Austin360 blogs > Austin Movie Blog > Archives > 2006 > June > 12
Monday, June 12, 2006
More on ‘The Hitcher’
We’ve actually known for a while that the remake of the 1986 creep-out “The Hitcher” would happen this summer in Austin. Looks like the crew is sticking to its posted starting date — that is, today — and rolling cameras outdoors on the UT campus for “generic college scenes,” our campus source tells us.
The remake is written by Eric Red, who wrote the remake for “When a Stranger Calls” (is Red in a rut?) and directed by Dave Meyers, a music video guy whose credits include vids for Britney Spears, OutKast and J. Lo.
The film stars Sean Bean, Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton, according to the Internet Database, and is being produced by Michael Bay, the hot-shot director of “Pearl Harbor” who also produced Austin-made horror remake “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”
The production is slated for 44 days in Austin and New Mexico.
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Lights, camera, UT
An alert reader writes in that “The Hitcher” has been filming on the University of Texas campus today. Boston.com reports that the film is a remake of the 1986 horror movie starring Rutger Hauer. This time around, Sean Bean and Sophia Bush star.
‘Garfield’: Bad kitty!
I have soft spots for kitties, frolicking animals in general, British accents and Lucy Davis from the original version of “The Office.” That “Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties” features all of those things and barely ekes out a two-star rating tells you something about the quality of everything else that goes on in this unambitious kid flick.
Not that any of this matters, of course. You will see or shun “Garfield” based not on reviews but on whether your kids want to go. And they probably will. The first “Garfield” movie brought in $75 million U.S. box office in 2004.
This time out, the famously lazy cat (voiced by an uninspired Bill Murray) stows away with owner Jon (Breckin Meyer) to London, where he ends up swapping places with an lookalike kitty named Prince. Prince is the heir to a vast estate and the benevolent ruler of the other animals who live there. The evil Lord Dargis (Billy Connolly) wants Prince out of the way so he can build condos on the estate.
You get the feeling that maybe 80 percent of the movie’s budget went toward Murray’s salary and CGI animation, and everyone else just did the best the could with what was left. Garfield himself isn’t very appealing, but his actual animal co-stars are cute, and the British actors who voice them are more engaging than the humans who get stuck appearing in the film (maybe because you can’t see the boredom in their eyes). Especially nice is Bob Hoskins as a bulldog named Winston. And at least it all wraps up in a trim 80 minutes.
Your kids probably won’t mind the movie’s flaws, but they deserve better. They deserve wonder, heart, humor, imagination. Instead, they get a CGI cat dancing to the Black-Eyed Peas.
A ‘Nacho’ feast
— The Alamo theaters have one of their trademark feasts planned for the new Jack Black film “Nacho Libre.”
The menu: avocado soup, mollettes, cactus salad, snapper in green chile sauce with corn-stuffed chayote squash and coconut flan with flambeed mangoes. (Not enough things are flambeed, if you ask us, and we’re not even that sure what it means.)
The $50 ticket price also includes the promise of “several” Mexican beers.
Suddenly, we’re kind of depressed about the frozen dinner we brought for lunch.
The Nacho Libre feast is 7 p.m. June 20 and Alamo South and 7 p.m. June 21 at Alamo Village. For more info, visit originalalamo.com.
Also on the Alamo calendar is a visit by the Barbarian Brothers to the downtown theater on June 25.
— Recent Southwestern University grad Andrew C. Richey wrote, produced and directed the film “Daddy,” which he plans to enter in several festivals. The cast includes Southwestern faculty David Gaines and Justin Smith, as well as students Joseph Banks and Aaron Thomeson, and was shot in Georgetown.
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Austin Film Fest to honor Milch
— The Austin Film Festival has just announced that David Milch will receive the 2006 Outstanding Television Writer Award during this fall’s festival. Milch is the co-creator of “NYPD Blue,” and his other credits include the classic “Hill Street Blues” and HBO’s “Deadwood.”
— “Superman Returns” is “too much of a chick flick with not enough action and a weak villain”? Or is it “not only an epic fantasy adventure but a sad romance about an alien outsider who will never really belong.”
— The Disney parks are updating their Pirates of the Caribbean rides to add Captain Jack Sparrow, which creates a quandary. On the one hand, they’re messing with a beloved attraction that was just fine the way it always has been since we were small. On the other hand, adding Johnny Depp is hard to argue with.
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