Olivier Lacan { thoughts }

What would it take to have me blog­ging again? Some­thing pretty big. Or some­thing huge like the fact that I just learned about AMC’s remake of Patrick McGoohan’s The Pris­oner, only TV’s cul­test and most clas­sic show before Twin Peaks. Not only that but it’s already slated for November.

And let’s not even get started on the cast of mostly brit-sounding unknowns (very good) headed by a seem­ingly excel­lent Ian McK­ellen (if you’re not from britain, a roy­al­ist or an Angli­can cult fol­lower, shut up with the “Sir”) as Num­ber 2 and Jim Caviezel as Num­ber 6. I’ve only seen Caviezel in a Z-movie being butchered by bearded dudes with a hard-on but he looks pretty good as a stoic amer­i­can equiv­a­lent of McGoohan’s.

I’m also very inter­ested to see how the pro­duc­ers are going to trans­late the Eng­lish odd­ness of the orig­i­nal Pris­oner into its Amer­i­cana equiv­a­lent. So far what the visu­als give away is promis­ing. And the sub­tle change to the way peo­ple are adressed as “X” instead of “Num­ber X” sounds good as well.

I was very sur­prised to see the Rover appear in the desert (again, hav­ing a desert instead of an ocean bay is a good coun­ter­point) and also intrigued by what appears to be Twin Tow­ers of glass in the back­ground. Some peo­ple may shout exploita­tion but I really enjoy when writ­ers and pro­duc­ers not only adapt some­thing to a new era but also to a new pop cul­ture sub­text. It’s really hard to have the same impact on the new audi­ence as the orig­i­nal piece, and while you may receive applause from fine crit­ics when you do a ver­ba­tim copy of the orig­i­nal much less tal­ent is required than when you actu­ally dis­as­sem­ble what made the orig­i­nal Pris­oner so potent in everyone’s mind at the time and try to have a sim­i­lar impact on the minds of peo­ple today.

Peo­ple aren’t afraid of the same things today than in the 70’s, and their imag­i­na­tion also aren’t trig­gered by the same arche­types. Which is why I think the sub­ur­ban design of the new Vil­lage is also a smart choice. In an era of Wys­te­ria Lanes and “lit­tle boxes” mak­ing the famil­iar unfa­mil­iar and dis­qui­et­ing again is nec­es­sary to estab­lish some­thing as spe­cial as The Village.

I’ll let you all form you own opin­ion by watch­ing the trailer (in HD please) :

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FqQsaK5KpQ

Update: I for­got to put up the posters.

TAGS

• amc
• the prisoner

Posted on Lundi, juillet 27th, 2009 at 4:57 . Filed under Series. Follow responses to this entry with the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.