Long live the new, new flesh... the Hollywood remake?

I'm a little late in posting this news but that time away has given me the advantage of seeing how most of my peers have tackled this disturbing, horrifying and tear your frikkin' hair out news from Variety. And from spending about 30 minutes reading the articles around the web, I'm happy to hear that universally, no-one thinks this is a good idea. Remaking Videodrome, well it's an absurd thought that truly shows that Hollywood has gone to hell, really. There used to be a time the suits would remake properties they thought they could make serious money out of but now it seems they are willing to remake anything, even if there is no chance of profit, just to make up the yearly production numbers. For the young screenwriters of today who are actually trying to bring something new and original to the table, for the new David Cronenberg's working at the gutter of the industry right now, or struggling to get noticed and to even make it that far, for them even to get their scripts read by producers and studio execs, this is a sad state of affairs. There's people in this industry with too much power, and not one brain cell between them. Doesn't market research come into play before you greenlight a movie, especially a remake no less? Now for what reason, I can't say, but Universal have used their option to remake their own 1983 picture Videodrome, directed by David Cronenberg and which starred Deborah Harry and James Woods in his greatest performance (how many times do we say that about actors who have worked with Cronenberg?) as the head of Civic TV Channel 83, who makes his station relevant by programming a series that depicts torture and murder that transfixes viewers.

It was part of Cronenberg's great era of "body horror" and about four years ago, I saw it during a university semester on horror and rarely have I ever been so disturbed and astonished by a movie at the same time. What a film, so out of the mainstream, so personal. So unlike anything that gets made today and it truly was an honour to see it play on the big screen, with an audience who were as ignorant going into the movie, as I was. Seeing that finger pointing out of the t.v, looking like it was judging us for ever having watched the technology known as television, well it was darn effective. What does Universal hope they can improve on, what story do they hope to tell with their movie, how they plan to update a film that is about as least commercial as you could ever imagine, I don't know. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger has been given the impossible task on making Cronenberg's movie a studio film for the 21st century. Kruger wrote the underrated Arlington Road but has contributed some rather formulaic genre stuff since with The Skeleton Key, Blood and Chocolate, Scream 3 and The Ring remake, the latter's success I put down more to the great direction of Gore Verbinski than the screenplay he had to work with. According to Variety, the new picture will modernize the concept, infuse it with the possibilities of nano-technology and blow it up into a large-scale sci-fi action thriller. Those last five words actually made me laugh out loud.