A couple of weeks ago I made a Twitter post saying that I’m not really a fan of Robert Rodriguez and that I only actually like one or two of his movies. People came crawling out of the woodwork defending the guy, which actually surprised me, since I thought pretty much everybody agreed that Rodriguez is a filmmaker without anything to say. At all.
So for those people, this is bad new. For me, this is a cause for celebration. And by this I mean Rodriguez telling MTV News that his remake of Barbarella is dead, dead, dead. “It came to the point where [a company from] Germany offered us a $70
million budget, which would have been by far the biggest budget I ever
would have had for a movie,” Rodriguez told MTV News. “But I had to
shoot it in Germany and post it in Germany. Nothing against Germany,
but I have five kids and I was like, ‘God, I don’t know if we can do
that. I don’t know if I can be away that long.’”
His version would have starred the way too old Rose McGowan as Barbarella, and probably would have been filled with flashy camerawork and a hyperactivity that many people mistake as ‘fun.’ Rodriguez did lots of pre-production work on the movie and hopes to one day release some of that art so fans can see just what bullet they dodged.
Here’s hoping nobody remakes Barbarella, a perfect relic of its moment in time. It’s hard to imagine that movie working in a post-AIDS, supercynical world the likes of which we inhabit today. Maybe if free love ever came back in vogue.