Recast Your Favorite (or Least-Favorite) Movies!

[Ed Hocken]

1990's Drive
Directed by Luc Besson

Driver: Tom Cruise
Shannon: Dennis Hopper
Nino: James Woods
Bernard Rose: Richard Pryor
Irene: Joan Cusack
Standard: Jean Reno
Cook: Miguel Ferrer

Coming off the critical success of La Femme Nikita. Besson comes to the states with his American debut with an homage to spaghetti westerns and film noir. Cruise comes in after rejecting Days of Thunder, feeling that it was Top Gun with cars.

Some have argued that Collateral was a continuation of Cruise's character but it's dismissed as nonsensical fan theory.

[Anderson]

Airing tonight on TCM:

A grand adventure from MGM's heyday.

"THE UNCANNY X-MEN" (1956)

Synopsis:

Professor Charles Xavier has heard Uncle Sam's call and he's decided to draft the nation's youth into service. Exposing them to "ELEMENT X", Xavier has turned America's youth in Patriotic Superheroes to fight Communism!

Unbeknownst to Xavier, the Soviets have hired freelance mercenary Magneto to create a team of supervillains and ethnics to destroy the American way of life. Which side will prevail?


Cast:

Professor X - Yul Brynner
Cyclops - Rod Taylor
Jean Grey - Judy Garland
Beast - Joe Canutt (in his screen debut!)
The Angel - Warren Beatty
Iceman - Anthony Perkins
The Wolverine - Mickey Rooney

Magneto - Cary Grant
Mastermind - Dana Andrews
Quicksilver - James Dean
The Scarlet Witch - Natalie Wood
The Toad - Dennis Hopper



Special Effects by George Pal



Critical Reception: Upon the release of the film, MGM didn't know how to judge the critical response. While most enjoyed Rooney and Garland taking mature roles, they didn't care for the rather adult tone of what was supposed to be general audience material.

The implied sex scene between Rooney and Garland took a lot of Andy Hardy fans back a step. But, later videophiles came to enjoy the drunken Garland's take on Jean Grey. Obviously hammered during the shoot, Garland would break into other scenes and claim to read everyone's mind regardless of whether the scene warranted it.

Yul Brynner would later call it the worse film of his career, but then he died of cancer from smoking unfiltered cigarettes through his butthole. Cary Grant would later write about how this film caused to him brown out on LSD after trying to have a tolerance contest with Dennis Hopper.

The late Mr. Grant would claim that he got so high with Hopper that the hallowed halls of MGM began talking to him, while shooting the film's finale. After Mr. Grant ate the original pair of ruby slippers, he climbed to the top of the nearby WB water tower and began to scream the following phrase over and over again.

YAKKO! WAKKO! DOT! I'm ready for the New Age, my three-headed lord. I AM READY!

[Captain Russ]

Sid & Nancy.

Directed by Clint Eastwood.

Sondra Locke as Nancy Spungen.

Clint Eastwood as Sid Vicious.

In an alternate timeline, where aging and boredom and not psychotic co-dependency took the lives of these two young dipshits in dipshit love, we see what On Golden Pond would be like through the prism of the punk movement.

[Anderson]

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (1973)


Director: Nicolas Roeg
Screenplay: Terry Southern

Cast:

Mick Jagger as Captain Jack Sparrow
Michael York as Will Turner
Britt Ekland as Elizabeth Swann
Terry-Thomas as Governor Swann
Peter Sellers as Captain Barbossa
Terence Stamp as Norrington
Dom DeLuise as Pintel
Marty Feldman as Ragetti


Background:

After Southern, Ringo Starr, Mick Jagger, Keith Moon and Roeg dropped acid at Disney Land...the friends decided to work on an adaptation of their favorite ride. Over a weekend, the five men were only able to piece together a dozen pages of crudely drawn images and loose plot suggestions.

A year later, Southern hammered it out into a shootable script that the Walt Disney Company agreed to bankroll sight unseen. This would later be called one of the worst decisions in film history by Pauline Kael in her Pulitzer Prize winning piece "Walt Disney's Severed Head Wept".

The nearly three hour film was shot in Black and White, Three-Strip Technicolor and Stop-Motion Animation to bring the various wonders to life. Some would blame Disney for moments of cheesiness such as Sellers and Jagger singing "Splishin and Splashin" to the Ray Harryhausen's Kraken.

Rock fans are quick to make note of Keith Moon's uncredited performance as Scurvy Riddled Rapist in the film's elaborate Siege at Tortuga. What most don't know is that the Siege at Tortuga sported real penetration and the Disney Company had to employ a team of 16 editors to trim it down to a hardy "PG".

Disney originally commissioned Paul Williams to write the score, but Williams walked off the set after Keith Moon stabbed him. Willing to fill the void with a suitable star, Disney employed The Carpenters to finish the film's score.

The result was Disney's worst Christmas bow in its history. Film fanatics would later mock the epic Pirate odyssey as being the results of 70s moral decline abetted by a supply of cocaine that lead from the jungles of Bogota to Terry Southern's nose.

FLASH FACT: Vaudevillian actor Slappy Jenkins hung himself in the background of the Siege of Tortuga. No one cut him down for five days and his corpse made it into the final cut. LOOK FOR HIM!

[Captain Russ]

I'll take two.

[FilmNerdJamie]

Sit the fuck down. Phil said he's cooking one up that dare I say may never be topped.

Stanley Kubrick's Ratatouille.

[Bobby Bear]

Courtesy of Hocken and Phil....

Guy Hamilton's Mystery Men

LOVED this. Nice one, Jamie, Ed, and Phil.

[Anderson]

Stanley Kubrick's Ratatouille.

RATATOUILLE (1985)
aka Locuzioni Idiomatiche Ratto (Italy)

Directed by: Stanley Kubrick
Written by: Stanley Kubrick and Don Bluth

Cast:

Anthony Michael Hall as Remy
Brad Dourif as Linguini
Sterling Hayden as Django
Shelley Duvall as Colette
Miguel Ferrer as Horst
Randy Quaid as Emile
Malcolm McDowell as Skinner
Brian Blessed as Gusteau

and starring:

Klaus Kinski as Anton Ego

Synopsis:

Originally planned as an animated feature, Kubrick pleaded with Bluth to allow him to adapt it for live-action. What was once an animated musical about a French Restaurant has now become a live-action drama about restaurant life in Post WWII France.

Echoing "Paths of Glory" and his later "Full Metal Jacket", Kubrick creates a world where hope can't escape the bleak existence of the Culinary Black Market. Local chef Linguini is desperate to save his father's legendary restaurant from going under, but he owes money to local black market kingpin Anton Ego. That's when Linguini enters into a devil's bargain with the local gypsy thugs dubbed "Les Rats".

Building an uneasy alliance with the thugs, Linguini falls in love with the gypsy princess Colette. Colette is local thug Remy's sister and Remy won't abide by this. The end result is a Les Rats knife fight to the death in the middle of Linguini's restaurant. Much has been made about the edits to Klaus Kinski's speech about food violence.

[FilmNerdJamie]

Lars von Trier's Hollywood Star Whackers.

[Captain Russ]

Werner Herzog's BAMBI

[Timothy225]

Uwe Boll's The Godfather

[Captain Russ]

Tim, you've gone too far.

[V]

Sam Peckinpah's 'What About Bob?'...

[Timothy225]

Tim Burton's Jaws

[Captain Russ]

Johnny Depp is Bruce the Shark.