I think they flirted with the idea of remaking it with Carrey a few years (i.e., probably a decade) ago. I could've sworn they even made a promo poster

So Gekko is no longer a villain?

Jeffrey Wright

Like A.O. Scott said this weekend, I wish Spielberg and Scorsese would make self-financed personal films that look more artistic risks, rather than stay in familiar territory. Say what you want about Youth Without Youth, at least Coppola is attempting something new and challenging, and it looks like he's continuing that practice with this film.

This approach can either be brilliantly challenging or can just look like laziness posing as meta-art...unfortunately, The Limits of Control feels more like the latter.

Plot-wise it's similar to Ghost Dog, but the approach reminded me a lot of Stranger Than Paradise...Let me know what you think when you see it!

That is, of course, assuming that Showgirls wasn't part of the "death" of the erotic thriller

It seems that, at least with movies like Paul Blart, Fast and Furious, and especially Obsessed, there is a tacit contract between audiences (or, at least audience members over 15) and the film that acknowledge that the film is stupid, mindless entertainment, and it can thus be enjoyed on those grounds. Of course, if a film whose aspirations do not seek beyond mindless entertainment fails to be adequately entertaining, that's a different issue entirely...

But what I think is the bigger threat are films marketed to tweens (17 Again, Hannah Montana). Tweens are not only dominating the box office, but pretty much every aspect of pop culture as we know it, and the age group consuming these products aren't old and discerning enough to realize that what they are consuming is nothing more than cultural junk food. Where films like Fast and Furious exist largely because of audience demand, trends are carefully created for films directed towards tweens based on the tendency for this age group to have uniform tastes. If tween culture continues to dominate, the qualitative future of studio films doesn't look promising...

Orson Welles was also a fat director. But look at the careers of Hitchcock, late Kubrick, Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo Del Toro, etc. People love fat filmmakers.

I think it depends greatly on the subject matter and how it is presented. Millions flocked to Saving Private Ryan, for example, and endured the film's gruesome first half hour not as a form of entertainment, but as a form of catharsis. People saw the film specifically to NOT have a good time, as they believed that, if soldiers gave their lives at Normandy, the least they could do is honor their legacy by enduring a graphic depiction of this sacrifice (of course, the squeaky clean movie star persona of the paternalistic Tom Hanks has something to do with this as well). In this respect, it is almost heretical to treat a film like SPR as a source of entertainment, or to admit "enjoying" watching the violence therein, rather than a rite of endurance. This supposes that the filmic content has some sort of a real correlation to the historical events, that this is an objective and realistic (rather than simply a "realist") look at the war instead of a depiction and manufacture of a narrative executed through meticulously constructed decisions at every turn. This is where realism, to me, becomes problematic, when a direct relationship to reality is assumed merely through formal means of representation. In truth, I've always found the heavily stylized realism of SPR, from its shaky camera to the desaturation of the palate, to be one of the most interesting parts of the film, and the violence an inextricable (and, yes, even entertaining) part of its overall spectacle.