Most Hollywood remakes completely miss the mark of the original. They remind audiences of Hollywood’s tendency to completely wring out every penny they can from anything that works. But once in a blue moon comes the exception to that rule. Those select few breathe new life into timeless classics and reintroduce those stories to a brand new audience. To celebrate the release of Papillon, a heart wrenching tale of love, loyalty, and redemption in cinemas 21st December 2018 courtesy of Signature Entertainment, below is the list of the top movie remakes of all time:
Papillon
Based on the autobiography of Henri Charrière, from screener writer Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners) and executive producer Danny Dimbort (The Wolf of Wall Street), comes Danish Director Michael Noer’s international feature debut Papillon, an eponymous modern take of one of the greatest escape films of all time. The original Papillon stars Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen as they attempt to break free from a French Penal colony in South America. The 2018 remake finds Charlie Hunnam (Son’s of Anarchy; Pacific Rim) and Emmy Award Winning – and strong contender this year’s Best Actor Oscar – Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody; Mr. Robot) in the exact same situation after they too are wrongfully convicted of murder and forgery – what are the odds?! These challenging characters gave Malek and Hunnam the chance to deliver two unforgettable performances that will surely blow audiences away when it hits cinemas this Friday.
A Star is Born
Who could forget the chemistry between Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristopherson in the 1976 version of A Star is Born? Having been remade 4 times, we wouldn’t blame you if you did. The original original dates back to 1954, starring Judy Garland and James Manson – big shoes to fill but who else than Bradley Cooper and idol, legend, and star Lady Gaga to take this on? Critics raved about the film, marking Gaga’s transformation into a fully fledged big screen icon.
Netflix is one of the world’s most popular websites, consuming 15% of the whole world’s internet traffic. It’s easy to see why: a huge back catalogue of old movies and TV shows, new ones and even original content; cult directors the Coen Brothers released their new movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, directly to Netflix after a very limited theatrical release that effectively functioned as a trailer for the real event.
This ain’t your grandma’s cable TV, in other words.
But Netflix has some downsides.
The platform offers viewers very different content depending on where they are in the world. That’s for two main reasons.First, no matter how cultured you are, you’re less interested in Tagalog-language content than the people of Indonesia. It makes sense to show more Hindi material in India, more French movies in France. That’s about serving the audience.
But Netflix also has to serve the entities that own the copyright in some of its content. Especially with films and TV shows, that usually means rights holders dedicated to a now-outdated staggered release schedule that allowed for locally-targeted marketing campaigns.
Staggered release schedules and geoblocking
There’s a reason why the stars of new Hollywood movies show up on German country’s TV shows just before those movies are released in Germany. Staggered release enables companies to focus their whole marketing energy on one region at a time.
That release schedule is outdated as soon as you can just connect to a website on the other side of the world and watch whatever you want, often before it’s even been released in your country of residence. But rights holders still want it. So they oblige Netflix to enforce it. Netflix can’t show their content to anyone if they don’t use geoblocking.
Geoblocking identifies where you are in the world and stops you seeing certain content, based on your location. It moves the old-fashioned, region-by-region release schedule online.
That’s pretty bad if you’re travelling and you cross a national border, only to find you’ve suddenly lost two years’ worth of TV — especially if you’re in the middle of a binge.
The standard way to get around it is with a VPN, a Virtual Private Network.
Evading geoblocking with a VPN
VPNs do two things: they encrypt your traffic,
and they conceal your location.
All the data you sent across the internet is broken up into packets; imagine taking a picture, cutting it up and putting the pieces into ten envelopes, each with the same address and your return address on the outside. Drop them in the postbox and they might get delivered by different vans, taking different roads, driven by different postal service personnel. But they all arrive and when they all get there, the recipient can put the picture back together. That’s how your data travels across the internet.
A VPN removes your return address, and replaces it with another one of your choosing. And it makes it impossible to open the envelopes; now, anyone who gets hold of one in transit can know where it’s going, but not where it’s from or what it contains.
This means when you’re travelling abroad and you want to access your normal Netflix content library, you can; all you need to do is fire up your VPN.
Proxy blockers and obfuscation: ‘oops, you seem to be using an unblocker or proxy’
Netflix has been wise to this for some time.They use technologies that, to carry your envelope analogy on, inspects the envelopes for signs that they come from a VPN. If they’re sealed, or if Netflix recognizes them as coming from a VPN’s address, it gives you an error message instead of sending back packets with your movie in them.
Luckily, there’s a way around this too. It’s called ‘obfuscation,’ which means ‘to make something less clear and harder to understand, especially intentionally.’ VPN obfuscation conceal sthe fact that you’re using a VPN by putting your sealed envelopes inside envelopes that look just like normal ones. Proxy detectors see normal traffic,but you’re still protected and anonymous.
Choosing a VPN for Netflix
Streaming is one of the main reasons people use VPNs, so it’s no surprise that the best VPNs for streaming are often also the best VPNs generally. Big names like Nord VPN, Express and Vypr are all solid choices. Obviously, you need to look for one that works with your devices and where you’re comfortable with the price, but most VPNs will give you a few days to a couple of weeks on a money-back guarantee so you can road-test them.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that Starship Troopers, Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 sci-fi satire of both militarism and fascism, was always supposed to be so ridiculous. If the concept of a group of galaxy trotting Space Marines battling overgrown cockroaches wasn’t enough to make you snicker, then the over-the-top, in your face performances by Michael Ironside, Clancy Brown, Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, and others definitely had you smirking. The film was so overblown and ludicrous that it’s hard to imagine how so much cheese could be crammed into a two hour block of time.
Despite the pomp and circumstance that Verhoeven is best known for, through classics like Robocop, and was definitely showcasing to full effect in Starship Troopers, the film remains a cult darling in the hearts and minds of sci-fi and die-hard movie buffs the world over. There have been fan clubs, online groups, conventions, and even blogs with custom domains that capture a quote or term used in the franchise in the URL, that keep the movie alive. In Japan, the movie enjoyed such a high degree of popularity that it got its own anime series, and Japanese film studios continue the story of Johnny, Carl, and Carmen in 3D animated, feature length movies. In short – Starship Troopers succeeded, in spite of itself.
What is it that’s so special about this strange sci-fi nugget that continues to capture the admiration and attention of so many movie fans?
“I only have one rule: Everyone fights. No one quits.”
Right off the bat, Starship Troopers is an adaption of the classic sci-fi novel of the same name by Robert A Heinlein. Contrary to most film adaptations, that try to recreate, as best they can, the plot, characterizations, themes, and tone of the source material, Starship Troopers had the distinction of trying its rowdy best to tear apart everything that the book stands for.
Heinlein was a former U.S. Navy officer, and much of his philosophy and views on life were shaped largely by his military service. When he sat down to pen the novel in 1958, he wanted to craft a work of fiction that explored and promoted militarism, patriotism, social responsibility, and what it means to be a citizen of a particular nation. The result was Starship Troopers, and it became one of the most successful, and controversial, works of science fiction ever published.
While many of the characters keep the same personas that they have in the movie (Johnny in the novel was still from Buenos Aires, but he was Filipino, instead of caucasian), the tone could not be more different. The novel argued that the only way to be a good citizen, and by extension, a good person, was to dedicate one’s entire body and soul in service to society. At the same time, the book emphasized the importance of achieving your potential through your own endeavors, instead of waiting for a government handout. It also explored the responsibility of leaders in becoming the best they could be, not for their own sake, but to better lead people to prosperity and enlightenment. The novel absolutely abolished any investment in a particular political party.
For all of Heinlein’s trouble, the novel received multiple accusations of being a militaristic, fascist, ultra-nationalist delusion of grandeur.
“The only good bug, is a dead bug.”
By contrast, the film is a campy, bombastic exaggeration, and a slap in the face of everything the book stands for. Many of the same speeches and sections of dialogue are copied word-for-word from the book, but delivered in the most satirical way possible. While in the novel, Lt. Rasczak’s dissertation to his high school class about the difference between a citizen and a civilian is a serious challenge to their preconceived notions about having a national identity, in the film, it’s a ridiculous outburst highlighted by the military veteran using the nub of his amputated arm to emphasize his point.
Verhoeven was certainly aware of what he was trying to do, and to a large degree, he succeeded. Serious characters like Rasczak are delivered in an over-the-top manner, to the point that all you can do is chuckle, even when things are their most serious. The film is clearly trying to imply that anyone who can take these ideals heart, and shape their whole life around them, couldn’t be anything other than a ridiculous person, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
In the hands of a less skilled director, and a less talented cast, it most assuredly would have devolved into an unwatchable mess. Instead, Starship Troopers stands as one of the greatest sci-fi romps of all time.
“Would you like to know more?”
What makes Starship Troopers so endearing, and what keeps it from devolving into a slog of a film, is its charm. These characters are so outrageous, as is the thought of anyone getting so amped up about what amounts to a giant ant infestation, that you can’t help but accept it and enjoy it for what it is. Verhoeven doesn’t try to relay his points with a big stick; he uses a punchline. Though he definitely wants to address, and deconstruct, the themes and values that Heinlein espoused, Verhoeven doesn’t sacrifice story by way of sermon. He’s fully aware that what he was doing, first and foremost, was to make a movie that entertained his audience – everything else was a bonus.
Because of that, there’s an undeniable sense of fun that comes through in Starship Troopers. You can see it even in the most gruesome scenes, when body parts, both human and alien, are flying all over the screen, and giant globs of green goo coat everything in the frame. You can see it in the faces of the actors as they gleefully shout, “Kill ‘em all!” while advancing on a group of bugs. It reminds me a lot of the old sci-fi movies of the 1950s and 60s, where the actual situation was dire, but the dialogue and performances were so cheesy that you ended up laughing, instead of cringing. And I think that’s key – despite a very cheesy delivery, those Hollywood gems became immensely popular, and are regarded as classics to this day, and Starship Troopers projects that same undiluted sense of pure, ridiculous fun.
Starship Troopers, for everything that it could have been, and wasn’t, remains a charming, utterly ridiculous film that invites to you sit back, eat some popcorn, enjoy the bullets and blood, and maybe, just maybe, try not to be a fascist.
The camera almost constantly zooms and dollies into and away from its subjects in Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Killing of a Sacred Deer.
In a film that grapples with the cyclical nature of family bloodlines and the death (or, rather paralysis) and rebirth of biological matter, it is no coincidence that the film opens with a shot of an open chest, mid-surgery, in which we see a heart beating.
This shot, this rhythmic pumping – in and out, in and out – is mirrored throughout the film by way of the camera techniques employed by DoP Thimios Bakatakis. Zooms are often presented in long takes, slowly closing into a character’s face, or moving away from them, revealing new figures in the frame. The continuous use of this rhythmic, slow “pumping” creates an unsettling assortment of imagery, where, as Lanthimos himself has noted, the camera becomes “another entity”. The camera signals it is alive, operating at another level to the narrative. It establishes its own heart beat.
Dr. Steven Murphy is a renowned cardiovascular surgeon who presides over a spotless household with his wife and two children. Lurking at the margins of his idyllic suburban existence is Martin, a fatherless teen who insinuates himself into the doctor’s life in gradually unsettling ways. Soon, the full scope of Martin’s intent becomes menacingly clear when he confronts Steven with a long-forgotten transgression that will shatter his domestic bliss forever.
To celebrate the release of Gloves Off, available now On Demand & DVD, the film’s star Brad Moore has taken a look back at the sport fuelled comedies that have knocked his socks off over the years; starring everyone from humour heavyweights like Bill Murray and John Candy to an Orangutan.
GLOVES OFF follows Doug (Brad Moore) who, after the sudden death of his trainer during his championship fight, has inherited a crumbling debt-ridden gym, packed with a mixed bag of crazy would-be boxers (Ricky Tomlinson, Paul Barber, Alexei Sayle).
He must raise £50,000 fast or risk watching his mentor’s legacy re-possessed and transformed into a jumped-up Pilates parlour for stock brokers. Doug agrees to train a gypsy woman’s (Denise Van Outen) brother to fight in a £100,000 winner-takes-all bare-knuckle contest against the ‘King of The Gypsies’.
“GLOVES OFF is a piece of entertainment but it also represents to me what people can achieve when they pull together and pride kicks in.”
GLOVES OFF is available On Demand & DVD now
Slap Shot
Directed by: George Roy Hill
“Unlike some, Paul Newman’s performances just got better and better as his career evolved. He again teams up with George Roy Hill in this crazy ice hockey romp. I loved watching this quirky film in my teens and the ‘goons’ unprovoked scraps. Tickled my Dad and I pink!”
Every Which Way But Loose
Directed by: James Fargo
“What a gem of a film with Clint showing he’s more than capable in a dustup. A beautiful backdrop in the San Fernando Valley and with his Mrs Sandra Locke and a huge Orangutan in tow they must have had a blast. Right turn Clyde!”
Mike Bassett: England Manager
Directed by: Steve Barron
“Our very own Ricky Tomlinson in full swing as the doomed England Manager. It’s not coming home sadly….”
Kingpin
Directed by: Bobby Farrelly & Peter Farrelly
“The Farrelly brothers at their very best here in this screwball comedy. A fallen hero, a beautiful lady, a road trip, a strange hair do, a final show down (this sound familiar? Oh yeah Gloves Off, the film that I wrote!) Woody Harrelson’s performance takes his career to another level and the hair on Bill Murray should have at least won a BAFTA of its own…”
The Mean Machine (a.k.a. The Longest Yard)
Directed by: Robert Aldrich
“Another film worshipped at the church of our family living room. Robert Aldrich of Dirty Dozen and Baby Jane fame directs this priceless prison break American football comedy. The British remake does its best but falls short of the charisma this cracker carries. RIP Burt Reynolds, we owe you one.”
Caddyshack
Directed by: Harold Ramis
“This crazy offbeat golfing extravaganza shouldn’t work but it does and then some! It’s directed by none other than Harold Ramis of Ghostbusters and written by Bill Murray’s brother Brian Doyle-Murray, which may go some way to explain the absurdity of the magic!! Bill Murray’s scenes were reportedly all improvised and worth watching just to witness Chevy Chase on the piano “I was born to love you…I was born to lick your face…” genius.”
Cool Runnings
Directed by: Jon Turteltaub
“Based on a true story and with a gloriously high concept! This excellent film starring the late John Candy has you laughing while tugging at the heart strings.”
Jerry Maguire
Directed by: Cameron Crowe
“Cameron Crowe’s riches to rags masterpiece featuring, in my opinion, Tom Cruise’s most well-rounded performance worthy of his Oscar nomination. Comedy, romance, drama, sport and our protagonist searching for a deeper purpose in life. What’s not to like! An almost cautionary tale of making sure you don’t lose focus of what’s truly important in life, the film works on all levels. Supporting breakthrough roles from both Renée Zellweger and Cuba Gooding Jr and the birth of a worldwide catchphrase…’Show me the money!’”
There’s Only One Jimmy Grimble
Directed by: John Hay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J–CO0b5DIY
“A lovely example of British football fantasy comedy drama that us Brits do so brilliantly. Robert Carlisle, Ray Winstone, Gina McKee and a killer cameo by Ben Miller”
