TCM is playing tribute this month to Archie Leach, better known to the world as Cary Grant. The range of films, the types of roles, the co-stars. Makes you long for another era of american film-making. Of interest to you architect types might be Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House of 1948, with the fabulous Myrna Loy - whose 1947 film The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer partly occupies that special message place on my answering machine. Grant's films with Hitchcock - especially North by Northwest with its great fake FLW house and fantastic Saul Bass titles - Cukor, and Hawks are well worth searching out. Don't miss his final role - Walk Don't Run - a film set at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and itself a remake of The More the Merrier of 1943. Who said that Hollywood couldn't do remakes?

One of the most interesting items to come out of the TCM documentary is Cary's embracing LSD in the early pre-illegal tests of it.
posted by grimley on Jun 1, 2004 - 25 comments

OK, remakes. While channel surfing tonight I noticed that there is a new miniseries on the box called Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital starting soon, on a channel near you. No doubt it will go the way of other King TV Greats, as the trailer suggests (Ed Begley Jr. in another hospital role). I am more interested in the way that it is being marketed - with the explicit "Stephen King" moniker. Similar to other less than stellar US remakes of European originals, (Point of No Return / Nikita, the weird case of Spoorloos / The Vanishing(same director for both), I could go on). Given the explicit reference in the title to King, do you think that people will seek out the original? Can you think of instances where the remake outdoes the original?
posted by grimley on Feb 25, 2004 - 24 comments