Joe Wright ‘s latest Anna Karenina had a cast, screenplay and plan of action in hand in the spring of 2011, but the acclaimed filmmaker of Atonement and Pride & Prejudice made a bold step a mere two months before beginning the shoot. Instead of another straightforward narrative telling of the story of the epic novel by Russian great Leo Tolstoy, he opted to go for a theatrical angle in depicting the saga of a late-19th century Russian high-society aristocrat who breaks entrenched taboos and embarks in a torrid love affair with affluent soldier, Count Vronsky. In Toronto where the film is having its World Premiere Friday night, cast members including star Keira Knightley and Wright likened the sudden change to “jumping off a cliff,” but they were ready for the challenge, though not all were sure if it would ultimately succeed. “I don’t know that we did know it would work,” Keira Knightley, who plays Anna Karenina, said Friday morning. “With Anna Karenina it’s been done so many times before and there was a sense that if you’re going to tell this story again, you might as well do something that’s out there.” “Out there” includes depicting scenes of the titled heroine (or anti-heroine) on a stage as her marriage and social status disintegrates. Wright grew up working at his parents’ puppet theater and took classes at the Anna Scher Theatre School and even acted on stage, no doubt influencing his creative point of view. And, perhaps conveniently, the reversal served-up some pragmatic pluses, according to Wright. “A lot of the budget was being spent on hotels and travel and all this stuff that the audience is never going to get to see,” he said in Toronto today at a hotel with a small group of journalists. “And I thought, if I could set this film in one place, where would it be? I was reminded of Orlando Figes’ book Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia , in which he talks about Russian society as if they lived upon a stage.” Wright also said that locations he’d been visiting in Russia and England for the shoot did not appear to be the key to give his project a new vision for Anna Karenina or its star Keira Knightley. “It just got to a point where I was walking around stately homes in England and I had people saying to me, ‘Well we’ve made three Keira Knightley films here before,’ and in Russia we had people saying, “Oh yes, we’ve made seven Anna Karenina s here before,’ and I was going, ‘Oh god, why am I doing this, it is so depressing.” The ultimate screen result is hypnotic and sumptuous, but Knightley admitted that the style will not work for everyone, though the few people who caught a glimpse in pre-premiere screenings here are already saying Knightley and others including Jude Law, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and others may be hefty contenders for next year’s Oscars race. “He demands 110% and that’s exactly what we give him and it makes him an extraordinarily magical person to work with, and a frightening person to work with, because it’s everything for the time you’re making it,” Knightley, who starred in Atonement and Pride & Prejudice said. “And that is why people said let’s go with the new concept. Not because we necessarily knew it would work, but we knew this was a team that would give 110 to 150% who will try and make it work. And at least we knew we’d given it our all.” Knightley said that she had read Anna Karenina as a teenager, but re-read it again last summer and had an entirely different take on the woman she’d eventually portray. “The dichotomy of Anna is that you’re not entirely sure what you should think about her. She is deceitful and manipulative and needy. But she is also wonderful, full of energy and full of love. She is also all of these things and completely culpable for what she does. She is a creature that makes you think of yourself because when you look at our own lives, the people we hurt the most are the people we love the most.” “I’m glad how daring Joe has been,” concluding Knightley on Friday, “and I’m glad I jumped off the cliff with him.” Read more from the Toronto Film Festival. Follow Brian Brooks on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
NBC’s putting black folks back on Primetime TV… there’s a new sitcom in the works and artist/producer/ The Voice judge Cee Lo Green , hot off of his acting debut in Sparkle, is set to be the star! The Voice mentor is expanding his relationship with the network to the scripted side with a comedy project loosely based on his real-life relationship with his ex-wife and children. He also has signed a first-look deal with NBC. Green is set to star and executive produce the multi-camera comedy, from Sony TV and studio-based Happy Madison. Comedy veteran Ali Leroi, co-creator of Everybody Hates Chris and developer of Are We There Yet?, will write the comedy, starring Green as a version of himself as he tries to balance his career as a top recording artist and his frenetic home life. A deal for the project at NBC is now in final negotiations. This would mark the TV acting debut for Green, who added actor to his resume with the feature Sparkle. He is executive producing the NBC comedy with Leroi, Happy Madison’s Doug Robinson, Andrew Jameson and Larry Mestel. He follows in the footsteps of Voice co-star Adam Levine, who produced a comedy project at NBC last season and now is making his acting debut on the second season of FX’s American Horror Story. Will you watch? Source Images via WENN
She received an Oscar and BAFTA nomination for her starring role as Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in the aptly titled Frida back in 2002, an Emmy nomination for her appearance in TV’s Ugly Betty (where she was also an executive producer) and has been in films from Puss in Boots (ok, her voice), Desperado to Dogma and her latest pic, Savages , directed by Oliver Stone . Yet Mexican-born actress Salma Hayek told a German magazine that she was in fact ready to end her acting career. The 45 year-old actress told German Vogue that Oliver Stone’s Savages persuaded her to stay on in front of the camera. Her husband Francois-Henri Pinault also encouraged her to take on the role in the drug thriller. “Roles like Elena don’t come along frequently,” she is quoted as saying in the publication via NDTV Movies . “I didn’t want to do another movie to be honest. Francois convinced me of that. Actually, I quit acting.” But now that Savages has been released both in the U.S. and abroad, will she continue to act? Apparently it’s not clear, but she did say she would have done Savages even if it would end up being her final performance because it was directed by Stone. “It at all I just wanted to do it for fun,” she said. “I didn’t take it that seriously anymore. And then [Stone] came. To be honest even if I didn’t like the part I still would have said yes just to work with Oliver.” In Savages , Hayek plays the role of a cartel leader. Even if the acting thing isn’t for her anymore, the movie biz will likely still be ongoing. She founded her film production company Ventanarosa in 2000 and she is currently producing The Prophet , an animated feature slated for next year. And a quick look at her IMDb page shows that she has two acting gigs in the works, Here Comes the Boom and Grown Ups 2 . [Sources: NDTV , IMDb ]
Having labeled the 1990 sci-fi Total Recall “ cheesy ,” it was only a matter of time before the makers of this summer’s lackluster Colin Farrell-starring remake had the tables turned on them by Paul Verhoeven , the original film’s director. And so, Friday at a sold-out screening of the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, Verhoeven seized the opportunity for a little payback, a good-natured gleam in his eye. “Colin Farrell called it in an interview ‘kitschy,’” he declared with a smile. “So I dare to say that his version was not good.” Verhoeven revisited the making of the film over 22 years ago over the course of an hourlong Q&A, joined by screenwriters Ron Shusett, who first optioned Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” and co-scripted Total Recall and Alien with the late Dan O’Bannon, and Gary Goldman, who came on to help flesh out a third act and penned many of the film’s memorable one-liners. The trio shared memories of the film’s long journey to the screen, the difficulty in adapting a writer as brilliant as Philip K. Dick, and the unique challenges and benefits of writing for a star like Schwarzenegger. Scroll down for these and more highlights from the evening, including Verhoeven’s favorite scene! Why he cast Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct ! The connection between Total Recall and Alien ! (Plus: an update on his Winter Queen adaptation, which was to star Milla Jovovich but, he says, “fell into the wrong hands.”) 1. VERHOEVEN ON THE TOTAL RECALL REMAKE “Arnold being there made the movie a little light, and I think that’s very important for these Philip Dick stories,” he said. “I think if it would have been done in a straight way, I’m not so sure that it would have worked – at least, not at that time. And recently [in the Total Recall remake], it did not. I get to say that because the producer of the new one said that this was cheesy or something. And Colin Farrell called it in an interview ‘kitschy.’ So I dare to say that his version was not good.” 2. THE LONG ROAD TO TOTAL RECALL A notoriously long and troubled development saw Total Recall nearly derailed many times, as Shusett recalled. “Sets were being built in Germany, in Australia, and Mexico City — all over the world — and being cancelled. At that time it was the most expensive movie ever made… it was cancelled so many times that when I asked if they would save it, they said the only way we could do this was if we called it Partial Recall .” Once Schwarzenegger signed on, he lent his star power to supporting collaborators behind the scenes. Shusett, who’d written and was producing the project, was nearly removed from the film until Schwarzenegger stepped in on his behalf; the actor also handpicked Verhoeven to direct, as the filmmaker remembered. “Arnold picked me,” said Verhoeven. “Arnold was after this project for a long time… they had started to shoot in Australia and then [Dino De Laurentiis’] company fell apart and went bankrupt. Then Arnold convinced Mario Kassar of Carolco to buy the script out of the bankruptcy. And at the same time he said to Mario, ‘I want Paul Verhoeven because I have seen RoboCop .'” Even with Verhoeven onboard, the script was missing a conclusion. “I felt that something had to happen in the third act that would also be also a little bit philosophical or ambiguous or something, but that was not there,” he said. “And I really got scared – there were like 40 drafts where it was not solved. I thought, it’s unsolvable! It can’t be done! But I had signed already.” 3. THE PHILIP K. DICK CHALLENGE “The other Philip Dick movies all failed for one reason,” declared Shusett. “He’s so brilliant with his set up, he paints you into a corner, he has no ending, there’s barely a second act, and if you don’t match his brilliance with a third act the audience is disappointed. You have to go to extreme length, talent and luck, and come up with an ending that’s worthy of his brilliant set up. That’s why it took six years to get a third act!” Verhoeven’s ambiguous ending leaves open both possibilities that Quaid is either experiencing real life or a fantasy. “I felt that it should be both. I thought in retrospect this is probably the first post-modern film,” said Verhoeven, adding that “the producer of the new one asked me [if it’s real or not]. I said no it’s both, and he said, ‘That’s nonsense.’” 4. SHARON STONE: FROM LORI TO BASIC INSTINCT “For me, casting Sharon was very handy because I started to realize during the shoot what she could do,” revealed Verhoeven. “There’s this beautiful moment when they kick the shit out of [Schwarzenegger] and Rachel [Ticotin] comes out of the elevator and starts shooting. Sharon is on the ground and looks at Arnold … and it was exactly these 5, 6 seconds that made me decide to take Sharon Stone for Basic Instinct . It was based on the fact that she could do that so fast and so believable and she is so mean and so nice and charming, one after the other, that I thought she would be perfect for Basic Instinct .” 5. THE REAL LIFE INSPIRATION FOR RICHTER’S DEATH As a child, Verhoeven played in an elevator that he briefly thought might cut off his legs as he dangled them over the side. He exorcised his lingering horror at the thought by condemning Michael Ironside’s Richter to death by elevator amputation. “I often think about it; I would have been without legs.” 6. VERHOEVEN’S FAVORITE SCENE “I came to the scene that is still one of my favorite scenes, the Dr. Edgemar scene with Roy Brocksmith, who comes to Arnold on Mars and says what we see in him, ‘You are not here.’ I thought that was such a fascinating scene to dare to do that, to say something to the audience that they have been looking at something that is completely not true, and then prove to them that it’s true again.” 7. PAUL VERHOEVEN’S CRUSADE , STARRING ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER Verhoeven spoke fondly of Crusade , the famously never-produced period epic that would have reunited Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger in 1993. “We tried very hard when we were setting up The Crusades. The script was written by Walon Green, and we were supposed to shoot it then Carolco went into Chapter 11 and the movie was never made. Certainly Ridley Scott did Kingdom of Heaven but it was, again, with Arnold, a lighter version of The Crusades but very critical of the Christians.” 8. ABOUT WRITING FOR/DIRECTING ARNOLD… The Quaid character was originally written as an accountant, but that idea (not to mention the suggestion that he could pass as an everyman) went out the window when Schwarzenegger was cast. “It seemed completely ridiculous,” Verhoeven said. “We realized we had to give him a completely different job. Jackhammer worker. We adapted everything to Arnold because I felt that you could not go around Arnold!” “We wrote it like he was just an ordinary Joe, like Jeff Bridges, one of the earlier persons who was going to do it,” said Shusett. “And you don’t know he’s a super agent but Suddenly he’s believable – so he could be a nerd, and not. But we realized everybody knows Arnold’s going to be the real secret agent … but if you can get it made, it turns your mind around.” “In retrospect,” Verhoeven added, “I’m very happy that Arnold was forced upon me.” 9. TOTAL RECALL AND ALIEN Schusett took the audience back a few decades to tell the story of how Total Recall and Alien sprang from a moment of mutual writer’s block between him and Dan O’Bannon. “He said a lot of people want to be writers – he was very blunt and could cut you down in a minute, but he was always truthful,” Schusett laughed, remembering his initial meeting with O’Bannon. “‘Can you show me something you’ve written?’ I went home and gave him something I wrote, a spec script. He said, ‘You’re good – come on over, I have a proposition for you: I can help you finish this if you can help me finish this .’ And he pulled out this thing, he had 29 pages written. He said, ‘You can’t take it with you because I don’t know you and I don’t trust you yet, sit down here and read it.’ And I sat down and read it, and it was the first 29 pages of Alien . I said ‘This is brilliant.’ He said, ‘Yeah – and I’m stuck. What I see in you, I think you’ve got a good enough mind to help me make it work. So I’ll help you fix Total Recall and make it a reality, at least the script, and you help me fix Alien .’ And that day, both movies were born.” BONUS: THE WINTER QUEEN IS DEAD Verhoeven explained why the adaptation of Boris Akunin’s Russian novel he was producing is no longer happening. ” The Winter Queen fell into the wrong hands, so it will not be made,” he said. “I think the time might have passed for this kind of lightness that was in the movie – nowadays everything is so hard and serious. It would have been a very light adventure story at the end of the 19th century, Russians – I mean, played by Americans or English [laughs] but I don’t think that’s going to be made, no. I would have loved to do that five years ago.” Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Also in Thursday afternoon’s round-up of news briefs thriller Maniac is heading to North American theaters. An Icon Productions exec joins The Weinstein Company as head of acquisitions. And an Artist actress will replace Marion Cotillard in Oscar-winner Asghar Farhadi ‘s follow-up project. Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land Set for Late December Release Two-time Oscar nominee Gus Van Sant’s contemporary drama Promised Land will open in theaters in L.A. and New York December 28th and expand further in January. Starring Rosemarie DeWitt, Oscar nominee Hal Holbrook ( Into the Wild ), Scoot McNairy ( Killing Them Softly ), Titus Welliver ( The Town ), and Academy Award winner Frances McDormand, the film revolves around Steve Butler, a corporate salesman who arrives in a rural town with his sales partner, Sue Thomason. The duo hope to persuade the economically down and out town to go for an offer of drilling rights. But things get complicated when a school teacher objects with support from a grassroots campaign led by another man. The film’s original screenplay was written by John Krasinski and Matt Damon, based on a story by Dave Eggers. Franck Khalfoun’s Thriller Maniac Heading to Theaters Elijah Woods stars in the remake of William Lustig’s 1980 film of the same title. The film revolves around Frank who develops an obsession with a young artist when he decides to help her with an exhibition. But the obsession unleashes a compulsion to stalk and kill a la a 21st century Jack the Ripper. IFC Midnight picked up rights to the Cannes out of competition title for North America. Mark Gooder Joins The Weinstein Company Gooder, who served as CEO for Icon Productions for six years, will serve as President of Acquisitions/ Australian Operations. Gooder’s new role involves the day-to-day running of the acquisitions department and leading the charge of bringing in projects for the company, from scripts through finished films. He will also attend major markets and festivals including the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival. Around the ‘net… Ang Lee Tops Sony’s List for Cleopatra Columbia Pictures has begun courting the Life of Pi director for its project that will star Angelina Jolie. No formal offer has been made yet, however, THR reports via Vulture. Mireille Enos Set for David Ayer’s Ten Enos ( The Killing ) will star in the feature that will star Arnold Schwarzenegger. She will play a member of the elite DEA team and married to co-star Sam Worthington’s character, Deadline reports . Bérénice Bejo To Replace Marion Cotillard In Oscar-Winner’s Next Project Bejo ( The Artist ) will join Oscar winning director Asghar Farhadi’s next untitled project set to begin shooting in October in Paris. She will replace Cotillard due to scheduling conflicts. The storyline is secret but is apparently in the vein of his award-winning A Separation with “an element of suspense,” Deadline reports .
Angelina Jolie’s adorable daughter Vivienne will soon make her film debut alongside her famous mother in Maleficent , according to reports. The four-year-old will have a small role in the project, a re-telling of the tale of Sleeping Beauty from the point of view of her horned, evil nemesis. Vivienne will play a younger version of Princess Aurora, played by Elle Fanning. Walt Disney studios confirmed the casting of Viv this week. For more on Maleficent , and for all the latest movie news , quotes, reviews, interviews and commentary, visit our partners at Movie Fanatic! UPDATE: Now featuring an actual picture of Viv (at far right) along with Angelina, Knox, Zahara and Shiloh. Thanks for the catch, readers! [Photo: WENN.com]
David Koepp couldn’t envision a Snow White and the Huntsman sequel without Kristen Stewart — which is one reason he says he’s no longer involved in the project. Koepp — who scripted Jurassic Park , the original 2002 Spider-Man movie and co-wrote and directed this weekend’s new bike-messenger thriller Premium Rush — told Movieline that he departed the project because he had worked on a script idea “that I really liked” involving Stewart’s character. “And their situation, I hear, changed a little, so they weren’t interested in pursuing that idea anymore.” Koepp said that was a sign for him to move on. “I felt like there was a good path with her, but then they wanted to explore a different thing that I had no ideas for,” he explained. “If you don’t have any ideas, you should probably put your pen in your backpack and go home.” As a result, he added, “we agreed to part ways and stay friends.” When I asked Koepp if he could see a sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman being made sans Stewart, he replied: “Well, I couldn’t. That was why I felt like I couldn’t follow through.” Stewart’s involvement in a Snow White sequel has been hotly debated since reports broke in late July that she cheated on her on- and 0ff-screen Twilight love interest Robert Pattinson with SWATH director Rupert Sanders and apologized for it. On Aug. 15, Deadline reported that, internally, Universal is discussing whether to focus the next movie on the Huntsman character played by Chris Hemsworth , who is fast proving himself to be leading-man material. Universal also bought a crime drama called 90 Church: The True Story of the Narcotics Squad from Hell for Sanders. Nell Alk is an arts and entertainment writer and reporter based in New York City. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal , Manhattan Magazine , Z!NK Magazine and on InterviewMagazine.com, PaperMag.com and RollingStone.com, among others. Learn more about her here . Follow Nell Alk on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter .
The demise of film and the seeming triumph of digital has been a hot topic of discussion for insiders and hardcore enthusiasts for a number of years. But Keanu Reeves is taking the topic into the mainstream(ish) realm with his latest project, Side by Side , which bowed recently in Los Angeles and is set to hit cities around the U.S. in the coming weeks. Co-produced and narrated by Reeves, the 98-minute documentary landed the likes of James Cameron , David Fincher , David Lynch , George Lucas , Danny Boyle , Martin Scorsese , Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh to weigh in on movie-making’s (d)evolution. Nolan, he noted, was the most difficult to reach among the people who appear in the doc, which features interviews with 70-plus filmmaking powerhouses. To lure The Dark Knight Rises filmmaker, Reeves went snail mail. “I actually wrote to him on an old-fashioned typewriter,” Reeves told Reuters . “I think he got a kick out of that and we finally shot him in his trailer on the Batman set in LA.” Reeves noted that Nolan’s schedule was “so crazy” because he was in the midst of filming The Dark Knight Rises , but wanted the filmmaker because of his long-standing opinions about the film vs. digital debate, which caught Reeves’ attention in earnest while finishing on a previous project a couple years back. While working on Henry’s Crime , which he also produced a couple of years back, Reeves and the film’s production manager, Chris Kenneally, began talking about the rise of digital technology. “We were sitting in the post-production suite trying to match the photochemical image with the digital image, side by side, and it just hit me – film is going away, and we should document this whole evolution,” Reeves told Reuter. “So Chris and I gradually put a team together to make the documentary.” A champion of film himself, none other than Martin Scorsese said earlier this summer he’ll probably go digital with his upcoming projects including The Wolf of Wall Street . His previous effort, Hugo was a de facto call for film preservation, something near and dear to the filmmaker’s heart. His longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker told Empire magazine at the time, “I think Marty just feels it’s unfortunately over, and there’s been no bigger champion of film than him.” And as Side by Side gets set to expand, Reeves appears to agree that film will continue to disintegrate into the annals of movie history. “Even Chris Nolan admits that film, if not dead, is now on life support, and it’s just going to become more and more difficult to even get film. Personally I’m a big film fan and it’s sad to see it go but the future is digital.” Reeves himself is directing a big screen feature about a a young martial artist set in Beijing titled Man of Tai Chi and he has apparently also accepted – even if begrudgingly – the comparatively cheaper technology. “”We did [go digital],” he said. “I developed this project for five years and we’re shooting on location in Beijing and Hong Kong. I’m having a great time directing and I definitely plan to do it again.” [ Source: Reuters ]
Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, after Robert Pattinson joked he needed a personal publicist, potential reps went into overdrive. And Mila Kunis and Max Martini eye separate upcoming projects. Natalie Wood’s Death Certificate Amended Thirty years later, authorities have changed Natalie Wood’s death certificate from an “accidental drowning” to “drowning and other undetermined factors.” The new document also says that the circumstances of how the actress ended up in the ocean off of Catalina Island in California in 1981 was “not clearly established,” A.P. reports . LL Cool J Captures Robber at L.A. Home He plays a special agent on NCIS: Los Angeles , but he took matters into his own hands in real-life Wednesday morning. L.A. police say the rapper nabbed a burglary suspect in his Studio City home and held him downstairs before 1 a.m. while police arrived, A.P. reports . Publicists Go Head to Head to Rep Robert Pattinson Pattinson said during an appearance on The Daily Show that his “biggest problem in life” was not hiring a publicist, setting off a frenzy among the Hollywood publicity machine to rep the actor, THR reports . Mila Kunis Joins Third Person Kunis is joining the cast of Oscar-winning filmmaker Paul Haggis’ drama set in Rome, New York and Paris centering on three overlapping love stories. James Franco and Casey Affleck are in negotiations to join the project, set to start in mid-October, The Wrap reports . Max Martini Eyes Breacher Martini is in talks to join Breacher playing Pyro, a member of the DEA team, which also stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Worthington and Terrence Howard and directed by David Ayer, Deadline reports .
Movieline would like to introduce The Player , a recurring feature in which we look at the crossroads where video games and moviemaking intersect. We’ll regularly be looking at games that inspire movies, movies that inspire games and a lot of fun stuff in between. For our first foray, Luke McKinley writes on Manos: The Hands of Fate , an excruciatingly bad 1965 micro-budget film that manages work well as a video game. “The game of the movie” is a worse curse than Cruciatus , and usually causes more pain. It’s such a guarantee of failure that even the Street Fighter movie game sucked, and that started with one of the greatest games of all time. They’re terrible because the studio has to acquire the license, and when any company spends most of its budget on lawyers, the lawyers are the only ones who get to have any fun. Once the rights are secured, there’s usually enough cash left in the kitty for a design team of two interns and a crayon. FreakZone Games found a way around this: Start with the worst movie of all time. That would be Manos: The Hands of Fate. (To watch the entire movie, if you dare, scroll down to the YouTube video below). This abomination was made when an insurance and fertilizer salesman named Harold P. Warren bet that he could make a horror movie for less than $20,000. He failed spectacularly. The results would have less painful — and more coherent — if he’d filmed himself drinking $20,000 worth of tequila. The actors are so bad that they can barely talk. One is so bad he can barely walk. John Reynolds, who played Torgo, handyman and henchman to the villainous “Master,” appeared to have taken his acting classes from electroshock therapy. Reynolds’attempts to look supernatural make his appearances look jerkier than an art student’s stop-motion film — and more tedious, too. It can take up to three minutes for him to cross a scene, and if you think the camera or actors do anything to distract from this you are wildly overestimating: a) their commitment to the project; b) their understanding of cinema, c) their baseline brain activity. Then there’s the movie’s title villain, The Master, played by Torn Neyman. At one point, he studies himself in the mirror and declares, “Yes, I am the face of horror.” That’s him in the poster with the fancy moustache. Scary, right? In addition to being widely recognized as one of the biggest stinkers in filmdom, Manos is also a testament to the healing power of laughter. The movie is now a cult favorite thanks largely to the crew behind Mystery Science Theater 3000, who mocked it to pieces in 1993 , and, on Aug. 16, mauled it a second time — this time, live — when they reunited under the name of Rifftrax . FreakZone took a similar approach. The video game version of Manos: The Hands of Fate is an homage to retro gaming and a satire of almost every other movie game ever made. It avoids sucking by wallowing in the cliches of video-game movie adaptations. And there are many. In the 1980s and ’90s, every movie franchise was turned into a platformer. Childish sword and sorcery tales, action movies, romantic dramas, tearjerkers about people in wheelchairs who were scared of heights — it didn’t matter. Manos, the game, improves upon the movie right from the get-go with better acting. It also reminds you of how evil games used to be before they started being built for the mediocre skills of broad movie-going audiences. In FreakZone’s Manos , it’s possible to die at the first jump. Tap A and misjudge the distance, and that’s it, you’re dead. (In Manos , the movie, the Master takes a good 20 minutes to get around to killing Torgo.) There are also invincible immortal enemies (who do nothing but float up and down), edge-of-the-block jumps for bonus items, and even curse-inducing sine-wave-flying enemies to knock you off platforms and trigger Castlevania flashbacks. The real glory of this game is proving that the internet is better for creativity than a whiteboard made of LSD. Hollywood spends more money to minimize risk than the Secret Service, and the gaming industry hasn’t just been taking notes. If you walked into a video game publisher in the ’90s and told them you wanted to make this game, they would have hired new security to escort you out of the building just so their regular security didn’t have to touch you. But now a few people with the right combination of skills and mental problems can build and sell a game like Manos: The Hands of Fate for a couple of bucks, and it’s fantastic. There’s a real chance the $1.99 I paid for the game will represent 50% of the publisher’s entire profit on the sale, but I’m still glad I gave it to them. That’s because with Manos: The Hands of Fate , FreakZone has achieved the impossible: It made a game that was better than the movie. Luke McKinney loves the real world, but only because it has movies and video games in it. He responds to every tweet. Follow Luke McKinney on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
