The Wicker Man Re-make
Constance Ash September 2nd, 2006
Bad.
Very bad, They Say.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/09/02/movies/02wick.html?ref=arts
The first one wasn’t very good either, but lordessa, the location on the Summersisle was/is indescribably beautiful. (The new one is supposedly on an island in Puget Sound, and it’s all women, who are beekeepers.) The originals staging of the ancient sword dances and hobby horses and so on were thoroughly effective. The premise was almost plausible — except for the nude Britt Eklund writhing around the walls to the beat of a tambor to illustrate — what? the unrestrained female lust of a pagan woman? If so, the rigidly Catholic sacrifice never even got a taste ….
The 1973 film’s echos of John Fowles’s The Magus are of a certain literary historical interest, dimly caught from this many decades’ later perspective. So many college types at least, considered The Magus a ‘guide to life, along with The Lord of the Rings, Siddartha, Stranger in a Strange Land and Camus’s The Stranger. Doubtless the re-make never heard of The Magus….
Love, C.
No one person that I knew in the ’60s and early 70s ever considered all of those titles mentioned guides to life. One or the other of them, yes, but they are mutually contradictory.
It’s amazing how fast the history one has experienced fades into mythology.
I liked the Christopher Lee - Wicker Man. I could tell from the previews that the “remake” was not going to follow the original, which had its flaws but was entertaining.
The people who scare(d) me were the ones who felt that The Fountainhead was a guide to life. Maybe that’s just because I worked at the Harvard School of Design. Architects, on the subject of Howard Roark, are hysterical.
Sorry,
But, went to see this movie last night.
When persons laugh at the climax of the ‘Wickerman’ — well I suppose your reservations — to spend your money on an entertaining yogurt swirl from Braum’s —or this movie ticket, are confirmed.
I began smelling bad fish on that island when the ‘wife’ kept giving Nicholas Cage’s character a constant ‘vague’ look as to where her daughter was hidden on a small island.
Hey, how does one miss a sixty foot effigy made of wood on a tiny island????
Or that every weirdo chick on the effing island is comin’ off callin’ you — ‘yo wickerman dude’.
I mean if this guy was in line to be promoted to detective (per the script) then the police force is better off with this character being culled from the live stock population.
grace
Kit, as to holding contradictory guides to life, you never met my ex, did you? (And be glad, very glad, you didn’t!) O, he also included the Colin Wilsonian fantasy as a guide to leading life. Not to mention his simulataneous conviction that he was JFK, Mick Jagger and Byron …. Oh, yes, another guide to life was the Fox-Jagger film, Performance. What a dorkdong.
Somehow, one doubts he ever got over it either.
Love, C.
Constance, so glad you divorced him!
I thought it was the reviewers who were attributing all of those books as 60s guides to life, btw, not you.