On 06-06-06, the day of the new Omen, here's the trailer for the new Wicker Man.

Oh my goodness, that trailer looks....SO WRONG!

I like LaBute, and I like most of the actors/actresses in this film. But that trailer seems so markedly different from the spirit of the original. They had to go and make it all modern horror film like. Why?

And why does Nicholas Cage's character have to have a "tortured past"? Why can't he merely be the earnest and devout cop that Sgt. Howie was in the original?

It doesn't look promising. I think I'll just go watch the original again (and no matter how good Ellen Burstyn is, she's not Christopher Lee).

Link to the thread on the original film.

Originally posted on the original Wicker Man thread...

I was listening to Scott Foundus (LA Weekly reviewer) on KLOS the other morning, and he revealed that the new version of The Wicker Man is not going to be screened for critics before its opening date in September. Can any of you confirm this rumor? Not the greatest of signs, especially for a film that has Neil LaBute and Nicholas Cage attached.

Ah yes, now that summer is basically over, the studios are keeping the critics away again.

Yeah, I called the woman here who's handling the film, which I'm supposed to review for CT Movies. No screening planned. If one materializes, she'll let me know, but...

So is it just stinkers they're doing this with, or relatively good films as well?

Ron, the D.C. screening is, as it apparently is in other markets (according to Hollywood Elsewhere), at 10 p.m. the night before opening. So, technically, it is screening ahead of time -- just not in time for reviews to be published in Friday's paper.

You wonder why the studio bothered with the 10 p.m. screen time, since the effect will be the same as if the movie hadn't screened at all.

If memory serves, this is also what the studios did with Alien Vs. Predator and Exorcist: The Beginning (the latter of which was a Warner film, like The Wicker Man) a couple years ago. My recollection is that these were promotional screenings, not press screenings per se -- these were the sorts of screenings that the average public could win tickets to, from radio stations and the like, and if any critics were there, it was only because they were invited to tag along. And if memory serves, all three of these films were horror movies, and all three of them were remakes and/or prequels of earlier horror movies, and all three of them were released in August (well, if we count The Wicker Man's "preview" on August 31).

Then again, I think Snakes on a Plane is ALSO getting the Thursday-night-at-10pm treatment, and it is NOT a remake or a prequel to any other film, at least not to my knowledge.

FWIW, the only "press screening" I have ever been to at night -- that is, the only screening where the only people allowed in the room were media, no radio, no contest winners, no "opinion makers", no nothing -- was the screening for The Da Vinci Code, on the Wednesday night before the film's Friday opening. That was weird.

I should add that I've seen only promotional screenings, save "Superman Returns," where the PR company blocked out two theaters, one of which was designated solely for press (interesting experience). However, every promo screening I've attended has a section reserved for "press."

Wait. Now that you mention it, I think my "Da Vinci Code" screening also was press-only.

But I'm not legit "press," in the sense that I don't write for a print paper or magazine. Or maybe more to the point: I have a day job. Therefore, I can't get to the official "press" screenings, which are usually at 2 p.m., on a Monday, at MPAA headquarters.

Incidentally, I did see A Prairie Home Companion at the MPAA, but I don't know who all was in attendance. Sure didn't look like press.

I see that Peter has blogged about seeing this remake, but inexplicably refuses to discuss it until he's seen the original. (That is so PTC:) ).

(I guess)

The movie's reception was pretty disastrous at last night's screening, and as much as I thought the first hour was an improvement over the original, the second half of the movie really sinks the remake. A crucial change in the nature of the main character robs the movie of some of its power, but the finale in the new version also seems to drag out more so than in the original, sapping the final sequence of the power it has in the earlier version. That sequence makes the movie, so getting it right is crucial.

The run-up to this sequence also misfires, with a lot of action-movie theatrics designed to get the audience cheering on our hero's behalf (the fact that Cage is punching out mostly females in these fights will be further grist for LaBute's critics).

It all falls apart at the end. People in the audience were hooting, then sneering.

I suppose it's possible some viewers will feel horrified by the film's conclusion -- that's the intent -- but they will be the exception, not the rule.

Mark Kermode just reviewed it on his afternoon radio spot (he paid to see it) and he slagged it to bits. Curiously, this new version totally jettisons the pagan/Christian culture clash of the original, and gives us instead a battle of the sexes. It would probably have been Kermode's turkey of the week if not for the UK release of Little Man.

Yeah, that robs the movie of much of its potency, although it's still a law-and-order individual taking on a lawless culture, of sorts.

The pagan costumes -- primarily bird masks, IIRC -- generated a few chuckles but were, I thought, eerily effective (sort of). However, when Cage dons a bear costume, things take a decided turn for the worse.

Man...I really hoped I would be proven wrong, and this might be good. But part of what makes the original film work is Sgt Howie has a virginal quality and a rigid dedication to his profession. He's pure. That's why he's there! It really destroys what made the original interesting. To change the conflict from Christians vs Pagans to men vs women is just...well...frustrating.

My review is up at CT Movies. It needed another edit - repetitive words and phrases, some awkward stuff, the usual stuff with something on so tight a timeline, darn those studios anyhow - but I must say I did have fun writing under the gun. Felt like a character in The Front Page or something. Should have used a typewriter and taken up the smoking of cigars.

My editor pointed out that it would have been better to have focused more on the present film, and I can definitely see his point - though again, we had no time for sober second thought, let alone second drafts! Gravitated to the '73 because, well, it's so much more interesting! Particularly from a spiritual point of view.

Had fun thinking about the connections between Anthony Schaffer's themes and those in his twin brother's plays - I cited EQUUS and AMADEUS because both became movies, but there are others as well. Did a last-second edit to hit my word count, cutting some kudos to the actresses in the film. As little time as each of them got, they really established strong screen presences. Was the woman who ran the pub Sister Beech, played by Diane Delano? Sure couldn't tell by her online photos, in which she's quite pretty - not uber-butch, as the chunky battleship of an innkeeper we see in the film, so maybe I haven't come up with the right charater and actor. (Why do they have guest rooms on Summersisle, anyhow? They don't much cotton to guests.) (And what's with that extra "s" in Summersisle? Bugs me!)

Thought Kate Beahan was alluring and suitably off-kilter as Sister Willow. Burstyn was complex and commanding as Sister Summersisle. (Did I mention that extra "s"?), Leelee Sobieski a kick (forgive the word choice) as the man-seeking-missile Sister Honey. But you know who stole the show for me? Molly Parker as Sister Rose and Sister Thorn. Somebody please make that woman an international star!!!! (I kept waiting for the twin thing to pay off - maybe the cop suddenly realizes that the missing girl has a twin sister, or that Willow isn't really Willow but her twin sister, or... On the other hand, I was quite prepared to settle for the whole twin thing just to be a creepy and unreferenced eeriness, and was tickled while writing this morning to stumble on the idea that it might be LaBute tipping his hat to the original author. Could also just be an image of fecundity, procreation, that sort of thing.)

The whole silent men thing worked really well for me. [spoiler]When Cage finds the pilot dead on the beach, his mouth is sewn shut... ![/spoiler] Again, appreciated a certain restraint on LaBute's part: their silence was increasingly evident, but not hit on the head, not explained away, just there as part of the texture of the community - [spoiler]I kept expecting one to open his mouth and show his tongue cut out, but it's far better that didn't happen[/quote].

Caught up in the flow of the film, I found a lot of LaBute's plot inventions working quite well, but by the end began to feel as if none of them were being paid off, and they started seeming quite gratuitous. Not so much the silent men / twins sorts of details - I like those sorts of things staying unexamined, un-paid-off - but... Did anyone see a way that the highway incident at the beginning (which I found very effective) which kept haunting him in various versions (which I also found effective) actually connected into the main plot in any way? I can't. One narrative blind alley that seemed pointless even while it was unfolding was the episode at the ruined church [spoiler]where Cage is lured down into the underground stream / tunnel thing, then summarily released by Sister Willow. Huh? I guess they just felt they needed another thrill at that point. Cheap.[/spoiler] That sequence was actually a lot like the moment when the cop is checking out the barn at night (I kept thinking of THE RING) and he falls through the rotting floor boards. Adrenaline hit, sure, but so what? It led to nothing, accomplished nothing. Doesn't ruin the movie for me, but... Coulda done better. Might as well install joy buzzers in our seat cushions and fire them off at random intervals.

Speaking of which, Peter, what was the deal with the bell that sounded before the show followed by the flashing strobe light thingamabob? Did that have to do with some sort of check for recording devices or something? How bizarre.

A bunch of visual stuff I liked. [quote]The fetuses in bottles were troubling. The inevitable Nick-stung-by-bees sequence was so obligatory it made me puke, but when the camera suddenly pulled up and revealed the whole field plowed into honeycomb shapes, I loved that.[/spoiler]

Wish the Badalamenti soundtrack had been more distinctive.

Footnote: much of it was apparently filmed around Vancouver, specifically on Bowen Island, where I have a number of friends. One of the actresses - Sister Violet, you saw her when the Cage character first arrived on the island, she was one of three women he first talked to, giving him a hard time about whatever that was bleeding in the sack - is Christine Willes, a very fine Vancouver actress who worked at Pacific Theatre for the first time playing the mother in our recent production PRODIGAL SON. There were several extremely strong performances in that show, but Christine's happened to be my absolute favourite: I thought it one of the best ever on our stage, and that's going back a couple decades now. Hoping to cast her in a production of DRIVING MISS DAISY next season.

Great review, Ron. One small thing: the original Wicker Man wasn't a Hammer film.

Thanks, Invizz. On the DVD extra thingie they talked about Hammer films, so without being sure I tossed that in there and hadn't time to fact check. I'll ask Mark to fix that Monday - which will be a great excuse to clean up a few other things at the same time.

Gracias!

Brian Godawa says: "Well, I cannot believe the amount of truth that is coming out of Hollywood these days. It's amazing. Still small in amounts, but it's happening. This is a genius story that shows the true heart and soul of Feminism/neo-paganism/Gaia Earth worship as the evil that it is. . . . Yes, that's right, this movie actually illustrates that the lovely 'earth' religion that Wiccans, witches and religious feminists all point to as the glorious original pristine Garden of Eden is actually a Garden of Snakes that is rooted in the same human sacrifice that all paganism is ultimately rooted in. A sacrifice that is a twisted parody of the need for atonement that the living God has embedded into the universe. Well, it's about time someone finally came out with this unique and original voice. Thank you, Neil LaBute. You are a courageous storyteller."

I suppose "courageous" is one word for a director who, at what should be one of the most dramatically intense moments, has Nicolas Cage running around in a bear costume.

Ron wrote:
: Speaking of which, Peter, what was the deal with the bell that sounded before the show followed by
: the flashing strobe light thingamabob?

Ordinarily, I'd say that was a fire alarm. Something very similar happened when I saw Constantine in a theatre on the Island last year, but in that case, the alarm klanged long enough for the theatre to actually evacuate us all.

I agree with a lot of your comments here, BTW. Lots of things that either don't come from anywhere or go anywhere. As I think I said after the screening, I kept waiting for the shoe to drop, and in the end, it didn't drop very far, or they hadn't lifted it very high, or something like that.

: Footnote: much of it was apparently filmed around Vancouver . . .

Yeah, did you notice that one of the half-dozen production companies was Brightlight Pictures? That's the company responsible for such made-in-Vancouver shlock classics as White Noise (which was actually semi-decent, as B-movies go) and Alone in the Dark (which was a HOWLER, it was so bad...).

I'm not with you on this one, Peter. It's such an easy criticism.

"It's easy to mock the sometimes jarring incongruities of tone, but they're utterly true to the spirit of the original, and true in turn to the spirit of May Day (when both pictures set their story), a spring fertility festival that mixed playfully outrageous folly with deadly earnest pagan ritual. If Cage traipsing through the woods in a bear costume is an easy target for the scoffers, so was Edward Woodward in a Punch costume, chased by a hobby-horse—and frankly, those are some of the elements that are most interesting in both films. For my money, it was gutsy for LaBute to retain the bizarre—I only wish he'd done more of it.

Nah, it didn't sound like a fire alarm: it chimed more than clanged, it wasn't alarming. And after maybe half a dozen evenly spaced clangs, we had the strobe light for, I don't know, thirty seconds to a minute? Not a fire alarm, I'd say.

Well, I talked my Christian guyfriend into going with me to see this one. I apologized in advance for what I thought would be the portrayal of his religion, then apologized afterwards for wasting his money on such a dud. We both found it boring and witless. La Bute cut most of the original movie's dialogue, and with it most of the verbal jousting between Sgt. Howie and Lord Summerisle that made the original so much fun. To fill in the gaps, La Bute seems to have lifted scenes at random from "Harvest Home" and "Children of the Corn." The action is supposed to take place in Peugot Sound, but the bit actors have Maine accents. Huh?

Ironically, my Christian boyfriend thought that Lady Summersisle's big speech about Paganism was the best part of the film (the only speech left from the original, BTW, and the only time someone other than Nicholas Cage got to do any acting). I was incredibly offended at the portrayal of Pagan men as silent slaves - real Pagan men are anything but silent and slavelike. Is it so difficult for La Bute to come to terms with the fact that some men actually like strong women?

Worst of all, this remake just wasn't any fun. A good horror movie is full of excuses to squeal and clutch your sweetie. This remake had few squeals and no excuse to clutch anyone. It was a Friday night, and we should have gone to "Snakes on a Plane."

Bright Blessings

I've been mulling The Bear Costume Question since my post Saturday. This morning I stumbled on an email I was sent long ago, a Christianity Today article called "The Horrors!" where W. David O. Taylor (I've never seen a name with two initials like that, one batting lead-off, the other in the number three slot. I mean, there's W.P. Kinsella, and I'm sure I've seen paired initials between the first and last names, but... Anyhow.) contemplates the horror genre from a Christian perspective. It's a nifty article.

He zeroes in on "the mother of the genre," the grotesque, specifically drawing on Wolfgang Kayser's The Grotesque in Art and Literature, whose four basic premises are;
Premise #1: The grotesque is the estranged or alienated world.
Premise #2: The grotesque is experienced as an incomprehensible, inexplicable impersonal force that has no name—
Premise #3: The grotesque is at play with the absurd.
Premise #4: The grotesque is an attempt to invoke and to subdue the demonic.

Here are Taylor's comments on #3;

I've always wondered why people laugh when they watch horror movies. I usually found them, well, profoundly un-funny. Why so much comic relief in Shaun of the Dead or Night of the Living Dead? The Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin suggests helpfully that the grotesque as a form of carnival sought to expose the inordinate sense of self-importance among the cultural aristocracy and the religious establishment. Clowns, fools, gargoyles and masks, costumes and games and laughter—all of it was a search after freedom. A freedom for what? To be whole. The only way to heal, it seems, was to laugh at our disintegrating pretensions.

Definitely fits with either version of WICKER MAN. Makes me think of those Mexican festivals where they "fool around" with death, or the European "Feast Of Fools," which also had death themes mixed in if I'm not mistaken.

P.S. Taylor was the director of the Ragamuffin Film Festival.

Ron wrote:
: I'm not with you on this one, Peter. It's such an easy criticism.

See, this is why I can't comment on the new film until I see the original.

: Nah, it didn't sound like a fire alarm: it chimed more than clanged, it wasn't alarming.

Well, I talked today to a colleague who was there, and he said it was a fire alarm, too. They make 'em special for the movie theatres, I guess.

In related news, while Googling to confirm that director Neil LaBute is a convert to Mormonism, I came across this paragraph in a review of The Shape of Others:

In LaBute's movies, people are either clueless dupes or psychotic manipulators, while art is meant to rub your face in unpleasant "truths." And I think he takes a little too much pleasure in that nose-rubbing, which might be why some critics (and a lot of women I know) called him a "misogynist" for In the Company of Men -- ostensibly an attack on misogyny: It was like watching a puppy tortured for 90 minutes. The Shape of Things is more straightforward in its fear of women -- and in its belief that opening oneself up to anyone is a sure recipe for getting clobbered.

This could almost have come from a review of The Wicker Man, no? Especially if the story has been revised in the way that I have been told it has ...

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Someone has compiled "the best scenes".

Oh, Peter. Oh, Thank You Thank You Thank You. That was just -- awesome. You really made my day with that one.

-s.

Oh, man. My sides are hurting from the laughter.

Even better:

Nicholas Cage Punches a Woman in a Bear Suit

-s.

Oh, man. That's incredible.

Is anybody else besides me wondering when Steven is going to review this? It's been parked in his "coming soon" section for months!

Nathaniel wrote:
: Is anybody else besides me wondering when Steven is going to review this? It's been parked in his "coming soon" section for months!

Link to the thread on SDG's reviews of the two films.

FWIW, my review.


Here is why I think Godawa is wrong.

First and foremost, while "Feminism" can be said to be a large part of the movie's subtext, "neo-paganism/Gaia Earth worship" isn't thematically important in the film at all. Narratively and ostensibly the Summersisle cult is neopagan, but thematically LaBute has no real interest in their religious or spiritual beliefs, no interest in specifically religious questions at all.

What LaBute is interested in is men, women and power, men versus women and women versus men. In the original, the protagonist's key conversation with Summerisle turned on belief in the old gods versus the true God. In the remake, the corresponding conversation turns on whether men are second-class citizens, whether women are subservient, etc.

Second, while misandry in feminism is a real phenemenon, from what little I know of real-world neopaganism it is usually more egalitarian than the Summersisle cult. Even if the goddess is put first, there is still room for the god, and men are not "second-class citizens" in the sense intended. I'm also unsure what Godawa means by connecting "earth religion" to human sacrifice: Surely he doesn't mean that real-world neopaganism has any tendency in that direction? Granted, it's not much of a religion, but that's kind of the point.

As far as the misandry-feminism angle goes, let's just say that I'm uncomfortable with a movie that invites us to cheer for the hero as he socks women around, no matter how scheming they are.



See, but in the original the absurdity of Woodward's Punch costume had a thematic point -- he was precisely the Fool. The villagers have been duping him all along, and in the end he willingly, if inadvertently, takes the role of the Fool. As Nathaniel notes, the villagers mock and jeer at him. His absurdity is the point.

What are we to make of Cage as the Bear? Okay, the Bear is in a way the natural enemy of the Bees. He is also basically immune to beestings, which this Bear most certainly is not. And even on their own worldview. Malus isn't out to despoil the colony. He's their dupe, not their predator. Since when do bees lure in bears to kill them? At the same time, the fool/jeering motif has been dropped. So the bear costume doesn't work qua bear and it doesn't work qua ridiculous.