This weekend in Ballard there is the fabulous Seafood Fest.  Market Street will be closed off and there will be TONS of good food as well as fun things to do! We are super excited to see what it’s all about!

Also happening is the Moviecycle sidewalk sale!!!! This weekend as well as July 22nd-25th, we will be offering over 3000 movies at unbelievably LOW prices!! Come on down and check it out! You’ll be sorry if you don’t stop by! Treasure awaits!

Or at least some really awesome Saturday night movies!!

“I heard of you… I heard you were dead.”

I read today there’s a planned remake of one of my favorite 80’s sci-fi action flicks: Escape From New York. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about this news. On the one hand, it sounds kinda cool to get a chance to see this movie with current special effects and such, and on the other hand I want to quote Han Solo: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

According to the article I saw, there are some changes to the setting and story:

“…the Big Apple that the as-yet-uncast Snake Plissken is dropped into will be geographically undesirable, but intact: This Manhattan was evacuated and turned into a privately run penal colony after the detonation of a crude radioactive dirty bomb on the outskirts of the city. “It is not a disaster movie,” says a source close to the project. “It is an exposé of an ecosystem, if you put a huge wall around Manhattan and then dropped in the most fucked-up, dangerous criminals on Earth.” This means New York will still be recognizable to audiences, à la I Am Legend, rather than an entirely new Armageddon Island.”

Which doesn’t really sound all that terrible to me, you know? I mean, other than they made a comparison to I Am Legend, which I hated very, very much. And that’s the thing about remakes and re-imaginings… often, the filmmakers had a really good reason for wanting to make their own version of a movie that held some kind of significance for them (and probably for many of us). And often they fail to acheieve the same significance.  I love The Omega Man, and though I’ve only seen it once as a kid, I remember thinking The Last Man On Earth, with Vincent Price, was really cool. I also really like Will Smith, so I was pretty jazzed to see  I Am Legend, and was thoroughly disappointed.

Anyhow, the point of all that is that I’m on the fence here. I love Escape From New York (I’m also one of the 6 people who liked Escape From L.A., so maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about) and am excited about an updated version of it, and at the same time my gut tells me it’s going to be a ginormous disappointing waste of time.

This bit makes me feel a little less uneasy about it, but only just a little:

“…New Line had to sign a contract with John Carpenter stipulating, among other things, that Plissken “must be called ‘Snake’”; “must wear an eye patch”; and that he would — and we’re not making this up — “always be a ‘bad-ass.’”"

For now I’m taking a wait-and-see approach, since nothing like this is ever chiseled in stone.

(You can see the whole article here: http://moviecycle.com/ip9)

One of my favorite movie genres is the docudrama or “based-on-a-true-story.” I know there’s always a certain amount of dramatic liberty taken when a filmmaker portrays real events in a drama, so it’s interesting to me when I can learn a little about where the movie veers off from the reality.

Today I read an article in the on-line version of the New York Times about Frank Serpico, the New York City policeman who helped expose corruption within the department in the early ’70s, and about whom there was a book and a movie starring Al Pacino. I haven’t seen the movie in years, but I remember Serpico as a fascinating and powerful story which helped shape my love of this type of film. We have it at the store right now, on what has become an Al Pacino shelf on our New Trades wall, so I may get a chance to see it again soon. Having said that, I’ve pretty much assured that it will sell before I get a chance (which wouldn’t be a bad thing, mind you).

Anyhow, the real Frank Serpico is living in upstate New York, pretty much isolated from the rest of the world. From the article he seems to be a fascinating man, if not still just a little bitter and angry over everything he went through to try to bring change to the police department. He’s also writing his memoir, telling his version of the story, “the rest of the story” as he puts it.

Corey Kilgannon, the author of the article, convinced Mr. Serpico to watch the film with him.

He provided a running commentary: His own wardrobe was much better than in the film, as were his police disguises. The scene in which the police commissioner hands him a gold detective shield in the hospital bed was conjured; in reality, he picked it up from a clerk at police headquarters.

I suppose it looked better on the screen to have it in the hospital, but it’s these little details that change the tone of the story. I don’t really have a point I’m trying to make, other than I find it interesting and I hope that someone else might find it interesting, too.