Movies that look back to the 1980s or glimpse the future are just a portion of what’s in store for this weekend at your local cinema.

Kickin’ It Old Skool

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The Condemned

Jindabyne

I’ve already talked about my love for the 1980 Flash Gordon.

Thrillers, both comedic and dramatic, head up this week’s releases.

Hot Fuzz

Fracture

Vacancy

Stephanie Daley

The Tripper

Lot’s of remakes being announced by the studios over the last week or so. Here’s a rundown of what cinematic new retreads are coming our way.

Fame

MGM has announced that they will be revisiting the New York Academy of Performing Arts with a remake of Alan Parker’s 1980 musical Fame. Set at the real world school for young entertainment industry hopefuls, the original film starred Irene Cara and Debbie Allen. The new version already have a writer and director attached but they were not named by studio COO Rick Sands, who made the announcement at Cannes on Tuesday. He did say that the film is budgeted at $25 million and already set for a Summer 2008 release. He also promised that the new film would retain some of the musical numbers from the original.

3:10 To Yuma

A couple of new photos have been released of the remake of the 1957 western 3:10 To Yuma have surfaced. The new version stars Russell Crowe, seen below, will be hitting theaters in October.

Barbarella

Producer Dino DeLaurentiis is putting together an update of the 1968 camp classic Barbarella, which starred a pre-feminist Jane Fonda as a futuristic space kitten/adventuress. No director or cast have been hired (although that hasn’t stopped the British press from speculating on who may land the title role), but a script is currently being written by Casino Royale (2007) scribes Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. According to an article in Variety, “in the remake, [Purvis and Wade] will make Barbarella a free, modern gal who survives in a futuristic world through her intelligence, fighting skills and sexuality.”

Via Cinematical

Clash Of The Titans

Lawrence Kasdan, scripter for two of the greatest genre films of the 1980s, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981), has been hired to write a remake of another ‘80s genre favorite- Clash Of The Titans. The original, which featured the last effects work from stop-motion genius Ray Harryhausen, starred Harry Hamlin as Perseus, the son of Greek god Zeus (Sir Laurence Olivier) who must complete a set of tasks including slaying the Medusa and taming the winged horse Pegasus as part of his quest to free the captured Princess Andromeda (Judi Bowker). According to the Hollywood Reporter, Kasdan will be working from a previous draft by Travis Beacham.

The Incredible Hulk

Not so much a remake of Ang Lee’s critically roasted Hulk than an attempt to try and start a franchise again, director Louis Leterrier has found his Bruce Banner in the form of Edward Norton. With the film set for a release in July 2008, production should get rolling fairly soon. The film’s screenplay is by Zak Penn, who has also worked on the big screen comic book adaptations of Fantastic Four, Elektra and X-Men films, all characters published by Hulk publisher Marvel Comics.

(And if you think — years is a little too soon to remake a film, remember that Dashille Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon was brought to the screen three times over the space of ten years, with the third try – John Houston’s version with Humphrey Bogart – being the charmed.)

Via Variety

Thrillers, historical action-adventure, personal voyages of discovery and a talking meatball are your new choices at the local cineplex this weekend. Or you could go see Grindhouse.

Disturbia

Pathfinder

Year Of The Dog

Perfect Stranger

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters

Regular updates have slowed down a bit as I have been at the Philadelphia Film Festival for the past week. Look for coverage with numerous film reviews in the next few days.

A potential DVD release for the controversial 1946 Disney film Song Of The South got a voice of support last night from Roy E. Disney, nephew of Walt Disney.

Speaking at the 16th Annual Philadelphia Film Festival, where he was receiving the fest’s Inspiration Award, Disney stated that a home video release of the film is overdue.

“I’ve got a bunch of cohorts working with me to convince the powers that be that it’s the smart thing to do,” Disney told the crowd at Philadelphia’s Prince Music Theatre.

Disney’s remarks comes on the heels of a statement made by current Disney President and CEO Bob Iger at the company’s annual shareholder’s meeting last month in New York City where he stated that the company was reviewing the film for a possible release.

Song Of The South has never seen an official home video release in the United States, despite the fact that it was one of Disney’s first films to employ live action actors. Its song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” won an Academy Award for Best Original Song while star James Baskett was awarded an honorary Oscar for his work as the kindly Uncle Remus. The film has come under criticism for its alleged racist treatment of Southern plantation African-Americans, though many of these criticisms erroneously place the film’s setting pre-Civil War instead of its actual post-Civil War, Reconstruction era. Although Disney announced in a 1970 Variety article that they were “retiring” the movie, it did receive additional theatrical re-releases in 1972, 1981 and 1986. Currently, illegal bootlegs of a 1980s Japanese laserdisc release of the film converted to DVD currently in circulation remain the only way that people can see the film.

Disney’s father Roy O. Disney co-founded Disney Studios with his more famous brother Walt. Roy E. Disney worked at the studio for numerous years as an editor and producer and oversaw the studio’s resurgence in animated feature films in the 1980s through the release of such films as The Lion King and Aladdin.

“[Song Of The South] is a wonderful film that deserves to be back out in the public,” stated Disney. “All it needs is context. Some of that animation is stunning, even by today’s standards.”

While discussing his upcoming film Hostel II with journalists at the New York ComicCon this past February, director Eli Roth talked a bit about the faux-trailer he created for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriquez’s up coming celebration of 1970s exploitation double features- Grindhouse.

“So there was this slasher movie that my friend Jeff and I had been dreaming about,” Roth explains. “Growing up in Massachusetts, Thanksgiving is the biggest f**king deal; it’s all you hear about. There’s two full-time working Pilgrim plantations that you go to. So, every year there’s a new slasher movie for every different holiday – My Bloody Valentine, April Fools Day, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Silent Night, Deadly Night – I’m like, how could they not have done Thanksgiving yet? I mean, what are they gonna start doing? Passover Massacre? So when Quentin asked what I was going to do, I told him Thanksgiving. It was my 1981 slasher movie. I’ve been dying to do it for years. So I went from Hostel II – we kind of recycled a bunch of stuff we had from that set, like a decapitated head – and threw it all into this trailer. It was fun. I had a great time doing it.”

Hollywood has always been about ballyhoo, sometimes hyping its films through outlandish promotions designed to catch a moviegoers imagination enough to get them down to the local cinema and placing their cash into the boxoffice attendant’s hands. (And it still is going on today, as evidenced by New York City’s upcoming Spider-Man Week, which coincides with the release of the next installment of the superhero franchise on May 4th.)

When it came time for producer David O. Selznick to begin publicity for his new comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House in 1948, he decided he needed something big to call attention to the film. Why he didn’t feel that names of stars Cary Grant and Myrna Loy on theatre marquees wasn’t enough to bring folks in is unknown. Suffice it to say that Selznick decided to capitalize on the post World War II explosion of suburban communities – which not-so-coincidentally also serves as the backfrop for the film – in the grandiose fashion of building 73 replicas of the home featured in the film aropund the country to be raffled off to theatre patrons.

Homes were built across the country- from Bakersfield, California to Worchester, Massachuesttes, from East Natick, New Jersey to Portland Oregon.

And one was built in Toldeo, Ohio.

This weekend, The Toldeo Blade published an excellent article on the history of Selznick’s Mr. Blandings promotion including how the film’s art director, a former architect, had to modify the plans for a film set into a fully useable home as well as the history of the specific prize home in the Toledo suburb of Ottawa Hills.

It’s a great piece of writing and well worth your time.