Yippee Ki-Ay, Muddled Farmers!

 

Oh, John McClane – what absurdity have your corporate masters wrought?

News reaches us today that Twentieth Century Fox, noted purveyors of the cinematic arts, have taken the proverbial low road and are releasing “A Good Day to Die Hard” with a 12A rating.  The BBFC, our film classification organisation, offered Fox an uncut 15 certificate – the closest US equivalent being the R rating – but Fox took the BBFC’s advice on the necessary trims to get the rating down to a level suitable for the UK’s sugar-addled tween boys to behold.

In related news, I’m bailing on this franchise.

I have no problem with reducing the level of violence in a movie – given the choice between thrilling adventure and bloody conflict, I’m fine with dialling back the gore – but I do have problems with a distributor lying to an audience about the actual tone of their film in order to make a double-dip cash-grab.  Remember the ‘uncut’ release of “Die Hard 4.0” on DVD and Blu-Ray?  Yep, pretty much the same film as the theatrical cut bar some more unfettered cursing and stupid digital blood.

We can only expect Fox to push a bogus, unexpurgated cut in due course which presents the preferred, definitive experience for cineastes – wouldn’t it be better to have the courage of your convictions and make an actual, honest-to-goodness, “Die Hard” movie again?  Or is that just a notion which boggles minds over at Fox?

I call reboot, people.  Free McClane!

 

Agent 47 lives to kill again (silently)…

Did anybody really want a “Hitman” reboot?  Twentieth Century Fox apparently did, as their 2007 movie with Timothy Olyphant, based on Eidos‘ series of stealth-based action games has a new titular killer in the form of…

Paul Walker.

Yep, I’m as bemused as that casting as you possibly are.  He’s arguably not the actor who comes to mind when you think ‘cold-blooded, genetically-engineered assassin’, but I await with interest to see how he’s going to circumvent the typecasting that I’ve saddled the “Fast and Furious” star with.

Directing this time around is commercials graduate Aleksander Bach, whose ad work is at the link.  I leave you to draw your own conclusions – but as I detest adverts with every fibre of my being, I shall recuse myself from further discussion of his work (He seems to get all of the perfectly-sculpted, model butts nicely into the frame in the “Tom Tailor” advert, doesn’t he?).

For my money, we’d be better off with this gentleman as Agent 47:

Golden-voiced, stylishly menacing English gent, Mark Strong.

He’s got the look, he can do menacing in his sleep and is a genuinely brilliant actor.  But I suspect that Fox would rather have a simpler proposition which they know how to sell.  If it’s cheap enough, I suppose that it will have been worth the effort to reboot the franchise, but something tells me that we’ll end up with a film which is near-identical to the not brilliant, not terrible Xavier Gens effort.

I live to be proven wrong – it’s about time that we had a decent, popcorn action flick based on a video game I.P. and this is one premise that should be hard to mess up too much.

Related articles

• Hitman movie reboot casts Paul Walker as Agent 47 (vg247.com)
• Paul Walker To Star In Rebooted ‘Hitman’ Film Called ‘Agent 47′ (slashfilm.com)

 

Wrath of the Titians

If you’ve been blogging for a while and take a look at how people searching online reach your site, you will no doubt have more than your fair share of ‘They searched for THAT and found me?’ results in your blog’s dashboard area.

Hence this post, inspired by some optimistic fellow seeking “Rosamund Pike Wrath of the Titians”.  Conjures an interesting picture doesn’t it?  They were, of course, seeking Rosamund in this Spring’s sequel “Wrath of the Titans“, but they did at least have a fighting chance of reaching my blog or finding a lovely image of the charming Ms Pike in her most recent film role.

As interesting are the bonkers results – “Sandra Bullock in Judge Dredd” comes to mind.  Clearly somebody conflating Sandy Bullock in the Stallone vehicle “Demolition Man“ with the not exactly dissimilar Diane Lane in the 1995 Stallone “Judge Dredd” and perhaps telling us a little more than Stallone might want to know about how unique and memorable some of his back catalogue is to the casual viewer?

Regularly top of my stats?

I get a 100 to 200 searches every week for the Fantastic Four, who I’ve only posted about once, in relation to the putative Josh Trank reboot of the franchise that Twentieth Century Fox are quite eager to get underway.  I’m not running a web hub for the perpetually bickering, Doctor Doom-thwarting Marvel superheroes, I don’t post regularly about them, but who can refuse that level of traffic?

Or is it just lusty Jessica Alba fanboys skewing things?  Who can say?

My favourite, utterly barking search result?  This one.

I know, right?  Somebody thought of that and ended up clicking through to me, I assume for my sterling coverage of Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch‘s careers.  Or they’re just into tall dudes.  Takes all kinds of folks, I guess…

Related articles

• Titian: His Life by Sheila Hale – review (guardian.co.uk)
• Wrath of the Titans (canadiancinephile.com)
• Titian doesn’t actually need sexing up – the week in art (guardian.co.uk)