Movie Review: Straw Dogs, Another Remake

Lauren Treihaft — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:54:19 +0000

Posted on andPOP:

Nothing is too supple, I mean subtle, in Rod Lurie’s remake of the 1971 classic, Straw Dogs.

Lurie trades the gloomy fog of the English countryside for the humid, deep south Deliverance style eeriness in his remake. The effect of terror is the same. However, Lurie is going by the new rulebook of horror, the one that boasts a wealth of gore and a lack of character development.

Screenwriter, David Sumner (James Marsden) and his trophy actress wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) decide to leave the Hollywood Hills for a while to return to Amy’s hometown in Blackwater, Mississippi so that David can work on his new screenplay about the Battle of Stalingrad. The couple rolls into town in a vintage Jaguar convertible, blasting old folky tunes, and it becomes clear that these people really don’t know how to fit in.

The deep southern backdrop provides an easy route to conjure the monsters of the film, the uneducated hicks and hillbillies who never left Blackwater. Amy is the former head cheerleader of the town, one of its most prized possessions second to their winning football team. David and Amy hire Amy’s former boyfriend, Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), an outgrown member of the football team, to work construction on her family’s old house. Charlie’s group of local derelict friends also help him with the construction job.

Automatically we know this is going to be an ultra-violent film. It starts out with a bar fight, basically the same one which occurs in the original but with a lot more blood. Coach (James Woods), the former coach of the football team and a local drunk, and possibly the most raucous and scary character of the film, will not leave the bar when he is refused a drink. After which he smashes a glass, throws a chair, and jumps behind the bar to take matters into his own hands. This is only the beginning of the local town folk taking justice as they see fit.

Meanwhile Amy, for the first half of the film dresses akin to Daisy Duke and prances around her estate nearly naked and after a short time Charlie and his gang’s voracious sexual appetites rise to the surface. Though Susan George, in the original, played the devious little nymph Amy in a role that can’t really be imitated, Bosworth does her best to attract the wrong attention and is subjected to a brutal raping, possibly more disturbing than the 1971 scene. The world’s fascination with torture porn must also be taken into account when comparing the two, but either way, it is difficult to watch.

The misogyny in the town is hard to handle as a viewer. Skarsgard and Woods play a terrific team of terror with their sinister looks and sarcastic winks as they refer to Amy by her old nickname, “Amy Cakes”. The final quarter of the film is startling and extremely visceral. The anticipation involved is evocative of that in Panic Room, and the demonization of Coach and Charlie is reminiscent of DeNiro’s character in Cape Fear, inflicting pain and horror on a fairly innocent family.

Though the acting is semi-decent and the setting is understandable, it is an arduous task to remake a film that has such clout as the 1971 version. Depending on tastes in psychological thriller films and their use of blood versus character development I would say jump for the original. However, not a bad effort by Lurie.

Dustin Hoffman Joins ‘Barney’s Version’

Eva Lam — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:24:01 +0000

Posted on andPOP:

Dustin Hoffman has joined the cast of “Barney’s Version,” a big-screen adaptation of the critically acclaimed novel by Mordecai Richler.

The two-time Academy Award winner will star alongside Paul Giamatti (“Sideways”), who will portray the cantankerous title character, Barney Panofsky. Hoffman will play Izzy, Barney’s foul-mouthed, retired cop father.

In a statement, the film’s director expressed his excitement for the addition of Hoffman to the Canada-Italy co-production.

“Many of the films that Dustin Hoffman starred in (The Graduate, Straw Dogs, Little Big Man) led me to become a filmmaker in the first place,” said Richard J. Lewis, whose credits include episodes of “CSI” and “North of 60.” “Now I have the opportunity to work with a legend.”

Principal photography is slated to begin Aug. 17 in Rome. Filming also expected to take place in Montreal, the Laurentians and New York.

Montreal author Richler won the Giller Prize for his novel, which was published in 1997.

andPOP » Dustin Hoffman

Movie Review: Straw Dogs, Another Remake

Dustin Hoffman Joins ‘Barney’s Version’