remakes
Big Screen
America, You’re To Blame For Hollywood’s Artistic Decline
4:50PM Andrew Belonsky | Much hay has been made over Hollywood’s growing reliance on the remake. Creativity is dead, yes, we know, but, more importantly, the silver screen’s recycling kick also acts as an endorsement for mediocrity. And it’s all your fault! More »
Small Screen
Bad Moon Rising
3:45PM Andrew Belonsky | It’s official: MTV is going ahead with that horrible and unnecessary Teen Wolf series.
NeverEnding Story Really Never Gonna End
5:46AM Defamer Hollywood | Hollywood continues to dredge up your beloved childhood memories and cruelly destroy them. The latest victim is The NeverEnding Story. The 1980s German puppet mindfrak may soon be zombified into a crappy new remake. More »Kate Ritchie’s Retirement From Acting Possibly Not Necessarily A ‘Retirement’
9:11AM Clem Bastow | When Kate “Sally Fletcher” Ritchie left the cast of Home & Away after what seemed like five million years (approximately), it looked as though that was it for the former child actress; radio was her new frontier and all the Summer Bay fans best suck it up!
Well, perhaps said suckage can be put on hold – Ritchie is rumoured to be returning to the world of television, to appear in the remake of The Young Doctors, which has perplexingly dropped the “The”:
Described as “Grey’s Anatomy meets The Secret Life of Us”, the series is currently in development with production company Fremantle Media and Channel 9, but is not likely to be seen on screens until next year.
While an official approach is yet to have been made to Ritchie’s agent, both Fremantle and Nine are eager to swoop on the viewer favourite after she ended her 20-year association with Seven soap Home and Away.
“The program is still in very early days of scripting and character development, but we think Kate is fantastic and would love to have her on the network at some stage,” a Nine spokeswoman told Confidential.
Yes, you read that right – “Grey’s Anatomy meets Secret Life Of Us“.
You know, I can – for some reason – handle the whole remake fever when it comes to multiplex fare, but there’s something about television remakes that is scraping the bottom of the “scraping the bottom of the barrel” barrel.
But if this is the new trend then I’d like to suggest that someone remakes Chances. More » 
8:25AM Defamer Hollywood | Compounding (and maybe even stealing) our acute grief at the news of Short Circuit Redux, LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez today mulls over the pandemic of horror glutting the marketplace. With this week’s release of Prom Night leading the way, Fernandez counts more than a dozen do-overs en route to theatres, including the certain evisceration of classics like Friday the 13th, The Birds and Near Dark; a Stanford professor deigns to comment that audiences can’t be bothered to think and dread at the same time, so they take comfort in the familiar. Kind of like Fernandez himself, in a way, who latched on to our Short Circuit distress by reworking our “End of Ideas” tag for a lede (”Smell that? It’s the decay of original ideas”), citing stars Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy being “at the height of their powers” (we said they were “in top form”) and hitting the 1986 original’s IMDB Quotes page to flesh out our mutual concern over Fisher Stevens’ garish Indian stereotype. We feel your pain, Jay — but you already knew that, didn’t you? [LAT] More »
8:25AM Defamer Hollywood | Compounding (and maybe even stealing) our acute grief at the news of Short Circuit Redux, LA Times columnist Jay Fernandez today mulls over the pandemic of horror glutting the marketplace. With this week’s release of Prom Night leading the way, Fernandez counts more than a dozen do-overs en route to theatres, including the certain evisceration of classics like Friday the 13th, The Birds and Near Dark; a Stanford professor deigns to comment that audiences can’t be bothered to think and dread at the same time, so they take comfort in the familiar. Kind of like Fernandez himself, in a way, who latched on to our Short Circuit distress by reworking our “End of Ideas” tag for a lede (”Smell that? It’s the decay of original ideas”), citing stars Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy being “at the height of their powers” (we said they were “in top form”) and hitting the 1986 original’s IMDB Quotes page to flesh out our mutual concern over Fisher Stevens’ garish Indian stereotype. We feel your pain, Jay — but you already knew that, didn’t you? [LAT] More »
God Sheds a Tear, Shoots Self at News of ‘Short Circuit’ Remake
8:40AM Defamer Hollywood | Mere days after the news of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure 3 flared a fresh ulcer in our cultural digestive tract, news over the wire says Bob Weinstein is planning his own Apocalypse Pre-Game Show with a remake of the 1986 hit Short Circuit. The original featured Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy in top form as the annoying flesh-and-blood foils of a stupid fucking wise-cracking government robot named Johnny Five, who gets struck by goddamned lightning and finds Gadget Jesus or some bullshit that changes his whole global perspective to pro-peace/disarmament/”fuck you Ronald Reagan.” But wait — it gets worse. More »
