CliqueClack

A drastic proposal: No more remakes

As Halloween approaches, so do more pointless remakes of classic horror films. This week we’ve been treated to teasers for the new versions of Evil Dead and Carrie. It would be easy to be cynical about both projects, but who knows, maybe they’ll be better than the originals.

Except obviously they won’t be. Because the originals are just about perfect, and more importantly, they’re original. The clue is in the name. These glossy new remakes may smooth over the rough edges, but in doing so they eliminate everything that made these films interesting in the first place.

Talking of rough edges, it’s worth noting that director Fede Alvarez has made Evil Dead‘s raped-by-a-tree scene “way more terrible than the original.” But Sam Raimi, who made the original and also co-wrote and produced the remake, has expressed regret for putting that scene in his 1981 classic. So what happened? I can only assume that all those Spider-Man films warped his brain.

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Is Homeland’s Carrie Mathison a ticking time bomb?

Late last year, after the first season of Homeland had drawn to a close, I talked about how much I hated the finale. I thought the episode itself was incredibly well done, but, to summarize, I thought the show copped out by not having Nicholas Brody go through the suicide plot. It was not the most popular of ideas — and I took a couple of body blows over it — but I still stand by my opinion.

The only equivocating I did at the time was whether or not I would come back for season two; fortunately, I pulled my head out of my … you know where, and have been watching. I’ve watched Damian Lewis continue to deliver as Brody and a supporting cast doing incredibly work. But mostly, I’ve been watching Claire Danes own the screen as Carrie Mathison.

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Happy Endings, Lost Girl, The Clones Wars on DVD and Blu-ray

New season sets coming to DVD — and Blu-ray in some cases — include Happy Endings, Lost Girl, The Clone Wars, and Upstairs, Downstairs. Sanctuary is getting a complete series release (DVD only), as are the classic series The Fugitive and Peter Gunn. If you want a chance to really get acquainted with some classic TV, check out the 24-hour marathon collections of Sea Hunt, In the Heat of the Night, The Young Riders, and Bat Masterson. You’ll find links to these and more in our handy guide, and you can make a purchase of any title directly through our Amazon links. Check it out!

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Magic Mike, Abraham Lincoln and Tinkerbell come to home video

If you missed Magic Mike in theaters — or were just too embarrassed to be seen buying a ticket — the good news is you can catch up with Channing Tatum and friends in all their glory this week on DVD and Blu-ray (and the Blu-ray also has full-length dance numbers so you don’t actually have to sit through the whole movie!). Also coming this week is the under-rated Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter which had the more dramatic and horrific tone that screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith’s other vampire flick, Dark Shadows, should have had. Disney is also debuting a new chapter in the Tinkebell franchise with Secret of the Wings, and we’ll have a review of that one soon. We’ve got more Madea on video, individual editions of the Universal Monsters Collection and much more on October 23rd. Have a look at the guide below, click on a link for more information or to make a purchase, and show your support for CliqueClack at the same time!

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Talking about How Sweet It Is

1. I’m doing the CliqueClack podcast, which is like “voice-writing” (which is what I’m sure it would have been called if Isaac Asimov had predicted podcasting in the 1950s).

2. I have a wife and kids who, despite my many protestations that I will most likely be like Judd Nelson’s dad from The Breakfast Club, still want me to “do stuff with them.”

3. I am lazy on a scale that can’t be fully comprehended via the written word (try listening to my voice-writing in the above link!).

4. I’ve been writing movies.

Now, it’s to that last point that I’m writing this little post. I won’t go into the whole history of the thing as that would take this thing into “full-fledged public masturbation” mode, but here’s the highlight: there will be a movie released next year that I wrote with Brian Herzlinger and that he directed.  It stars Paul Sorvino, Joe Piscopo, Eddie Griffin, Erika Christensen, Michael Pare, Louis Lombardi, Steven W. Bailey, and Erich Bergen. You can check out the trailer above.

Hopefully you’ll like it.  If you do, please post many comments to that effect (under several aliases!). If you don’t like it, please disconnect your keyboard until the urge to destroy my soul goes away. (Ah, you know what, now that I think about it, go ahead and post.  My soul is already pretty destroyed from years of stand-up comedy.  I don’t even know what my own laugh sounds like any more.)

Thanks for your time and hopefully I’ll be able to do my writing for CliqueClack soon!

Team CliqueClack discusses Vulture’s list of top fandoms

Early this morning, at our daily meeting at CliqueClack HQ, I shared that Vulture had compiled a list of the 25 Most Devoted Fan Bases. See, I’m a sucker for lists … I just can’t get enough of them. I enjoy the debate that always erupts as people discuss their disagreements. And considering Vulture had included several different genres and mediums for fandoms in their list, I just knew I was in for some fun.

And I wasn’t disappointed … well, almost. Our fearless leader Keith McDuffee doesn’t like lists. It’s like he’s allergic to them. But considering that otherwise he’s a pretty righteous dude – and, you know my boss – was willing to let it slide … this time at least.

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Alex Cross was 100 minutes I’ll never get back

Let me start with a confession: I have never read the series of novels by James Patterson that Alex Cross was based on. I understand they are pretty popular, and enjoy Patterson’s cameos when he shows up on Castle, but my experience with the source material only goes as far as the two Morgan Freeman movies with the same character. But I don’t need to know the source material to know that Alex Cross is a horrible representation of it.

Tyler Perry plays the titular detective, the leader of some form of priority homicide team of the Detroit Police Department. It’s never particularly clear how “priority,” but his team consists of his best friend Tommy Kane (Ed Burns) and Tommy’s not-as-secret-as-he-thinks girlfriend Monica Ashe (Rachel Nichols), along with a team of tech-guys and other sundry helpers. They are tasked with tracking down a mysterious assassin (Matthew Fox) who is systematically attacking the corporate leadership of a foreign company that’s taken an interest in Detroit’s resurgence.

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Vampire Diaries season 4 continues well-crafted thematic episodes

Something that The Vampire Diaries does so well is to make each episode stand out in some way, even though it is a serialized drama. There’s no “case of the week” to fall back on for structure, but the writers take that extra step to make sure there’s something special about each episode, through the character interactions, reveals, themes running through the episode or whatever gems they decide to gift us with each week.

“Memorial” was a shining example of a thematic approach. You could argue it was all about juxtapositions: the dead versus the living (or the undead, as the case may be with most of our characters), real morning versus symbolic mourning, the old versus the new and the loner versus the team. Likely there were many more, but these stood out for me.

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Animal Practice sent to the farm – The curse of Tyler Labine

Poor Tyler Labine:

This Guy!

He’s now the victim of yet another show being “indefinitely pulled from the lineup” — NBC has officially taken Animal Practice off the schedule. On the “mildly almost funny but the monkey is cute” comedy, Tyler Labine played a straight-laced veterinarian who seems the least crazy or zany guy in the bunch. Which is unusual for him. It seems like only yesterday we were watching Tyler Labine on his failed show Mad Love, where he played Larry, a slacker with a sardonic wit who was best friends with Ben, played by Jason Biggs. Remember that one?

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Do not send Venture Bros. creators pot-laced brownies

OK. So, two-to-three years ago, I loved the Venture Bros.. I obsessively watched seasons one through three (and four until the December 2009 break). Although I loved the 1960s Jonny Quest cartoon, the original comics and the 1990s Cartoon Network re-boot, I wanted something naughty, something demented and something slightly twisted to play with. I wanted something like The Tick. Dexter’s Lab, Johnny Bravo and The Powerpuff Girls nicely fit the ironic retro bill. But, when Venture Bros. rolled around in 2003 with Patrick Warburton channeling his 1990s Tick awesomeness, I geek-gasmed. From minute one, I cheered for Hank and Dean’s Bizarro Hardy Boy doppelgangers meets Jonny Quest. I loved Dr. Girlfriend’s sexy-ass voice, The Monarch as a failed Cobra commander and Phantom Limb’s … um … phantom limb. I cheered for Rusty and the “Boy Genius” who realistically exemplified what would’ve really happened to 1960s teen sidekicks in the 2000s.

So, when I heard about the Venture Bros. press room at New York Comic Con, I thought “ohmigosh! Venture Bros. are coming back! Finally!”  I didn’t know what to expect. They had done practically everything under the sun and both Doc Hammer and Jackson Public were such characters, so I went in with only two questions on my mind: where were they going to pick up when the show returned in 2013 and what twisted versions of 1960s pop culture would they re-formulate?

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