MySassyGirl Tagged Articles at Cinematical

How did the remake of a wildly popular Asian romantic comedy end up going direct to video? We'll have a chance to examine the wreckage for ourselves when My Sassy Girl, starring Elisha Cuthbert and Jesse Bradford, hits DVD on August 26. Grady Hendrix at Kaiju Shakedown comments: "I thought this was a bad idea, but then I saw the trailer. " If you follow that link to YouTube and watch the woe-begotten thing to the end, you are very brave and I salute your adventuresome nature. To be absolutely fair, it could be that the movie is terrific and the trailer is a terrible misrepresentation of its merits, but I wouldn't risk a rental on it.

Though I admit to a knee-jerk suspicion about English-language remakes of foreign-language pictures, in this case I wasn't a big fan of the Korean original, which was a box office smash in its native land in the summer of 2001. It was also a big hit in Hong Kong the following year, and US festival audiences lapped it up (e.g. it won the Audience Award at the first New York Asian Film Festival). Personally, I thought the humor was too over the top and the basic premise too difficult to swallow. (Here's a review I wrote in 2002.) That might make me receptive to a remake, but it doesn't look like director Yann Samuell or scripter Victor Levin licked the problems I saw in the original.

Miramax doesn't seem to be at a loss for projects lately, so it looks like they have decided to let one go. Variety reports that Gold Circle Films has picked up the rights to the film version of the Thomas Wheeler fantasy novel The Arcanum. Released by Bantam books in 2004, the novel is a fictionalized take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle leading a Super Friends style group of paranormal investigators called The Arcanum -- which includes Harry Houdini and the notorious voodoo priestess Marie Laveau as members. In the novel, The Arcanum is a secret society with a mandate to protect humanity from a variety of things that go "bump in the night" and the novel seems to be chock-full of fantasy and horror references (cameos include appearances by H.P Lovecraft and Aleistar Crowley). Throw in a plot about The Book of Enoch and a serial killer bumping off angels, and you end up with what sounds like a cross between The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Da Vinci Code, with maybe just a dash of Caleb Carr.

The project had been optioned by Miramax in 1999, but had been languishing in turn-around before Gold Circle showed up with designs on a fantasy franchise of their very own. Wheeler adapted the screenplay and a call has already been put out for a director. Gold Circle might not have the same high-profile reputation that Miramax does, but they have a respectable line-up set for the coming year, including Whisper with LOST's Josh Holloway, and the U.S. remake of the South Korean film My Sassy Girl with Elisha Cuthbert. So even if The Arcanum doesn't turn out to be the next great fantasy franchise, one studio's trash could still be another's treasure.

Odds and ends from Thursday:

• I'm not exactly sure how a sassy girl can turn a guy's life upside down, but that's apparently what will happen to Jesse Bradford, as he's just signed on to star opposite Elisha Cuthbert in My Sassy Girl. Directed by Yann Samuell, pic is a remake of a South Korean romantic comedy about some small-town guy and the "reckless, brazen" (yet somehow "sassy") girl that disrupts his entire life.
• Though at one point considered a wild rumor, Angelina Jolie is now officially set to star in Atlas Shrugged, based on the 1,100-page book by Ayn Rand. Jolie will take on the powerful Dagney Taggart, a role she's been interested in for quite awhile having been a fan of Rand's for years. No word yet on whether Brad Pitt will join her, though I suspect Lionsgate (who's producing) will do what they can to land them both.
• I can't see how a script called Little Lover Boy has anything to do with aliens, but according to Variety it most certainly does. Universal has acquired the spec comedy from writer Rick Overton, with Mary Parent, Scott Stuber and Mosaic Media's Jimmy Miller set to produce. Story is said to follow a "small-time crook who gets abducted by aliens, swipes their spaceship and teams with an alien pilot for a Robin Hood-inspired intergalactic road trip." Sounds fun enough, though I have one question: How do these aliens not have The Club?