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…)

This week’s episode of the HomeVideodrome podcast is running behind schedule, so check The Film Thugs for updates and subscribe on iTunes!

“Nostalgia is a powerful feeling, it can drown out anything.”

So says director Terrence Malick, who decidedly avoided nostalgia in his debut film, “Badlands,” but threw in subtle allusions to the pop-culture of the period so that they might inform the characters rather than the audience.

This is a stark contrast to other movies of Malick’s early era, in which some filmmakers laid the glassy-eyed longing for days gone by on thick, as George Lucas did in his breakthrough hit, “American Graffiti.” Lucas romantically looks back on early ’60s teenage innocence, when all kids cared about was cruising, fast food, and rock n’ roll before the reality of the Vietnam war set in.

Filmmakers often deal with nostalgia when depicting a certain time or place, usually because it’s one that they have lived. So how does one become nostalgic for a time they have never experienced? (more…)

1. The Lion King (3D) $22M – Somewhere I read that this was supposed to be a two-weekend re-release, but I can’t imagine the studio will pull it with this kind of cash coming in.  

2. Moneyball $20.6M – Brad Pitt’s star power is receiving a lot of credit for this very respectable opening and I’m not going to argue with that, but the “Moneyball” trailer is one of the best I’ve seen in years. The baseball pic looked enormously appealing and judging from the reviews, delivered as advertised. 

3. Dolphin Tale $20.2M – This would be an impressive opening without having to compete against “The Lion King.” Considering that kind of competition for the family buck, this is a phenomenal start. Appealing family movies will always be the best bang for the buck.

4. Abduction $11.2M – Shirtless “Twilight” star Taylor Lautner’s solo debut as an action star is being described as a box office disappointment, but I’m not so sure. The trailer was pretty cheesy looking and this opening is right up there with other B-level action pics. In other words, what brought in $11.2M was Lautner — not the concept or glowing vampires or anything else. This 19 year-old has an audience.

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Gregory Solman in CityArts Forum:

The deserved box-office disaster of Sony’s Straw Dogs remake—the South, as well as everywhere else, rising up against this species of estranged Hollywood elitism—merits a variation on Variety’s most famous headline: “Stix Nix Prix Pic.”

Filmmaker Rod Lurie’s benighted religious bigotry is matched only by flyover-country condescension and his seeming self-absorption: He swaps the sober middle class astrophysicist running away from Vietnam War campus tumult into what he thinks will be an English country idyll, into an insufferable sponsored character, a wealthy pseudo-intellectual screenwriter who moves to a place he neither likes nor respects to teach everyone there a lesson in atheistic, moralistic superiority.

Lurie bowdlerizes Sam Peckinpah’s unnerving, sophisticated 1971 psychodrama, which was itself freely adapted from source material by a British novelist, by applying the cheap theatrics of horror movies, so it finally has no resonance or plausibility. In contradistinction, Peckinpah’s work incisively contextualizes the American professor’s ’60s mid-revolution manhood-in-turmoil with Cornwall’s stubbornly retrogressive working class, which includes David’s (Dustin Hoffman) English wife Amy (Susan George). Exuding class distinction, she parades through her hometown brazenly braless, seeming to import ugly-American urban manners and embodying the threat of modern womanhood to economically emasculated men.

Peckinpah’s David dodges what the Englishmen see as “bombin’, riotin’, snipin’, shootin’ the blacks” for an escape into the peaceful, quiet cosmos of his mind. Lurie’s David and his possibly used-up television star wife moves from California to Mississippi for no discernible reason other than show-biz-kid showing off, only to sniff at cash-only bars and spotty cell-phone service and blackboard his siege-of-Stalingrad movie as if he’s the serious historian, not the Hollywood over-simplifier. One man discovers that he can’t go home again; the other learns he should have stayed home.

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OUCH: STREAMING TITLES NETFLIX MIGHT LOSE  – ‘QWIKSTER’ ALREADY A JOKE

Wait. “Apocalypto” is on streaming? … … … …  … … … Sorry, had to add that to my queue.

Hollywood board rooms everywhere have to be freaking out because they have absolutely no idea what the market that delivers half their profits will look like in five years — and that market is home video.

Sure, the loss of these titles sucks for Netflix, but we the consumers don’t give much of a damn. It’s all about the value and convenience. If it won’t stream we’ll hit the Redbox on our way out the door after buying a firearm at Walmart. If it’s not in the Redbox, we’ll hit the dollar shelf at Best Buy.

What we won’t do is pay $3.99 for a rental. Those days are waning. And we certainly won’t $14.99 for some awful flick we didn’t like very much in the theatre and can catch any time on streaming or the dollar shelf.

In case you haven’t noticed, I find what’s happening to home video absolutely fascinating.

As far as this insipid Qwikster debacle, it’s already becoming a joke — therefore I’m going to break that part of my personal code that says never offer unsolicited advice.  

Dearest Netflix:

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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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Maybe I need to start calling this “The Early-Afternoon-On-The-West-Coast Call Sheet”. Anyone who runs any kind of blog will tell you that it takes more work to write something when there isn’t much to write about. The search for inspiration is an endless one.

Charlie Sheen’s Apology Tour

Thus far, Sheen’s done both the “Tonight Show” and the “Today Show” and actually does come across as a guy who had some time to stare into the abyss. You never know, though. Sheen is an underrated actor, so it could all be a game to worm his way back into Hollywood’s good graces. No matter how talented you are, you can only be so much of a nightmare to deal with before you become unemployable.

On a human level, I hope everyone finds more peace in their life, but as a Charlie Sheen fan going back some twenty years, I’m eager to see what another phase in his career might bring. Hopefully more awesome B-movies like his epic ’90’s run and not “Major League IV.”

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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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Even more than Washington, Hollywood is famously the land of, “if you want a friend, get a dog.”  Pals, business associates, even lovers come and go in this, the country’s last freewheeling bastion of untrammeled capitalism, in which “what have you done for me lately?” is not a reproach but a perfectly reasonable question.

Daniel Melnick

So it is with great sadness that I learned, up here in the New England woods, of the death on Tuesday of my friend, rabbi and mentor, Daniel Melnick, the former head of MGM and Columbia, best known for Straw Dogs, Altered States, All That Jazz, L.A. Story, and That’s Entertainment.  Dan was not only a great producer, with a story sense second to none, a sense of history, both cinematic and American, a steel-trap mind, and an amazing memory (he could read version after version of a treatment written by an idiot – in this case, me – and always find the new material.  And then tell you what was wrong with it).   No, he was much more. (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…)