley, who died in 2006 at the age of 64, never named Mundus — now in his early eighties — as his inspiration. In fact, he was known to actively deny it, a fact that apparently still rankles Mundus. "If he just would have thanked me," Mundus recently told the New York Times, "my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in." Mundus has his own website, has been the subject of at least two books, and cowrote his autobiography, Fifty Years a Hooker, with his wife Jeanette.

Mundus retired to Hawaii in the early 1990s but recently returned to Long Island at the behest of sibling shark buffs Sean and Brooks Paxton, who are trying to set up a reality show at New Line Television. In what can hardly help but strike many as a piercing irony, Monster Man Mundus, worried by dwindling populations and the ever-smaller sharks sportfishermen were pulling in, is now a vocal conservationist who encourages catch-and-release fishing.

Question: I was wondering if you could help me with a movie title. I watched it when I was in elementary school, which would have been in the '80s. In the movie there was a "monster" in the middle of a lake, and at the end they discovered that it was actually a crane that would get the air built up underneath it and lift up. — Julie
FlickChick: You saw The Quest/Frog Dreaming (1986), an Australian movie starring Henry Thomas, little Elliott of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Given the number of questions I get about it, it must have been shown regularly on TV in the 1980s. Though the film has never been released on DVD in the U.S., used videotapes aren't hard to find.

Question: I was recently listening to the song "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" in its entirety and trying to figure out what it means. Do you know if this song was originally written for a movie? — Tracey
FlickChick: "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" was written by the legendary Broadway team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for the 1941 show Pal Joey, adapted from the novel by John O'Hara. It was made into the 1957 film starring Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. The song is about the bittersweet experience of being a worldly, experienced older woman thrown into an erotic tizzy by someone totally sexy and so the person you shouldn't be involved with. Hence:

"I'm wild again/Beguiled again/A simpering, whimpering child again/Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I"

and:

"Seen a lot/I mean I lot/But now I'm like sweet 17 a lot/Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I"

and:

"When he talks he is seeking/Words to get off his chest/Horizontally speaking/He's at his very best."

Oh yeah, that guy.

"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" has been covered by everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Rufus Wainwright.

Question: Which Halloween movies do you recommend watching before the Rob Zombie version hits theaters on Aug. 31? Thanks! — Jason
FlickChick: Halloween (1978). I think the rest of them are crap and believe me, I saw every blessed one. In theaters. When they opened. Some have moments, but really, it's all downhill after John Carpenter's original, which made me afraid of being alone in my own house when I didn't even live in a house — I grew up in an apartment. And I was in college.

Fan though I was and am of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Halloween is the nightmare-maker. I should also say that while I see no need whatsoever for a Halloween 1.5, if anyone had to make one, I'm thrilled it's Rob Zombie, who knows and loves horror films with the passion of a true believer and whose The Devil's Rejects (2005) I consider the best 1970s horror film made 30 years after the fact.

Question: I have been stumped about an old black-and-white movie about an alien spacecraft found in a cave. The aliens inside looked like 3-foot grasshoppers that had been in pods; there was even a part where they watched a recording on the ship of the alien grasshoppers jumping around on their planet. The ship gave off some radioactive electricity; there was a giant alien head that the main male character rode a giant crane boom into, grounding it and dying in the process. Any ideas? — Mike H.
FlickChick: Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth (1968). The alien grasshoppers are discovered in a subway station — Hobbs End — that's undergoing renovation, and the ship is at first mistaken for an unexploded World War II bomb, not an uncommon occurrence in London more than 20 years after the end of WWII. The film is in color and there's no movie-within-the-movie of the aliens' hive life on their planet; what you're seeing is a psychic link established by modern-day scientist Barbara Shelley (of Hammer films fame). But you've got the gist. This was the third U.K. sci-fi feature built around the exploits of rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy in the first two, Anthony Quayle in the third), following the melancholy Quatermass Experiment/The Creeping Unknown (1955) and the excoriating Quatermass II/Enemy from Space (1957). I highly recommend all three, though the bleak, relentless cynicism of Quatermass II makes it my favorite.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

DVD Tuesday: The animated Renaissance unfolds in gorgeous black-and-white, and if it owes a debt to Blade Runner, well, borrow from the best!

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

I can never get too much of Blade Runner (1982), but until the next absolutely, positively definitive DVD edition comes out — which would be Dec. 18, with a theatrical preview starting Oct. 5 — I'm recommending Renaissance, a black-and-white animated science-fiction feature that owes Blade Runner a deep debt without being a rip-off.

The year is 2054, and Paris is in thrall to a company called Avalon, whose animated billboards promise "health, beauty and longevity" rather than old-fashioned "liberty, equality and fraternity." Brilliant Avalon researcher Ilona Tasuiev has been kidnapped and Barthelemy Karas, who rose from the streets to become a top cop, is assigned to find her. Suspicion at first centers on her sister, family black-sheep Bislane; they had a public fight right before Ilona vanished. But Karas quickly realizes that Ilona's abduction had something to do with her work on a top-secret immortality project, and with an earlier Avalon initiative that went terribly wrong.

If ever a film tripped the dark fantastic, it's Renaissance, which manages to be even more purely black-and-white than Sin City — and that's saying something. It's also proof positive that, Paul Simon to the contrary, everything does not look "worse in black-and-white": It looks better. Cleaner, crisper, sexier, more sleekly menacing. Renaissance's use of rotoscoping — tracing over live-action footage — produces phenomenally naturalistic movement; you can see the shift and roll of real flesh over bone. But it also captures rare nuances of performance: It's animated, but there's nothing cartoonish about it.

Some people find the story simplistic, but it worked for me, especially because the film's glossy, futuristic Paris is such a fully realized character, an elegant old lady whose flawless bones only look better by comparison with the hard, clean lines of glass sidewalks and soaring skyscrapers. And when it rains or snows, the result is simply breathtaking. Renaissance is available both in the dubbed American version — which features a top-notch voice cast that includes Daniel Craig, Romola Garai, Ian Holm and Jonathan Pryce (apparently in the future, the English have reclaimed their language) — and in the original French, with subtitles. I prefer the subtitles version, and believe me, you'll never have any contrast problems with them!

Things to consider:

What's the difference between science fiction in the Star Wars vein and the Blade Runner school of sci-fi?

Do you have any favorite animated science-fiction movies? I love Fantastic Planet (1973), for example — curiously, also French, not a country I associate with a large sci-fi output.

Do you believe that most science fiction holds up a mirror to present-day problems or issues, or is it really all about the robots and futuristic geegaws?

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Blowup
Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Ask FlickChick: The difference between movies and films, songs in movies and more

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

Question: I was wondering: What's the difference between a movie and a film? I know that if anybody can tell me, it will be you. Thank you for your response. — Jay

FlickChick: Strictly speaking there's no difference. Movie and film are literally synonymous. But nuance and implication are everything, and the word movie — the shortened form of "moving picture" — usually implies an entertainment: Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Charade (1963). Film — which, curiously, is the more literal word, coming as it does from the physical material of the medium — has come to suggest art: The Seventh Seal (1957), L'Avventura (1960), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). "Picture" has always carried a hint of bizspeak to me, "motion picture" (almost always preceded by the word "major") smacks of a kind of middlebrow pretension, while "the cinema" is a favorite of the art-house crowd. Flick (short for "flickers") always strikes me as dismissive: A flick isn't just entertainment, it's throwaway entertainment.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: Hi, love your column and look forward to it every Thursday. This may be a bizarre question, but when I was a young kid, my mom and dad took me to the drive-in. I don't remember the first movie, but the second was about these tough women that went around killing men. All I remember was these women showed up at a farm; the farmer had a big strong son who was mentally slow, and at one point they were digging up a tree stump — the son pushed while a mule pulled. Then one of the women sat on top of the son and I think was having sex with him. He starts to yell that she's making him feel funny and she shoots him in the head while her friends are holding the dad hostage and making him watch. Was there ever such a movie or did I somehow get something mixed up as a kid? If it was a movie, I'm glad it didn't scare me about sex. Anyway, you have answered several of my questions before and I hope you could answer this one. — JR

FlickChick: Your parents took you to see Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) when you were a child.... I'm not sure whether that's utterly cool or kind of horrifying. Granted, they probably went for the first movie and had no idea what the second was going to be, and maybe they thought you were asleep by the time it came on. In any event, it is indeed about three busty, ass-kicking strippers — Varla (the formidable Tura Satana), Rosie (Haji) and Billie (Lori Williams) — who drift around making trouble, which often includes killing men. And I'm glad it didn't scare you to death about sex, because I can certainly see how it might have!

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I recently saw Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye on TV. I really enjoyed it and was struck by the very effective use of the single theme song throughout the movie. Are there other movies that use a single song so effectively to help establish atmosphere? — Sue

FlickChick: You're right, Altman's use of John Williams (yes, that John Williams) and Johnny Mercer's "The Long Goodbye" is both unusual and striking (my favorite version of the song is the muzak version Elliott Gould hears in the supermarket). Instrumental leitmotifs are more common in movies: Think of the themes from Star Wars (Williams), Rocky (Bill Conti), the James Bond films (John Barry) or The Pink Panther (Henry Mancini).

But I can think of a few songs that are used repeatedly in films to establish and reinforce atmosphere:

Damien Rice's "The Blower's Daughter" in Mike Nichols' Closer (2004)

Screamin' Jay Hawkins' "I Put a Spell on You" in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

Erroll Garner's "Misty" in Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me (1971)

Dave Berry's "The Crying Game" in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992)

Jack Lawrence's "Linda" in Dan Klores' documentary Crazy Love (2007)

Ary Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil" in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985)

Kay Starr's "Wheel of Fortune" in Peter Medak's Let Him Have It (1991)

Readers, other suggestions?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I thoroughly enjoyed Daniel Handler's novel The Basic Eight and remember hearing recently that the film rights had been picked up. Do you have any more information on this? What is the status of the film version? — Tom

FlickChick: Unfortunately, Handler's The Basic Eight, a satirical high school novel written before he transformed himself into Lemony Snickett, is in turnaround. That means that the producing company — in this case New Regency Productions — has decided not to go ahead with the project. In theory that means the rights holders can go out and find someone else to bankroll the property. But in practice it usually means the project is dead. I don't know why The Basic Eight fell apart. Perhaps you could console yourself with the deeply twisted Rick (2003), a very dark fable inspired by Rigoletto. Handler wrote the original screenplay just after The Basic Eight, in part because his agent thought having an original screenplay to show would make it easier to sell movie rights to Basic Eight. Rick is incredibly mean and clever.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

DVD Tuesday: Alienation, miniskirts and Swinging London: The late Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-up wraps a mystery in an groovy existential enigma.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

My tiny tribute to the late Michelangelo Antonioni – who died last week on the same day as fellow film great Ingmar Bergman – is making Blow-up (1966), the film that spaked many a heated argument about what it all meant, this week's DVD Tuesday pick. And of course, the photo-shoot sequence featuring star David Hemmings and pioneering superstar model Veruschka regularly turns up on lists of the sexiest movie scenes, so there's something for everyone.

Based loosely on a short story by Argentine experimental writer Julio Cortazar, it's set in London in the mid-1960s, when London's scene — music, fashion, art, clubs — was the coolest in the world, Blow-up revolves around a successful fashion photographer (coldly impish Hemmings) who discovers evidence of a murder when he blows up the casual snapshots he took in a public park of a young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) apparently meeting her older boyfriend. Or has he? By the time he's blown up the tiny part of the picture where he thinks a body lies so it's large enough to examine, the grain is so big that the image looks like an abstract painting. Maybe he's just seeing a body because he thinks that's what's there. And in circles where consciousness altering drugs, head games, distrust of the apparent and general disconnection are de riguer -– which is to say his circles – the story about the murder in the park is a hard sell.

The first time I saw Blow-up was a little more than a decade after it was made, which was long enough for all that counter-culture, mod London stuff to look dated to me. Almost 30 years after that, the grooviness is distant enough that it doesn't bother me and the film's sense of atmosphere of hipster alienation seems prescient rather than passé (I still hate the mimes, but now I think you're supposed to hate the mimes). Star Hemmings, who died in 2003, never looked better than in Blow-up (he became a positive gargoyle as he got older) or fit a role better than photographer Thomas, reportedly based on David Hamilton, a photographer turned filmmaker famous (or perhaps notorious) for his gauzy, eroticized images of young women. Hemmings was one of the iconic faces of '60s movies, as was Redgrave, whom you may recognize as Julia's (Joely Richardson) self-centered, pop-psychologist mom on Nip/Tuck (Joely is Redgrave's real daughter, as are movie actress Natasha Richardson). Together they were the epitome of hipness – beautiful, bored, soul sick and so, so impossibly cool. Hidden in a small scene involving two would-be models you can see Jane Birkin, soon-to-be international style icon, in one of her earliest roles: The insanely sought-after Hermes Birkin bag was named for her. And the club band is The Yardbirds, featuring both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck.

Blow-up's weightier elements, its themes of alienation, disgust at a culture of surfaces and reckless rejection of the reassuring, regimented world of previous generations, are obvious. Not because Antonioni was crude, but because he was ahead of the curve: What was radical then is all too apparent now. Discuss over espresso.

Things to consider:

Who do you consider the greatest filmmakers? When did you first see their films and what impression did they make?

In the 1950s and '60s, many moviegoers sought out challenging films, and Hollywood sought out people like Antonioni — MGM financed Blow-up in hopes of appealing to a younger audience that was rejecting what we now call "popcorn movies" as stupid and irrelevant. What's changed?

Does entertainment inherently mean "turn your brain off"?


Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Hot Fuzz
300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Ask FlickChick: The lowdown on movie cliches, Jenny Wright is missing and more movie questions...

Question: Some friends and I were discussing movie clichés the other day and I was wondering which ones you hate the most. Some of the ones we discussed were:

• The vehicle chases where they always end up near some train tracks and the pursued just makes it across ahead of the speeding train and eludes the pursuer. I mean, what are the odds?

• The girl or guy is running away from the ax/chainsaw/machete-wielding maniac, jumps in their vehicle and it doesn't start. I mean, my car almost always starts.

• All bombs are defused with less than 10 seconds to go. Just once I'd like to see a bomb that had 12 hours left so the hero has time to order a pizza, call his girlfriend and then defuse it.

So, which ones really make your eyes roll back into your head? — Steve "Butthead" Mross

FlickChick:

• The dog that never dies (not that I want the dog to die, but half the population of New York could get sucked into a cosmic sinkhole and the dog would still escape).

• The fireball that throws the hero towards the screen but leaves him with no more damage than a couple of bruises.

• The suspense-dissipating cat in the closet ([Mrrrrrrrooooooooowwwwwwwwwwww]).

• The shadowy area at the upper right-hand side of the screen during a suspense scene — the one someone or something is going to appear out of.

• The audition montage and its cousin, the bad-date montage.

• The barefoot, wounded running girl who keeps falling down and yet stays a few steps ahead og the psychokiller pursuing her.

• The bad guys who can't shoot straight.

• The villain who talks and talks and talks when he should just kill the hero before the hero gets the drop on him, and the victim who finally overpowers the bad guy and doesn't make goddamned sure he's dead before turning away.

• The female cops/detectives/Secret Service agents in high heels (ask any woman how fast you can run in heels).

• The car chase that ends with the car in pieces and the driver unscathed.

• The brilliant psychopath who can think 10 moves ahead of everyone else and knows exactly how everyone will react to every new development.

Readers, your unfavorites?

MORE CLICHES: I just ran across this piece on cliches, pegged to the release of (surprise!) Rush Hour 3.

Question: I am a new fan of Near Dark, which I saw on cable. Did you ever find out what became of Jenny Wright? — John H.

FlickChick: Not only have I not found out what happened to Jenny Wright, but no one else has either. In fact, I recently took a look at the Near Dark DVD extras, and there's a moment where Adrian Pasdar looks directly at the camera and says, "Jenny, if you're out there... I miss you."

There's a fansite whose webmaster apparently had some contact with Wright and her mother, Marilyn, around 2000, during which time Marilyn sent an e-mail saying that Jenny was not quite "ready to emerge from her shadows." A band called Davy Shannon & Callian's Dream wrote and recorded a song called "Near Dark Jenny" in 1999. But there's still no sign of Jenny Wright herself; I hope she resurfaces or that someone can share some news.

Question: Hey, I really enjoy your column! I had heard a year or so ago that the author Janet Evanovich had been approached about a movie featuring her Stephanie Plum character. As a die-hard "Cupcake"/Joe/Ranger fan, there is nothing I'd love more than to see these characters come to life on screen. Do you know if there has been any progress made on getting this movie made? Thanks for your consideration. — Jan

FlickChick: Unfortunately, I have nothing good to report. TriStar bought the rights to One for the Money in 1994 "for over a million dollars," by Janet Evanovich's account, and all they've done with them is develop a 2002 television pilot with Lynn Collins as Stephanie Plum and General Hospital's Tyler Christopher as Joe Morelli (not the kind of big-name casting likely to flutter a fan's heart). As far as I can tell, the pilot was never made.

A theatrical version of One for the Money is in development, with Reese Witherspoon attached to play Stephanie (Sandra Bullock — whom Evanovich has always said would be great — and Jennifer Lopez were previously mentioned for the part), and her Type A Films is one of the production companies working with TriStar. The script has been through at least seven writers to date and the producers include Wendy Finerman, whose recent credits have been The Devil Wears Prada and Drumline; she was involved with the TV pilot. And that's about all there is to tell: There's no start date, no director, no casting beyond Witherspoon. But the project isn't dead, and that's a lot more than you can say for most things that have been hanging around unmade for 13 years. So don't give up hope.

Question: I have an old New York newspaper from 1945 that had an advertisement for a movie called Bewitched. The premise was a woman with spilt personalities. I can't find very much information on this anywhere. Do you have any information or know where I can get a copy? — Patrick

FlickChick: This is a tough one. Bewitched (1945) was a very low-budget MGM B-picture (back when that term meant a short, cheap movie made to play on the bottom half of a double bill) made by Arch Oboler. Oboler was famous as the writer of the "Lights Out" radio series — Bill Cosby's famous "Chicken Heart" riff (about being left at home alone and scared to death of the giant chicken heart) was inspired by one of Oboler's episodes. Oboler went on to make nearly a dozen low-budget pictures, including cult sci-fi pictures Five (1951), The Twonky (1953) and The Bubble (1967).

Bewitched is a psychological horror story — as were several of the stories written for "Lights Out" — about a young woman (Phyllis Thaxter) with multiple personality disorder. Shortly before she's about to get married, she starts hearing a voice (belonging to noir chippie Audrey Totten) that drives her to move away and start a new life. But the voice, which belongs to her violent second personality, follows her and eventually drives her to murder. Edmund Gwenn, best known as the original Miracle on 34th Street's Kris Kringle, plays the psychiatrist who puts a name to the disorder that made her kill. For all its apparent melodramatic clunkiness — I can't speak from personal knowledge — it predates movies like The Three Faces of Eve (1957) by more than a decade.

Now, the bad news. It's been released on VHS, but I couldn't find a single copy for sale. I did run across someone selling noncommercial DVDs on the ioffer site, with which I have no experience. So it's going to be tough to find, but if you're determined, you can satisfy your curiosity about Bewitched.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

DVD Tuesday: Hot Fuzz pokes pitch-perfect fun at the excesses of Hollywood cop pictures while simultaneously delivering real action. How cool is that?

This week's DVD Tuesday pick isn't profound or obscure or controversial: I just loved it.
Hot Fuzz does for American-style buddy-cop pictures what Shaun of the Dead (2004) did for zombie movies: Writer-director Edgar Wright and cowriter Simon Pegg take every cliché, every stock character, every narrative contrivance and give it a sly half twist. The result is so close to the real thing, a careless channel surfer could go right by without realizing it wasn't, while being completely, utterly hilarious — even more so on a second viewing.

Pegg plays London supercop Nicholas Angel, whose compulsive overachieving has cost him his girlfriend and his job: The girlfriend because she's sick of competing with the job and the job because everyone else is sick of competing with Angel and coming up short. So to keep peace in the ranks, Angel's superiors ship him off to quiet, ye olde Sanford, where the overzealous Angel busies himself busting locals for driving under the influence — including his soon-to-be partner PC Danny Butterman (Shaun of the Dead alum Nick Frost) — and meeting the zealous neighborhood watch whose primary concern is making sure no one messes with the town's brilliant flower beds.

Mistakenly calling in reinforcements to disarm an inert WWII-era bomb in a local codger's shed destroys whatever credibility he may have had, so when Angel detects a pattern in the increasingly bizarre and bloody accidents that keep felling upstanding Sanford citizens, fellow cops and civilians alike pooh-pooh it. But — in a nod to hundreds of bucolic English mysteries in which nastiness lurks beneath the small-town cobblestones — there's something going on and Angel won't stop until he finds out what it is.

What it is is a doozy, and before the rip-roaring showdown in a child-sized replica of Sanford, Angel has come riding back into town like Clint Eastwood, ready to right a punishing world of wrongs. And rest assured, that runaway swan the chief keeps badgering Angel and Butterman to round up and return to its pond plays a very special part in the film's ludicrously bloody conclusion.

Funny though Airplane! was, it spawned a school of broad, gross and incoherent movies that barely bother to find an overarching conceit on which to hang their witless jibes at popular movies, trends and whatever else they can sling a bodily function joke at. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are something else entirely: Wright and Pegg pitch their films to people who, like them, know and love their targets. Sure, they may get exasperated with the dumber George Romero-style zombie pictures, or lose patience with the insane excesses of, say, Michael Bay — that's where the poking fun comes in. The Scary Movie films drip contempt, but Hot Fuzz is made by fans for fans… fans who can take a joke.

Things to consider:

Favorite movie parodies? Which ones and why? Parodies you really hate?

The line between a smart spoof and the real thing can be very thin and that's part of the thrill — I think immediately of An American Werewolf in London, which has its laughs and rips them to shreds, too. Thoughts?

The appeal of genre movies is that they're all the same only different. Is there a genre you really love (for me it's horror), and what does it take for a movie in that genre to lose you?

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

300
Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Question: I saw and liked Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow but was wondering: What was the source of Sir Laurence Olivier's performance? I've always wanted to know. — Jay

FlickChick: The late Sir Laurence Olivier's "performance" as Professor Totenkopf ("dead head" in German) in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004) was digitally built from archival BBC footage of Olivier giving a speech at some fund-raising event. The movements of his mouth were manipulated to match the film's dialogue, and the footage was processed to look like a staticky video holograph.

The same basic technology was used to alter existing footage of Marlon Brando from Superman (1978) so he could speak new dialogue for Superman Returns (2006). But in Superman Returns, the Brando footage looks as "real" as the rest, so it's another step toward being truly able to have a living actor appear alongside a dead one, the way singers can now do thoroughly convincing "duets" by integrating their new tracks with another vocalist's classic ones. It's a brave new world.

Question: What do you think about banning smoking in movies? — K.K.

FlickChick: The short answer is, I think it's ridiculous. Yes, smoking is dangerous to your health. So is drinking, reckless driving, pitched gun battles, eating French fries and bacon, sleeping with mysterious strangers, and checking on that noise in the basement. Remove all those behaviors from movies and you might as well go to church.

That said, I'm not an unreasonable person. I see where the Walt Disney Company is coming from in banning smoking from its kiddie films. As an internationally famous provider of wholesome, child-friendly entertainment, I can understand why Disney feels that, on a corporate level, it bears some responsibility to not actively disseminate images that could encourage children to engage in destructive behaviors like, say, smoking or huffing paint fumes. I can't say I'm aware of recent Disney children's films that feature children smoking or huffing, but hey, no harm in getting a rule on the books. Now, if they'd just ban kicked-in-the-'nads scenes....

ALl joking aside, Disney's promise to "discourage" smoking in films distributed by Touchstone and Miramax strikes me as a little more problematic. Some people smoke. Barring smokers across the board is like barring heavy people across the board: It's a weird distortion of reality. And once you ban smoking from new movies, someone will come up with the idea to delete it from old movies, the way HarperCollins erased illustrator Clement Hurd's cigarette from the photo that appeared on every edition of the children's classic Goodnight, Moon from 1947 until 2004. That smacks to me of Joseph Stalin's army of retouchers "disappearing" purged party officials from photographs.

Question: Hey, FlickChick, you rule. I thought Shane Carruth's Primer was one of the most dazzling films of the last decade. But there's been nary a peep out of the filmmaker since. Do you know if he is working on a follow-up project? I am dying to see what he does next. — Dominic

FlickChick: Thanks, and good question. After doing hundreds of interviews to promote the release of Primer (2004), software engineer turned self-taught filmmaker Shane Carruth seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. Three years ago he told interviewers he had already started the script for his next film, which he described as a coming-of-age romance between "an 18-year-old oceanography prodigy and the daughter of a commodities trader." He even said he'd written some music and hoped to find the money to pay a real composer to do something with it. And then... complete radio silence. But like you, I look forward to seeing what he does next: Primer was bracingly different from the kind of films most first-time filmmakers come up with. Come back, Shane!

Question: I just saw a poster for Skinwalkers, and that got me to wondering: How come people don't make more werewolf movies? I'm tired of vampires and psychos. — Kyle

FlickChick: My gut is that at the low-budget end of genre filmmaking, which is where the overwhelming majority of horror films are made, it comes down to special effects. You can do a vampire movie without investing in anything more than fangs; in fact, you can even do without them, was in movies like Martin (1978), Near Dark (1987) and The Addiction (1995). You can spring for more elaborate effects, you just don't have to. Ditto slasher movies: they can be utterly minimalist, though if you want to you can pay for elaborate gore effects. But with werewolves you need to deliver transformations, and they cost.

Skinwalkers is heavily action-oriented — think guns-and-motorcycles action — and it goes for a wolfman look rather than the kind of full-body, man-into-wolf transformations that have been the norm since The Howling and An American Werewolf in London (both 1981). I think that was a more a creative decision than a flat-out cost-cutting effort, but I also I think it may be off-putting to horror buffs, especially in combination with a PG-13 rating.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast.

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk.

DVD Tuesday: 300 divided critics and united moviegoers with its stylized vision of free men standing down monsters.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

300 was exhibit "A" when Variety editor Peter Bart launched a spiteful screed against elitist critics earlier this year. Critics lambasted 300 and audiences flocked to see it. Bart concluded, "filmgoers seem to be having a great time at the multiplexes… critics, by contrast, may be shopping around for a new line of work." Please: popular isn't always good. But it's not always bad, either -- I loved 300, and it's this week's DVD Tuesday pick. So there.

A highly stylized blend of CGI and live action, 300 is based on graphic novelist Frank Miller's bloody, visceral retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, during which vastly outnumbered troops from a coalition of Greek city states -- led by a core group of 300 Spartan soldiers commanded by King Leonidas -- held off Persian king Xerxes the Great's massive, armed-to-the-teeth forces for three full days at a narrow pass overlooking the Aegean Sea. The battle ended when a traitor betrayed the one weakness of the Greek warriors' position.

Virtually all the film's backgrounds are computer generated; the actors were shot against a green screen and com posited into imaginary rooms and landscapes. Rather than try to gloss over the artificiality, director Zack Snyder highlights it, and the resulting imagery has a vibrant, pulpy energy and impact. Is the film painstakingly accurate history? No. Is it hugely entertaining and even moving? You bet.

And for all the chiseled flesh on display, 300's stars are anything but a collection of beefcake pin-ups (though you used to have to visit a gay go-go bar to see so many men in leather underpants): They include Scottish theater actor Gerard Butler as Leonidas, English Dominic West (of The Wire), Australian David Wenham and a slew of less well-known but equally accomplished (mostly UK) actors, and they lend a certain grace and depth to the movie's clipped, epigrammatic dialogue. Some of which, by the way comes from existing historical records via Miller: Spartan training was designed to produce world-class fighting men who were also tersely eloquent, witness Leonidas' response to Xerxes' demand that the Spartans lay down their arms: "Come take them." Any screenwriter would be proud to have concocted such an eloquently belligerent, beautifully pared down comeback.

Miller's version of the story takes some liberties with history and stylizes the rest, larding the Persian troops with flat-out monsters (though Xerxes' legendary 10,000 Immortals are perfectly human, faces concealed behind scary masks) and making the traitor Ephialtes a grotesque hunchback. In the name of vividly visual storytelling, I say bring it on. There's a reason 300 opens with Dilios (Wenhan), Sparta's oral historian, declaiming the story of the young Leonidas and his youthful victory over a larger-than-life wolf: It puts you on notice that this is a story, facts shaped and angled to a particular end. As to stripping Leonidas and his citizen-warriors down to their helmets, in scarlet capes, sandals and briefs, Miller and Snyder are hardly the first to evoke Spartan culture's muscular rigor through literal musculature. The monument at Thermopylae commemorating the Spartans'"triumphant defeat" depicts Leonidas butt naked, as does French neoclassical painter Jean-Louis David's "Leonidas at Thermopylae" Yes, everything old is nude again.

Things to consider:

How do you feel about hyperstylized movies like Sin City or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow? Do dazzling, conspicuously artificial visuals detract from story and character?

What degree of accuracy do you think it's reasonable to expect from fiction films based on real events?

Is the power of a well-made movie to fix a particular version of reality in people's minds (think, for example, Oliver Stone's JFK) dangerous?

300 has been characterized as both spirited defense of American presence in Iraq (Spartans as outnumbered American troops, taking a stand against barbaric terrorist hordes) or a critique (Spartans as Iraqi insurgents, taking a stand against better-armed foreign invaders). Do you buy either? Neither?

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Ace in the Hole
Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
Pi
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

Question: I've seen Harry Potter five times now — I liked it that much — and I'm still wowed by Imelda Staunton's portrayal of Umbridge. Is there any chance she'll get nominated for an Oscar? I know the Academy Awards are iffy about nominating actors for roles in sci-fi-fantasy movies, which is why I fear she'll get no Oscar nomination. But do you think she'll at least get nominated for a Golden Globe, since the Hollywood Foreign Press tend to be a bit more creative with their nominations? — Lisa

FlickChick: I think the odds that Imelda Staunton will be recognized with an Academy Award nomination for her excellent performance in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are slim to none, because yes, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a long-standing bias against horror/sci-fi/fantasy films. At least Staunton was was nominated in 2004 for the title role in Vera Drake, although she lost to Hilary Swank for Million Dollar Baby.

Your question made me curious, so I did a quick (and not definitive) inventory of actors and actresses nominated for genre roles, and the pickings are pretty slim. Fredric March was nominated for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932) and Roland Young for Topper (1935). A best-supporting-actress nom went to Whoopi Goldberg for Ghost (1990), and Willem Dafoe was nominated for Shadow of the Vampire (2000), which is a meta-vampire movie rather than a straightforward one, but it's a vampire movie nonetheless. Janet Leigh got a nod for Psycho (1960); Ruth Gordon was nominated for best supporting actress in Rosemary's Baby (1968); and Jason Miller, Ellen Burstyn and Linda Blair earned nods for The Exorcist (1973). More recently, Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment were nominated for The Sixth Sense (1999). Not a lot, given that the Academy has been handing out statuettes since 1927.

Thrillers fare better: That's where you get Kathy Bates for Misery (1990) and Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster for The Silence of the Lambs (1991)... all best actor/actress winners. Edward Norton was also nominated for Primal Fear (1996). Back in the '60s, we have Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark (1967), Samantha Eggar in The Collector (1965), Victor Buono and Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Kim Stanley in Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964), Nancy Kelly and Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed (1956), Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), and Ethel Barrymore in The Spiral Staircase (1946). Awful lot of ladies on this list, huh?

I don't know that Staunton's chances are much better at the Golden Globes. While the Hollywood Foreign Press Association does regularly nominate films that aren't recognized by the Academy, I can't say I've noticed that they're significantly warmer to genre films.

Question: I have a couple of questions for you. I recently saw the great Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West, and was awestruck by Claudia Cardinale's beauty. But it was obvious that her lines were dubbed, leading me to ask the following: Who overdubbed Ms. Cardinale's lines? And does Hollywood still follow this practice, where foreign actresses in Hollywood feature films have their lines overdubbed? Great job on the column; much thanks in advance! — Stephen

FlickChick: I've had absolutely no luck tracking down the identity of the actress who dubbed Claudia Cardinale's voice for the English-language version of Once Upon a Time in the West (1969). But that's not unusual. Hollywood wasn't actually responsible for that piece of dubbing: For most of the history of the Italian film industry, it was common practice not to record direct sound. That means all the dialogue was looped in postproduction, even if the entire cast was Italian and they were all post-dubbing their own parts.

The 1960s were the age of multinational coproduction, and Italian producers — particularly of genre films like Westerns and thrillers — made it their business to cast one actor from each territory in which they thought they could market the final product. This often produced a modern-day tower of Babel on the set, with actors speaking lines in their own languages even if no one else could understand them. Then the whole business was post-dubbed in various languages. Some actors did their own looping for foreign languages they spoke: Franco Nero, for example, usually dubbed his own English-language tracks. Others didn't: Klaus Kinski made dozens of Italian and Spanish Westerns and I have yet to hear his voice on an English-language print (or an Italian one, for that matter).

The upshot is that there was a significant community of actors in Europe who made their living dubbing movies into other languages but were never credited. Every once in a while some fan will be interviewing some second-string actor who worked in Europe in the '60s and 1970s, and it will come out that he or she did dubbing work on the side. But that's pretty much the only way those voices ever get attached to names.

As for dubbing practices now, the theatrical market for foreign films in the U.S. is now so specialized that almost no one ever bothers, except for animated films. A rare recent exception was Miramax's decision to dub Life Is Beautiful (1998) into English, and it was a disaster. The prevailing thinking is that any American willing to watch a German, French or Italian film is willing to read subtitles. I do, however, see optional dubbing on some DVDs.

Question: Let me start by saying I love your columns, I love you on the podcast, and I just got your book and cannot wait to read it! Being a horror fan, it's nice to have a movie critic who enjoys and appreciates the genre. Quality films too often get written off because they carry the label of "horror." That said, onto my question. When I was a kid, I was a big fan of the animated movie The Last Unicorn. For years I'd been hearing some buzz that they may do a live-action version of it, but I have never heard anything really beyond that. Can you confirm that there will be a live-action version, and if so, any ideas on when it might start filming or who might be in it? — Kim

FlickChick: Wow, I wish I had great news, but I trust you're not going to drop me like a hot potato for having to report that as far as I can determine, the long-rumored live-action remake of Peter S. Beagle's novel The Last Unicorn seems to be going nowhere fast.

There is a website, apparently belonging to a company called Continent Films (though there's no company name anywhere — not even in the copyright). This suggests that the project is in some stage of development. But I've also read in reputable publications that in 2005 Beagle started shopping around for a development deal that would include his Last Unicorn sequel, Two Hearts, as well as one or more as-yet-unwritten Unicorn books, and that part of that deal would involve reacquiring the movie rights to The Last Unicorn. That's the kind of thing that can keep a project in limbo for years.

Back in 2003, there were a number of optimistic news items suggesting that Continent Films intended to have The Last Unicorn in theaters by Christmas 2004, with a cast that included Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Schmendrick the magician, Christopher Lee as King Haggard, Mia Farrow as Molly Grue, Angela Lansbury as Mommy Fortuna and Rene Auberjonois as Captain Cully. All but Meyers were in the voice cast of the animated Last Unicorn, with Lee and Lansbury voicing the same characters while Farrow and Auberjonois voiced different ones. Of those five actors, only Lee is listed on the current site, and to its credit, the extent of his commitment can be determined if you click on the "letter" link. It takes you to a handwritten note to producer Michael Pakleppa basically saying that yeah, sure, he'd be into playing Haggard if the project ever comes together and fits into his schedule. Lee is a gentleman, so I have no doubt but that his word is his bond. But that's still something less than a firm commitment.

New Zealand director Geoff Murphy is listed alongside Pakleppa's and there's mention of a production coordinator for Hungary, which makes me think the idea is to shoot in Eastern Europe, where you can get a lot of production value (old buildings and streets, inexpensive crews) for not a lot of money. Apparently the idea is to use a lot of CGI, including motion capture of horses for the unicorn. I haven't read Beagle's book, but I understand this idea upsets a lot of fans because the book says explicitly that unicorns don't look like horses with horns.

So I don't think I'd be holding my breath on this project. You might want to console yourself with the 25th Anniversary Edition DVD of the original animated film, which Lions Gate issued in February 2007. I understand it looks terrific, though the extras are nothing to write home about.

Question: Hi, love your column. I've got two movie questions that have nothing to do with each other. One is driving me nuts: In the early 1990s I played hookie from school and caught a movie midway through on the USA channel, before it was network. I think it might have been a TV-movie and I've never seen it again. It was about some schoolkids and their teacher. I guess they were kidnapped — I started watching at the point where men were holding guns to them in a cave full of water and they had to swim under a dangerous rock to get out. Long-story-short, by the end of the film the teacher and the kids got the upper hand and killed their kidnappers. No one else knew what happened and the students and teacher kept it to themselves, although they kept some of the kidnappers' remains in jars in their classroom.

My second question is about a Portuguese movie called O Misterio da Estrada de Sintra (The Mystery of Sintra's Road). I've seen the trailer on my local Portuguese channel, so it's a somewhat recent release, and it looks really good; it's a period film with a top-notch cast of famous Portuguese and Brazilian actors. Do you know if it will be coming out in U.S. theaters anytime soon? I rarely see recent Portuguese films released here. Thanks for any help you can give. — Eleuteria

FlickChick: The film you remember is Fortress (1986), which was made for Australian television and starred Rachel Ward as the teacher. Many, many readers have written to me about it since I started this column, many of whom remember little more than that someone was kidnapped by guys wearing Santa Claus and duck masks. I've seen DVDs of the film on eBay, though I'm not convinced that they're legitimate commercial product. As to O Misterio da Estrada de Sintra, as far as I can tell it doesn't have a U.S. distributor. Sorry!

Question: How did Jean Simmons like working with William Wyler on The Big Country? — Jim

FlickChick: By all accounts, not much, and she was hardly alone. William Wyler's epic Western The Big Country (1958) was not a happy production.

For one thing, Wyler liked to shoot numerous takes while veteran actor Charles Bickford didn't — they'd fought about it almost 20 years earlier during the shooting of Hell's Heroes (1930), and apparently picked up the same fight in 1958, right where it left off. Wyler would keep shooting take after take and Bickford would do exactly what he wanted, one take after another, until Wyler gave up trying to get him to change a reading or rework a line. On the other hand, when star Gregory Peck — who coproduced the film with Wyler — wanted to retake a scene he felt strongly about, Wyler refused. Peck — not known for being temperamental — walked off the set and cooler heads were forced to intervene so the film could be completed.

Charlton Heston claimed that Wyler, in the name of getting a great performance, encouraged him to manhandle actress Carroll Baker during a scene in which she was supposed to break free from his grip. Wyler told Heston to hang on until the much smaller Baker actually fought her way free, and after nearly a dozen takes Baker was in tears and had welts on her wrists.

And that brings us to British-born actress Jean Simmons, who had a reputation for being polite, professional, gracious and easy to work with. She apparently refused to talk about The Big Country until the '80s, when she admitted that the set was so tense she found herself wondering constantly what she'd done wrong. She also spoke of constant script rewrites, and her longtime manager apparently said that she confided in him that Wyler was cruel to her.

Of the principal cast, the only person who actually seems to have liked Wyler was character actor and folksinger Burl Ives, who won an Oscar for his role in The Big Country and is probably best known to younger viewers as the voice of Sam the Snowman in the Rankin/Bass puppet-animated Christmas special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964).

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Hear Maitland on the weekly TV Guide Talk podcast.

DVD Tuesday: Ace in the Hole lays into the public appetite for sensation and the tabloid media machine that feeds it — 55 years later, nothing has changed.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks on the Movie Talk vodcast!

Hear Maitland on the weekly podcast TV Guide Talk!

As soon as I got my first VCR, I began waiting for Billy Wilder's lacerating Ace in the Hole (1951) to come out on video. Never happened. And why it's taken so long to come to DVD when you can choose from multiple editions of all manner of junk is one of life's little mysteries. But it's finally here, courtesy of the Criterion Collection, so goodbye combing listings for the rare TV showing or ponying up for someone else's made-from-TV bootleg!

The anti-hero of Ace in the Hole, which was also released as The Big Carnival and tanked under both titles, is Charles Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a bastard of a disgraced big-city newspaperman looking for a way back into the game. He finds it in New Mexico when he stumbles across a "human-interest story" (the film's working title) he thinks he can spin into a Pulitzer Prize: Leo Minosa, owner of a godforsaken cafe/souvenir shop in the middle of sunbaked nowhere, is trapped in the abandoned mine where he was digging for Indian artifacts.

Tatum allies himself with the local sheriff, who's running for reelection and knows the value of publicity; he promises to keep all other reporters away from Leo and bullies the contractor hired to dig Leo out into choosing a route that will take six days rather than the one that would have the man out in a matter of hours. The only thing better than an exclusive is an exclusive with legs. Tatum beefs up his dispatches with rumors of vengeful Indian spirits and tributes to the quiet devotion of Leo's wife, Lorraine (Jan Sterling), a restless, hard-faced chippie who couldn't care less about her loser of a husband. Her response when Tatum tells her it would look good if she dressed up and went to church to pray for Leo: "I don't go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons." Tatum even crawls into the cave and strikes up a friendship with the increasingly desperate Leo, whose condition deteriorates rapidly as he lies in the cold, dusty darkness, legs pinned under a fallen beam. Tatum's stories bring other reporters, print and radio. Vacationers detour to the site with their kids (it could be an educational experience, one couple explains) and sensation seekers make special trips to gape; the cafe flourishes and carnies set up a Ferris wheel and concessions right outside the cave. The term "media circus" has never been more vividly realized.

Critics didn't like Ace in the Hole — they called it cynical, sordid and preposterous. Now it just looks clear-eyed and unforgiving. Made more than half a century ago, Ace in the Hole remains sharper than most newer movies that tackle similar material, including 15 Minutes (2001), The Paper (1994) and Mad City (1997) — which owes Ace in the Hole a massive debt of inspiration. Few equal it: Network (1976) comes to mind. The genius of Ace in the Hole — which was inspired by the real-life 1925 case of caver Floyd Collins and cowritten by Wilder, Walter Newman and Lesser Samuels — is that it's not just press bashing: Tatum is just part of a larger picture and Wilder was never a great believer in the goodness of human nature — William Holden, who starred in his Stalag 17 (1953), said Wilder had "a mind full of razor blades." And forget every goofy imitation of Kirk Douglas you've ever seen: His Tatum is the performance of a lifetime — selfish, manipulative, condescending, two-faced, utterly ruthless and terrifically good at what he does. Any journalist knows the truth of Tatum's mantra: "Bad news sells best... good news is no news."

Things to consider:

I devoted a chapter of Movie Lust ("Scoop Dreams") to films about the press — do you have any favorites?

Do you read or watch lurid coverage of murders, war atrocities, sex scandals? Do you or don't you feel bad about indulging morbid curiosity about the misfortunes of others?

Is that fascination just part of human nature? After all, the minute there were printing presses, there were scandal sheets.

What's your overall feeling about journalists and journalism, and do you think there's a fundamental difference between, say, a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a reporter covering the celebrity beat for The Star?

Previously in DVD Tuesday:

Eyes Without a Face
Apocalypto
Citizen Kane
La Jetée
Gone in 60 Seconds (1974)
Bob le Flambeur
Near Dark
Perfect Blue
Pan's Labyrinth
Les Girls
The Girl Who Knew Too Much
The Queen
Expresso Bongo
I'm Not Scared
Shocking Grindhouse Double Bill! — Scanners and The Candy Snatchers
Don't Look Now
Re-Animator
Casino Royale
The Prestige
13 Tzameti
The Departed
Suspiria
Kiss and Make Up
Kiss Me Deadly
The Long Good Friday
What Alice Found
The Devil's Backbone
The Descent
The Devil Wears Prada
Pandora's Box
The Thief and the Cobbler
Nashville
Panic in the Streets/Jack Palance Interview
The Pusher Trilogy
Scarface
Slither
Sunset Blvd.
In Cold Blood
Brick

Also: This week's new DVD releases

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.

See Maitland McDonagh and Ken Fox review this week's new flicks in Movie Talk!

Hear Maitland on the weekly TVGuide Talk podcast.

Question: What do you think of Weinstein Company releasing Death Proof and Planet Terror on separate discs a month apart? I'm disappointed: It was great seeing the films back-to-back with trailers and advertisements. Do you think there will be a bigger edition coming out a few months later, as studios often like to do? Do you think it's a good move? — Jason

FlickChick: I love Grindhouse (witness my review) and frankly, I think it's really going to find its audience on DVD; I truly believe that a big part of the reason it did so poorly in theaters is that people weren't willing to commit to spending three hours in a movie seat. That problem goes away when you're at home and can pause to get a drink, stretch your legs, use the bathroom or whatever. In real grindhouses you could at least take a break during the trailers; if you were a regular you'd seen half of them before anyway. But with Grindhouse, the trailers were as much fun as the movies.

My feeling is that the Weinstein Company is figuring that since they made the investment in full-length versions of Death Proof and Planet Terror, which have been playing theaters in Europe, they might as well put them on separate DVDs. At best, people will buy both; at worst, Quentin Tarantino fans will buy Death Proof (which is scheduled for a Sept. 18 release) and Robert Rodriguez buffs will spring for Planet Terror, which is supposedly coming out in October, just in time for Halloween.

I absolutely believe that there will be a consolidated edition later, at which point consumers who boycotted the individual releases will pony up, and a lot of people who bought one or both of the full-length individual features will pony up again to have the full theatrical Grindhouse experience. Count me in on that category. That said, I'm still waiting for the integrated Kill Bill and there's no sign of it.

Update: I just got official word on the US DVD release dates of Death Proof and Planet Terror --September 18th and October 16th, respectively. Each is described as a " two-disc unrated and extended DVD" set. I'm hoping the Grindhouse trailers will be among the extras on the second disc.


Question: As a horror aficionado, can you tell me what the deal is with The Wicker Man? I caught the Nicolas Cage remake on cable recently (what happened to his career, anyway?) and while I can generally find something redeemable in most films, I thought this one was a waste of my time. I like most of Neil LaBute's movies and plays, but I can't figure out why a studio gave the go-ahead to put him in charge. I know the original film has a large cult following; is the story/script the same? Is it worth going back to check out the first one? — Jenny

FlickChick: I'm a huge fan of the original Wicker Man (1973), which has a very similar story but is to my mind a much better movie than the Neil LaBute remake. Not that it could be worse, of course — you're absolutely right that the new Wicker Man is execrable.

I think part of the reason horror buffs like me, who saw The Wicker Man when it was new (or at least newish), love it so much is that it was so unlike anything else being made at the time. Its cynicism about the manipulation of belief for commerce, its vicious undermining of the then-daring counterculture cult of happy paganism, its stunningly downbeat ending were all real shockers. That's less true now, so maybe its impact on younger movie buffs wouldn't be so great — especially if you've seen the remake and basically know where it's going. But it's still a smart, haunting genre piece that's horrifying rather than scary in a "boo, gotcha!" way.

As to Nicolas Cage's career, beats me. But if he'd stop wearing horrible hairpieces, talking funny and generally acting like a freak maybe he'd be able to make a decent movie again.

Question: Maitland, I love your column! I'm just curious about the process for making movies these days. It seems like there is more and more emphasis on profit rather than producing great films (at least in my opinion). The target demographic seems to be teenagers. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see family films being made, but am I right to think that today's focus is more commercial than artistic? — Jan

FlickChick: As the cynics always say, there's a reason they call it show business. The American movie industry has always been profit-based, which means that commercial considerations have always trumped art. That's why countries with national film boards that help finance filmmaking (and other arts) consistently turn out a less monolithic mix of movies than the U.S. industry does mdash; remember, I'm talking about the moviemaking mainstream.

But having said all that, I think the Hollywood system is more stacked against interesting filmmaking than it's ever been. The great thing about old Hollywood is that it was, as Thomas Schatz memorably wrote in The Genius of the System, a factory for moviemaking. Studios owned the business top to bottom: They owned backlots, theater chains, stars and behind-the-scenes talent. (No one signs seven-year-contracts anymore; they negotiate one project at a time.) The studios made money by keeping the product coming, and that meant that aside from a few high-profile, big-budget projects, there wasn't a lot of micromanaging.

One movie couldn't bankrupt a studio, the way Heaven's Gate (1980) bankrupted United Artists. It's a paradox, but the industrial model of filmmaking gave a lot of filmmakers a lot of freedom, as long as they stayed within budget.

But several things changed the business dramatically. There was the antitrust suit that forced the studios to divest themselves of their theaters. A-list actors, directors and screenwriters (or more to the point, their agents) realized that they could do better negotiating fees on a film-by-film basis than signing long-term contracts. And movies like Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) convinced executives that if one megahit movie could float a studio for a whole year, then it was better to pour money into a blockbuster than divide the money between 30 modestly budgeted pictures.

That concentration of cash in a handful of projects made market research more important than it had ever been in the past, and fueled enthusiasm for sequels, tie-ins and movies based on "pre-sold" ideas. It encouraged meddling at every level — after all, with so much money at stake you can't trust some crazy filmmaker to run around following his (or her) vision.

Put it all together, and you start to see how we wound up where we are now.

Question: When I was younger, in the 1980s, I saw a movie several times. It was a horror farce: People were killed in strange ways, like with a rubber chicken. It took place in a high school and the killer wore rubber boots that would squeak when he walked. If you could tell me the name of this movie I would really appreciate it. — Mandi

FlickChick: I'm going with Student Bodies (1981), a spoof of slasher movies. I don't remember the psycho killing anyone with a rubber chicken, but he made threatening phone calls and disguised his voice by talking through a rubber chicken. He killed someone with a paper clip, though. And someone else with an eggplant. Silly stuff.

Send your movie questions to FlickChick.