When Dustin Hoffman’s David Sumner announces at the end of the 1971 version of “Straw Dogs” that he “got ‘em all,” he says it with a sense of triumph.

We know he has changed from a man who fled America because he was too spineless to take a stand on the Vietnam War into someone who takes a stand against some British thugs who have antagonized him and his wife. When they begin to attack his home, Sumner takes a stand to defend it. He begins to understand machismo and responsibility.

In the new version of “Straw Dogs,” lead actor James Marsden utters the same line, but with a very different feeling. We don’t get a slightly sick sense of accomplishment in his voice. Instead we get a voice that is beat after what could only be described as a Pyrrhic victory for the hero. We get the sense that he he has beaten the monsters at their own game and is now spent and ready to move on, not completely changed.

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Hollywood’s contempt for “middle America” is no secret. Audiences are repeatedly subjected to its indoctrination, hiding in plain sight, via entire plot themes, one-liners in network comedies, and yes, even seemingly benign horror films. The lesson? Folks, Hollywood’s leftist propaganda is indeed peddled everywhere. Case in point:  the recent box-office bomb “Straw Dogs,” now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

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While billed merely as a home-invasion thriller, upon reading the plot description, my liberal propaganda radar was already on high alert. The story? Professional screenwriter David (“X-Men”’s James Marsden) and his wife Amy (“Blue Crush”’s Kate Bosworth) leave the confines of Los Angeles and head down south to Amy’s boondocks hometown so they can restore her deceased father’s house and David can focus on his writing.

Hmm, we already know where this is headed. Two enlightened, urban yuppies moving to a tiny Southern town? Forget the usual ‘fish out of water’ comedy hijinks; this is, of course, a liberal’s wet dream:  an opportunity to elevate blue-state dwellers while ridiculing the red. Moreover, you know you’re in for a dose of authenticity when Rod Lurie — its writer/producer/director — hails from the middle-America enclave known as… Greenwich, CT.

David and Amy slowly but surely clash with her high school ex-boyfriend, Charlie (“True Blood”’s Alexander Skarsgard) and his crew of “hillbilly miscreants,” culminating in a (yawn-inducing) home-invasion showdown. (more…)

Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 thriller “Straw Dogs” was an incendiary work in its time, a study on the nature of violence in man and manhood. It’s an excellent picture more appreciated than loved, a challenging film that’s nonetheless somewhat slow.

For 2011, director Rod Lurie has changed the theme, switching from an interest in man’s primal instincts to a treatise on how Southerners are cruel, superstitious, and stupid. Perhaps the former would be a bit dated in a cinematic era of torture porn, but then again, so is the latter, with its aggressive stereotyping and persistent jabs at those awful Red Staters who keep giving their electoral votes to Republicans.

Its hero is David Sumner, played in 1971 by Dustin Hoffman, now by James Marsden. Quite the shift in leading men, one that has a benefit or two but ultimately sabotages the character. Hoffman, playing a mathematician, looks an unlikely candidate to mercilessly dispatch a gang of marauding hooligans. But when he surveyed the carnage and proclaimed, “I got ‘em all,” there was a catharsis and morbid satisfaction in what had just gone before.

Uttered by Marsden, it feels like a statement of fact; of course this guy won. Look at how handsome he is! He doesn’t earn his manhood, he just slaughters those buffoonish, superstitious Mississippians (filming was done in Louisiana, so the state it actively smears was deprived of any potential revenue the production would have brought).

David and his wife Amy (a bland Kate Bosworth) move to an English house in her native Blackwater, Mississippi, to get some quiet and work on his screenplay about Stalingrad. Peckinpah’s version infused the American Hoffman’s move to England with meaning by associating it with political strife at home, but Lurie’s wealthy screenwriter just wants some quiet. David 2.0’s stand is thus reduced to inane stubbornness in service of a shoddy script.

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Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 “Straw Dogs” is a movie that cries out not to be remade. Even as an international movement for women’s rights and revaluation was beginning to build (Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” had been published the year before), Peckinpah determined to make a case for male primacy and female insufficiency. His picture didn’t just argue that a man must be prepared to use force in defense of his home and his woman (who can’t be counted on in such a situation); it also asserted that only in such violence can he discover his true nature as a man. In the movie’s most famous scene, a woman is brutally raped and halfway enjoys it: In the view of Peckinpah, who co-wrote the script, she was a tease who had been asking for it anyway.

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Although hailed for its technical skill, the movie was also widely reviled at the time. Critic Pauline Kael, a Peckinpah champion, deplored the film’s “sexual fascism.” Peckinpah, she said, had “discovered the territorial imperative and wants to spread the Neanderthal word.”

It’s no surprise that in undertaking to remake Straw Dogs, director Rod Lurie realized that there was no way this story was going to fly today without some key adjustments. Unfortunately, these have further muddied Peckinpah’s already murky motivational waters. …

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Film critic Roger Moore (no right winger) in the Orlando Sentinel:

Equal measures smug and savage, Rod Lurie’s infuriating remake of Sam Peckinpah’s vengeance thriller “Straw Dogs” still packs a visceral punch. An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it’s not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

Lurie, whose career has become a careen (unreleased or under-released failures) since “The Contender,” has cleverly re-set the tale, that of a mild-mannered bookish and emasculated city dweller (Dustin Hoffman in the original, James Marsden here) challenged, bullied and battered by brutish, primitive locals from England to Mississippi. …

Lurie’s resetting of the movie may seem dated to a real Southerner. But you don’t have to dig into ancient history to find the redneck thuggery suggested here. Where the original film was a commentary on the endangered state of manhood in the late 20th  century, Lurie seems to be making points about the ineffectual ways reasonable people face belligerent ignorance. It’s intellectual liberals vs. Tea Party hicks with guns. Get it?

One “improvement” stands out. Sam Peckinpah rather famously forgot to leave out the Chinese proverb that gave the original film its title. Lurie has David explain it in a moment that feels like a class recitation. It comes right after the  nightly chess lesson he gives his young/naive wife.

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The new film “The Box” starts off with a simple premise. A stranger leaves a box at a young couple’s door early one morning in Richmond, Virginia. Later on, that stranger comes to visit the couple and he tells the young wife that if she pushes the red button in the box, she’ll receive a million dollars but someone that she does not know will die. The stranger does not explain how or who or even why this will occur. He just gives her the instructions and a time-frame. The premise is an interesting one to develop but unfortunately, this movie fails to develop it and the film is quickly overwhelmed by a bizarre series of events that follows the choice over whether or not to push the button.

The film is set in the mid-1970s and the lead couple, Arthur and Norma Lewis, are played by James Marsden and Cameron Diaz. He works for NASA and she’s an elementary school teacher. They’re a relatively boring couple with one son  The movie begins with the doorbell ringing very early in the morning and the couple finding the box on the doorstep. Mrs. Lewis learns more about the box from Arlington Steward, played by Frank Langella, the mystery man who dropped it off. The young couple has recently faced some disappointing news about their jobs and the financial benefits of pushing the button are obvious to both of them, even though their financial situation has not been detailed enough to show a compelling desire for them to lean towards pushing the button at the expense of another person’s life. (more…)

 
James Marsden

Here’s one that could go really right, or really wrong.

James Marsden (“X-Men’s” Cyclops) has been cast in a remake of “Straw Dogs,” Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic about a mathematician who moves to his wife’s hometown for some country seclusion – and gets very little.

The film is incredibly complex and filled with controversial social commentary. Dustin Hoffman’s timid lead character is forced to confront not simply his social awkwardness but his own impotence as a cat and mouse game with a band of blue-collar locals intensifies.

They flirt with and then rape his wife (Susan George) before attacking his home. Hoffman’s character must face his own passivity and relationship to violence. (more…)