SamPeckinpah Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Some more cast members have been revealed for Rod Lurie's "re-imagining" of Sam Peckinpah's controversial '70s thriller Straw Dogs, which is good because it just started filming in Shreveport, LA. Like, yesterday. James Woods (one of my favorite creeps) has joined the cast, as have Willa Holland and Dominic Purcell; however, there's no real info on who they will be playing, as the three leads have already been cast.

Kate Bosworth is taking on the complicated character of Amy Sumner, who was played by Susan George in the original; James Marsden is her husband, David, originally played by Dustin Hoffman, and Alexander Skarsgård is her ex-boyfriend Charlie, Susan's ex and the ringleader of the escalating violence against the couple.

In Lurie's version, the Sumners relocate to Amy's hometown in Mississippi instead of Cornwall, and David is a screenwriter from Los Angeles rather than a milquetoast mathematician. I'm very curious to see how Lurie plans to handle the ambiguities of the original, especially the rape scene that had many critics leveling charges of misogyny against Peckinpah.

Did this movie really need a "re-imagining?" Can we please think of a new term of directors and writers who take pre-existing characters and put them in almost the same circumstances but in different locations? How will the cast hold up to the original? And let's not forget the iconic poster from the original -- that will be hard to top.

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which is due to hit theaters on September 11. Perry definitely has an army of supporters in his target audience -- African-American, female, and religious -- and I Can Do Bad All by Myself sounds like more of the same. Three delinquent children loot the home of the lovable-but-firm Madea (Perry), and she takes matters into her own hands. She delivers them into the care of their only relative, the hard-drinking, nightclub-singing April, played by Academy Award-nominated Taraji P. Henson. Aunt April sponges off her married boyfriend and wants nothing to do with the kids, but things start to change when a good-looking Mexican immigrant (Adam Rodriguez) moves into her basement.

In a funny marketing twist for folks outside Perry's usual target audience, the poster references a vastly different movie: Sam Peckinpah's controversial, violent home invasion thriller Straw Dogs, starring Dustin Hoffman. It may be a little obscure for mainstream audiences, but I think it's pretty clever when you consider it in light of the Rod Lurie remake that is due out next year, which will be set in the deep South -- Perry country! Check out the above poster and the original Straw Dogs poster side-by-side, as well as the full version of the new Tyler Perry movie poster, in the gallery below.

Meanwhile, Tyler Perry fans can check out the trailer for I Can Do Bad All by Myself, which just debuted at Fandango.

Just when it was looking like No Country for Old Men had a monopoly on successful interpretations of Cormac McCarthy's drearily minimalistic prose, production on an adaptation of The Road suggests the possibility of healthy competition. The movie, which recently finished shooting in Pennsylvania and hits theaters in November, remains a wild card until post-production wraps. Nevertheless, if this colorful report from the set in The New York Times offers any indication, The Road appears poised to capture McCarthy's original gloomy lyricism. Reporter Charles McGrath points out the difficulties the filmmakers endured when the weather got too nice and the grass looked too green. In other words, they're working really hard to keep things bleak. The story, about a father and son wandering through desolate landscapes after a cataclysmic event destroys civilization, demands that the dark aura remain intact. However, it wouldn't work without two strong leads, and McGrath implies that with Viggo Mortensen and eleven-year-old Kodi Smit-Mcphee (the next Haley Joel Osment?), that need has been fulfilled.

The best match for The Road, however, is its director, John Hillcoat, whose work on The Proposition proves he's the man for the job. That woefully undervalued western had the intensity of a Sam Peckinpah movie in overdrive, and The Road screams for the same raw, stripped-down approach. It's nice to hear that Hillcoat sees the movie as an antithesis to Mad Max, meaning he wants to eschew cartoony violence in order to create a scarily realistic depiction of post-apocalyptic duress. Bring it on.

[Photo above: Kodi Smit-Mcphee on the set of The Road, courtesy of the New York Times]

Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is an extremely divisive movie. While some people view it as one of the finest explorations of violence and the nature of man on film, others find it offensive and misogynistic. Famed critic Pauline Kael famously dubbed it "the first American film that is a fascist work of art." The 1971 film stars Dustin Hoffman as a mild-mannered professor living in the English countryside with his attractive wife (Susan George). A gang of locals harasses them both, graphically rapes the wife and attacks their home. Hoffman fights back with great vengeance and furious anger.

I saw the movie again very recently in its excellent Criterion edition and found it to be just as powerful and gripping and challenging as I had remembered. As Christopher told you in March, Rod Lurie (director of The Contender and Resurrecting the Champ, which opens Friday) plans to direct a remake of Straw Dogs. Lurie recently spoke with ComingSoon.net about it, calling Peckinpah's work on the film "a little lazy" and the film itself "very imperfect." He says, "It's sort of a classic film in the sense that it's infamous. It's a good not great film by a great director."

"It's an interesting film, isn't it?" Lurie adds. "But it was pretty much killed by a two-second moment on screen where his wife is being raped and she smiles. That was the end of that movie. You can be certain that she's not going to be smiling in the rape in my film." If you ask me (and you didn't), a huge reason the 1970s is referred to as a golden age of cinema is because the films were gritty and uncompromising. They didn't tie everything up with a pretty bow; they left questions. And often, as is certainly the case with Straw Dogs, the questions don't come with easily acceptable or digestible answers. Straightening out the film's politics, making the film clearer morally -- that doesn't strike me as a particularly great notion. What do you guys think? Is Lurie blaspheming here? That "two-second moment" he's referring to is a major reason that people still heatedly debate the film to this day. Will Lurie de-fang the movie by taking that away? Or is he setting things right?

Update: Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere takes issue with Lurie's statement about the rape scene.

As movies continue to get more and more violent -- and as filmmakers keep defending the violence -- it makes sense that one of the most controversially violent films would get a remake. Yes, Sam Peckinpah's disturbing classic Straw Dogs is being redone, and this time it will of course take place in America. The original, for those who haven't seen it, took place in the English countryside, where a couple played by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George are terrorized by locals. Screen Gems is still in the process of acquiring the rights to the film, but they already have a screenwriter (Reed Steiner) and a director (Rod Lurie). The project definitely appears to be more on track than the proposed remake of Peckinpah's Wild Bunch we heard about awhile back.

Considering Peckinpah's Straw Dogs is pretty sick even by today's standards, Steiner and Lurie will have to up the violence to possibly NC-17 levels. Personally, I can hardly stand the graphic nature of the raping and murdering that occurs in the 35-year-old original, so I don't know what more I could take in a redo. Fortunately the new version won't be made by someone like Eli Roth. I have hopes that Lurie, who made The Contender, one of my favorite films of 2000, will be concentrating on the themes of violence more than the actual depiction of violence, since the director tends to work with more political material. Certainly the more interesting aspect -- and one of the more controversial aspects -- of Straw Dogs is the how Hoffman and George react to the violence committed against them as well as by them.

A trio of insanely great series recently started in New York City, once again displaying the cultural embarrassment of riches with which those of us lucky enough to live here grapple on a daily basis (I'm not complaining, trust me).

Friday saw the opening of Summer Swashbucklers at Manhattan's Film Forum, a series of 30 pirate and adventure films -- most made between 1920 and 1950 -- that will unspool over the next three weeks, many of them in double features. Among the films in the series are such Errol Flynn classics as Captain Blood (his first starring role, in which he displays a surprising knack for screwball humor) and The Adventures of Robin Hood, the elder Douglas Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro and The Three Musketeers, and Gunga Din, starring the junior Fairbanks and Cary Grant.

Meanwhile, over in Brooklyn, the BAM Cinematek has put together two truly magnificent series that will run concurrently though the month of August. The first half of each week features the work of controversial American master Sam Peckinpah, from the shocking Straw Dogs (that one's showing Tuesday the 15th -- go see it, if you haven't) to the Steve McQueen starrers The Getaway and Junior Bonner. Then, from Thursday to Sunday each week, the theater is given over to a series called Leading Men of French Cinema. As you might expect, the films showcase the work of a wide range of French stars, in films that are equally diverse. Highlights of the series include Purple Noon, Rene Clement's 1960 version of The Talented Mr. Ripley (starring Alain Delon at his most impossibly beautiful), Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou (starring the wonderful Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Les tontons flingueurs, which stars Lino Ventura, a wrestler who transformed himself during the 1960s into an unexpectedly appealing screen presence.

While September is sure to bring good series of its own, these are all well worth sweating on a subway platform to see.

Sam Peckinpah would have been 81 today, had he not died of a stroke in 1984. Imagine the films he could have made if he were still alive ... or started making until he lost funding or grew too irritated with studios. Imagine the trouble he could have made.

I did not see a Sam Peckinpah movie until a few years ago, because I had heard they were all bloody and violent and misogynistic. So my first Peckinpah movie was Junior Bonner, the 1972 film that's considered the director's only non-violent, non-gory movie. Besides, I could not resist a film in which Robert Preston and Ida Lupino played Steve McQueen's parents. I was not disappointed: Junior Bonner is a lovely, wistful movie about the rodeo, and family, and the destructive effect of "progress" on a small Arizona town. McQueen is in his element as a fading rodeo cowboy, and Preston is charming as always.

The Wild Bunch is now one of my favorite movies ever, but I recommend Junior Bonner as a great "small" film, as well as a good introduction to Peckinpah if you're hesitant to watch his films. It's also a good way to fall helplessly for Steve McQueen ... you've been warned.