(“Stop.  Hammer time.”)

Good news, everyone: I wrote a humorous headline.  Also, Steven Spielberg and Will Smith’s planned remake of Park Chan-Wook’s Old Boy (actually, if you want to get technical, it was supposed to be a separate adaptation of the original Old Boy manga) is dead.  Latino Review reports that it was killed when Dreamworks couldn’t come to a deal with Mandate pictures.

So now if you want to see Old Boy, you’ll just have to watch Old Boy.  And to get your fill of Will, you’ll have to satisfy yourself with his remake of Karate Kid, Flowers for Algernon,  I Am Legend 2, Hancock 2, Men in Black 3, Bad Boys 3, that street magician movie, the Hurricane Katrina movie, and God knows what else. Will Smith is basically the Michael Jordan of acting, in that no one knows his actual personality, which as it turns out is really good for business.  That’s why publicists coach actors and athletes to answer all questions with variations on the same clichés. That, and Tom Cruise is a succubus.  It’s true, I read it in Science Magazine.

Filmschoolrejects recently caught up with Will Smith while he was out promoting Seven Pounds, and Smith wanted to clarify that his Oldboy remake with Steven Spielberg is not a direct remake of Chan Wook-Park’s film, as was reported this week.

“We’re looking at that right now. Not the film though, it’s the original source material. There’s the original comics of ‘Oldboy’ that they made the first film from. And that’s what we’re working from, not an adaptation of the film…,”

So not only is this an ill-advised remake, it’s yet another comic-book movie.  Thanks, now I feel much better.  And with Will Smith in the lead, I’m sure it’ll be edgy as hell.  Let’s face it, the guy can’t walk five feet without doing something controvertial, like screamin “Kill whitey!” or “Dogs f-ck the pope!” or “Gayness should be taught in Kindergarten!”    He’s pretty much the black Lenny Bruce.

When fans of 2003 Korean movie Old Boy heard that Spielberg and Will Smith were planning a remake, the immediate fear was that they’d turn it into something crappy and mediocre.  Luckily, Spielberg and Smith are both really rich and don’t care what you think, so they’re trying to hire Mark Protosevich, a writer known for his work on crappy, mediocre blockbusters like Poseidon (2006) and I Am Legend.  It was reportedly Smith’s idea, since they’d worked together on I Am Legend.

So I’ve sat here for forty minutes now trying to think of something to say that won’t ruin the plot of the original for those who haven’t seen it, but I got nothing.  Ten bucks says the new one will be about Will Smith having to save his daughter from terrorists, and he’ll have to run ten miles with his shirt off in the rain.  The only thing that’s keeping her alive?  A father’s love.

[THR]

If you haven’t seen Chan Wook-Park’s Old Boy, you need to rent it right away because it’s pretty legit.  Unless you can’t read subtitles, in which case it’d probably just be depressing.  Anyway, as you may have guessed from the headline, Spielberg is trying to get the rights and wants to do a remake for Universal starring Will Smith.

In the 2003 Korean original, a man gets kidnapped and held in a shabby cell for 15 years without explanation. Suddenly, he’s released and given money, a cell phone and clothes and is set on a path to discover who destroyed his life so he can take revenge. [Variety]

Spielberg isn’t nearly as shitty a filmmaker as George Lucas, and I’m even willing to concede he’s made some pretty good movies (Jurassic Park, Minority Report, Saving Private Ryan…), but one thing the dude most certainly does not have a talent for is dark and edgy.  And if he remakes Old Boy, with Will “I only play good guys” Smith of all people, it’s going to be the most dickless watered-down hero story ever.  If you want to know what Spielberg does with edgy material, just watch the last 30 minutes of AI.  It’s a good thing that kid from Virginia Tech already killed a bunch of people, because this probably would’ve put him over the edge.  Okay, so on second thought, I guess that’s probably not a good thing, but I think we all know what I meant.  Shut up, you were thinking it too.