Terrorists are everywhere. One of the men behind the recently uncovered plot to massacre soldiers at Fort Dix had access to the base as their local pizza delivery guy (just to tie all current events into pop culture, he worked at a place called Super Marios Pizza), and the rest of the plotters were seemingly unassuming immigrants, some from the former Yugoslavia. This is all bad news for most of us, but it’s great news for Hollywood, who can now revisit Cold War paranoia in a big way.
I don’t know that a planned remake of Robert Ludlum’s The Osterman Weekend will swap Islamic extremists for the original KGB operatives, but it’s a decent guess. The second book by the man behind the (titles of) the Bourne series, The Osterman Weekend is about a journalist who is convinced by a CIA agent that the friends he invited for a weekend away are KGB agents bent on destroying America. The book has been made into a movie before, Sam Peckinpah’s tragic last film that is largely considered muddled and incoherent, a real mess.
While I love Peckinpah and hold him as one of the great American directors, his movie is a good example of John Huston’s dictum that they shouldn’t remake good movies but only bad ones (it certainly makes a lot more fucking sense than the currently planned remake of Straw Dogs, that’s for sure). Simon Kinberg, the writer of Mr. & Mrs. Smith, is going to be making his directorial debut with the film, which will hew much more closely to the source material. Shooting will begin towards the end of the year. Note to Kinberg: After the Heckler experience I am infatuated with the idea of being in movies. I have a big beard, and can shout ‘Allahu Ackbar!’ with the best of them. Call me.