The Lodger Tagged Articles at Cinematical

I wish turkey day was turkey month, but since we all have to work and don't want to end up looking like Mr. Creosote, it's time to get back to work. Elizabeth Berkley is soon going to play David Caruso's ex on CSI: Miami, but that's not the only casting news coming out of the weekend:

• His name might not be on the tip of every tongue, but you've definitely seen John Michael Higgins around. He's been in a ton of stuff, the best of which rests on the plate of Christopher Guest. He was Michael McKean's lover and dog-show helper in Best in Show, a New Main Street singer in A Mighty Wind, and finally, For Your Consideration's Corey Taft, who said: "In every actor there lives a tiger, a pig, an ass, and a nightingale." Now Variety reports that he's got a role in Jim Carrey's Yes Man. Unfortunately, there's no word on who he'll play, but hopefully it'll be a decent gig and not just a brief blip.
  
• Ah, Simon Baker. The Aussie actor has made People's "Most Beautiful" list, and most recently, he's tried to whisk Anne Hathaway away from Adrian Grenier in The Devil Wears Prada, and starred with Winona Ryder in Daniel Waters' Sex and Death 101. According to Variety, he's now joining Alfred Molina and Hope Davis in The Lodger -- a Hitchcock remake that first geared up back in 2006. While they're not saying who he'll play, I imagine he'll be the lodger, since the only other younger man on the cast list thus far is Donal Logue, who is already playing Bunting.
• He usually pops up on television a lot, and in movies you've probably never heard of, but now Vince Colosimo has nabbed himself a role in a bigger-buzz feature. Variety reports that he has a part in Ridley Scott's Body of Lies, which already stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe and Carice van Houten. The movie, which is currently filming, is about a former journalist who was injured in Iraq, who then somehow gets hired to hunt down an Al Qaeda leader. Colosimo is playing some dude named Skip.

Give me a break. I usually don't raise a fuss about the endless wave of remakes, reimaginings, re-conceptualizings, prequels of sequels and assorted other bald-faced money-grabbing ventures Hollywood engages in, but now we're being told that Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 film The Lodger is on the track for a remake! So it will be black and white? And silent? And will follow the same storyline? Well, no, obviously, but it has Alfred Hitchcock's name attached to it, so that's got to be worth at least something. The film will be directed by first-timer David Ondaatje and will be "re-imagined" as an "urban thriller set in Los Angeles" -- where Jack the Ripper committed some of his most heinous murders.

Ondaatje's film will be partially based on the novel from Marie Belloc Lowndes that served as the inspiration for Hitchcock's film, but it's hard to see how much inspiration it could possibly provide. Lowndes' book is about the Jack the Ripper killing spree, while this new film will have, according to HR, "two converging plot lines set in present-day Los Angeles. The first involves an uneasy relationship between a psychologically unstable landlady and her enigmatic lodger, and the second is about a troubled detective engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with an unknown killer." Translation: having Alfred Hitchcock's name attached to our complex detective thriller would really raise the coinage, so can we make that happen? We can? Awesome.

Though the story has temporarily disappeared from the Production Weekly website (usually when this happens, the story resurfaces within 24 hours or so), it was reported earlier today that David Ondaatje announced his intentions to remake Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 silent film, The Lodger (based on a book by Marie Adelaide Lowndes). Though the story of the original Lodger was "about a fictional version of the Jack The Ripper killings," Ondaatje's version will (of course) be shifted to the present day. According to the PW piece, the film will examine a series of mysterious, Ripper-esque killings from two different points of view. The first is that a of a detective who is both trying to solve the case and dealing with the fact that he's one of the prime suspects in the killings; the second comes from a landlady, who becomes increasingly convinced that one of her tenants is the killer. I know I'm usually opposed to remakes and all, but this sounds sort of great -- or at least like fodder for a great novel. Whether Ondaatje's is a good enough writer and director to pull it off on screen remains to be seen.

If nothing else, Ondaatje will approach his subject with respect: He made a Hitchcock-inspired short called Waiting for Dr. MacGuffin, as well as a documentary, Undressing Hitchcock, which "studies the technical, cinematic innovations" of the director. Production on The Lodger is expected to begin in LA in early 2007.