hideo nakata Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Well, I guess there were only so many ghost stories out there that revolved around 'creepy little kids', so it was about time that Hideo Nakata started to look elsewhere for thrills. Variety reports that Nakata will be embarking on his second English-language feature (after The Ring 2) with the psychological thriller Chatroom. So before you ask, no, this will not be a technophobe thriller along the lines of Pulse or One Missed Call. So breathe a big sigh of relief, because if there is one thing that I think this world could do without, it is a horror movie about a killer chatroom.

Chatroom centers on six teenagers who become involved in an online chatroom that encourages its members to engage in destructive and suicidal behaviors out in the 'real world'. The film is based on the 2005 play of the same name by Enda Walsh and Walsh will be adapting his own play for the big screen. Walsh won the Cannes Camera d'Or back in 2001, so at least the guy knows his way around a screenplay.

So while it would seem that Chatroom is a little outside of Nakata's usual 'supernatural stomping grounds', it doesn't look like that has been keeping anyone up at night. WestEnd Films' (who is in charge of selling the property) founder told Variety, "Nakata has come up with something very visual, very conceptual, and situated somewhere between Disturbia and Cube, " -- so I can only assume that Nakata's film is going to work in a few scares with his teen angst. At least the topic of online suicide clubs is something that the native Japanese director is probably pretty familiar with.

Chatroom will begin filming on location in the UK this spring -- hopefully without a waterlogged pre-teen girl in sight.

In the latest example of the bromide that film crosses international borders, we have news from Variety of an American remake of a Japanese film to be directed by a Chinese filmmaker featuring a cast of American and Canadian actors. (Pardon me, but my head is still spinning.) Let's start with the cast, which includes a couple of names that may be familiar: Henry Thomas (E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Legends of the Fall) and Kevin Corrigan (The Departed, American Gangster) will star in Don't Look Up, the story of a film crew that slowly goes insane "when spirits from another era invade the film stock of the contempo production." Fruit Chan is set to direct.

Hideo Nakata directed the original film (Joyû-rei, AKA Ghost Actress), which was released in Japan in 1996. Two years later, Nakata made Ringu, which kicked off an Asian ghost movie boom that slackened only recently. In turn, the Hollywood remake of Ringu (The Ring) reaped big returns at the box office, which sparked the Asian remake mania we're still suffering from. Among other projects, Nakata remade his own sequel for Hollywood (The Ring Two) -- and then promptly retreated to Japan. He turned down offers from production company Distant Horizons to remake Don't Look Up himself.

Despite the fact that I love both movies, and despite the fact that they're nothing alike, I often confuse the titles of Don't Look Back and Don't Look Now. Soon I will be able to confuse them with another film, Don't Look Up, which is going into production at the end of this year in Romania and South Africa. According to Variety, the film will be a remake of Hideo Nakata's 1996 horror pic, Joyû-rei. For those not paying close attention to Japanese remakes, this came before even Nakata's original Ringu, which was redone as The Ring (he also did an original sequel, Ringu 2, helmed the remake sequel, The Ring Two, and is set to do The Ring 3). For Don't Look Up, the director is Hong Kong filmmaker Fruit Chan, who is most familiar to Western audiences for his segment Dumplings in Three ... Extremes. Chan possibly hopes to break out bigger with the remake; he told Variety that he's too often considered an art-house director and would like to be considered, simply, a director.

The original Don't Look Up (aka Ghost Actress, as Joyû-rei has also been called in English translations) dealt with a haunted movie studio and focused on the production of a war film. The ghost of a woman begins appearing on the set and even shows up in the dailies (reminds me of that Three Men and a Baby legend). Also, footage from an older film keeps inserting itself into the film. This is all the plot info I could get out of review sites Black Hole DVD Reviews and Flipside Movie Emporium -- the movie is currently unavailable in the States. Variety gives the new version's plot as being about a film production shooting in Transylvania haunted by an old piece of celluloid depicting a woman's murder. Don't Look Up will be produced by Brian Cox (Pulse) and Yôko Asakura. As for the other Don't Look movies, Don't Look Back recently got a sorta-sequel called 65 Revisited, which must be seen, and Don't Look Now is also being remade.

I've come to notice a trend with the production company Vertigo Entertainment. Even more than they like to make remakes of foreign horror films (The Ring; The Grudge; The Eye), they really seem to favor the recruitment of foreign filmmakers. Here is a rundown of some of the acclaimed directors they've hired: Walter Salles, from Brazil; Alejandro Agresti, from Argentina; Oliver Hirschbiegel, from Germany; French duo David Moreau and Xavier Palud; Yann Samuel, also from France; Swedish duo Joel Bergvall and Simon Sanquist; Victor García, from Spain; Yam Laranas, from Philippines; and Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Nakata and Masayuki Ochiai, all three from Japan. I guess Jim Sheridan, from Ireland, counts too. It is weird, because sometimes a filmmaker is brought out to remake his own film, like with Shimizu and The Grudge and with Laranas and The Echo, and other times a filmmaker will be assigned the remake of someone else's film while his own original film is being remade by another acclaimed director, like with Nakata and Salles and Dark Water.

The sad thing is that many of these great directors have ended up making awful movies for Vertigo. The reason is probably coincidental, and we still have yet to see if Samuel can bring his fantastically romantic vision appropriately to a pic starring Jesse Bradford and Elisha Cuthbert or if the work Hirschbiegel did on The Invasion (before being replaced -- allegedly not fired) holds up to his Oscar-nominated breakthrough. But just in case there is a curse (how fitting) on the company to ruin these foreign filmmakers, then I am glad that the latest recruit, Spain's Daniel Calparsoso, is not actually that widely respected. Actually, I'm not familiar with him at all, but his most recent film, Ausentes, has a super-low rating of 3.9 on the IMDb. Not even The Grudge 2 rated that badly. So, he certainly can't do any worse with his film for Vertigo, a trapped-in-a-loony-bin-during-a-thunderstorm-set horror film called Incident at Sans Asylum (do asylums even exist anymore??). Another thing it has going for it: it isn't a remake. The script is an original, by chef-turned-cinematographer-turned-writer Craig Zahler, who also penned Vertigo's upcoming western The Brigands of Rattleborge. Zahler was also one of Variety's "10 Screenwriters to Watch" last year.