Sofia Coppola to Write and Direct Remake of The Beguiled

[KC]

Good luck to her and if the films good I'll certainly give it a chance.. but I'm finding it a little annoying how dismissive all the reviwers are being of the Eastwood/Siegel film..

"The male gaze of the Eastwood film feverishly directed by Siegel " etc etc

"like a mediocre Tennessee Williams play staged by Sam Pekinpah as a third wave feminist horror film "

Where did you find those reviews, Gant?

Wait, I found them. The first is by Peter Travers in Rolling Stone:

http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/peter-travers-sofia-coppola-scores-big-with-the-beguiled-w488567

I wonder if he's even seen the original? It would take a very dumb observer not to notice how much the original Beguiled is centered on the female gaze.

The other is by Owen Gleiberman, now writing for Variety, and if he's dismissive of Siegel-Eastwood, he's none too kind about Coppola:

http://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/the-beguiled-review-nicole-kidman-1202442508/

“The Beguiled” is like a mediocre Tennessee Williams play staged by Sam Peckinpah as a third-wave-feminist horror film. Yet there’s no denying it’s a picture of its time.

So why would Sofia Coppola want to remake it? If you’re the sort of moviegoer who favors good taste over sensation, restraint over decadence, and decorous drama over porno leering, then you may actually like Coppola’s coolly pensive and sober new version of “The Beguiled.” But anyone else may wonder what, exactly, the movie thinks it’s doing.

Sofia Coppola has long been a filmmaker who divides critics and audiences. I count myself as a Coppola believer (I even liked her Hollywood art ramble “Somewhere”), but this may be the first film she has made in which her essential personality as a director gets buried under the movie she’s making. She has “feminized” “The Beguiled” to the point that she’s really just pummeled it into the shape of a prestige movie, one that ends with a telling tableau of the film’s female characters posed in formation, like some Civil War sorority of the newly woke. Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that “The Beguiled” is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

[Perry]

Coppola totally took out the Mae Mercer role for PC reasons. You can begin and end with that. She is overrated anyhow as a film 'Director' and if she wasn't the daughter of a once great Director she wouldn't even be making anything. This movie will be a bomb anyway.

[KC]

The Times review (by A.O. Scott) has some interesting comments on how this stacks up against the Siegel film:

The earlier film is a bracingly pulpy product of its moment, a time when American movies were breaking free of repressive codes and reveling — sometimes wallowing — in sexual display and rough violence. It’s smutty and disturbing and feverish, rooting around in the muck of the unconscious and the mess of the American past and digging up all kinds of disturbing stuff.

None of that applies to Ms. Coppola’s film, which is less interested in battling repression than in observing its mechanisms and arguing, quietly and unmistakably, for its virtues. Her “Beguiled” is less a hothouse flower than a bonsai garden, a work of cool, exquisite artifice that evokes wildness on a small, controlled scale.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/movies/the-beguiled-review-sofia-coppola.html

[KC]

Coppola totally took out the Mae Mercer role for PC reasons.

This review by Corey Atad in Slate has some trenchant comments on that:

“The slaves left.” In three words, Sofia Coppola’s new film The Beguiled casually dispenses with one of the great shames of the American republic. Coppola’s film is an elegant Southern Gothic tale of masculine charms and feminine vengeance, completely stripped of its historical and racial context.

In The Beguiled, Coppola cuts out the enslaved housemaid Mattie (called Hallie in the 1971 film), and she also turns the character Edwina, who was a free mixed-race teenager in the novel, into a white teacher played by Kirsten Dunst. Asked why she cut out the enslaved woman from the original film, Coppola told BuzzFeed News, “I didn’t want to brush over such an important topic in a light way. Young girls watch my films and this was not the depiction of an African-American character I would want to show them.” Perhaps her intentions were pure, but it’s hard not to see this as part of a larger pattern.

(I didn't know that Edwina, in the novel, was mixed-race ... I'll have to read that book someday.)

Mattie, meanwhile, is the book’s most clear-eyed character. She knows precisely where she stands in relation to not only her enslavers at the school but also to Corporal McBurney, whom she quickly sizes up as a deceitful man despite his suiting up for the army that would supposedly free her. In Don Siegel’s exploitation-influenced film, too, the enslaved Hallie, played by the outstanding Mae Mercer, is easily the strongest character. While everyone else falls into games of seduction and deceit, Hallie sees right through the charade and stands up for herself with a ferocity drawn from any number of black women in the blaxploitation genre. “You better like it with a dead black woman,” she says to McBurney after he threatens to rape her, late in the film, “because that’s the only way you’ll get it from this one.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/06/sofia_coppola_s_whitewashed_new_movie_the_beguiled.html

[Perry]

"Don Siegel's Exploitation....."......hahahaha...... I rest my case......

[KC]

He said "Exploitation-influenced." I can see that.

[Richard Earl]

I just saw the Movie Trailer for The Beguiled.

[Gant]

When I heard the reasons that Coppola gave for cutting the slave role Hallie (played by Mae Mercer in the original) from her remake citing that this was a film about gender not race and it would be wrong to treat such an important issue so lightly.. I kinda got it.. Is slavery too big an issue to just serve as a footnote in this movie.. maybe.. Although is it possible to set a film in a race war and not have it about race at some point.. ??

But on re-watching the original Beguiled recently,  although Hallie is not a main or pivotal character she is a very interesting one.. she's smarter than all the white girls and sees right through McBurney's act from the start.. although jokingly admiting he's not bad looking "for a white man" when Eastwoods character suggests "You and me should be freinds" suggesting they're on the same side she straight away refuses to see him as any kind of saviour and later , when he threatens her she tells him sternly where to get off.. 
I like her in the original. She's strong and smart.. I'm not so sure now that the character shouldve been cut..

What does anyone else think.. ?

[KC]

I've always been sure Hallie is a major character, despite the fact that she has less screentime than most of the others and doesn't really figure in the working out of the plot. As you said, it's really not acceptable, or shouldn't be, to make a movie set in the deep South during the war that was fought over the enslavement of a whole race, and leave the race question out of it. And Mercer gives an indelible reading in the role (as she does in her very tiny role in Dirty Harry).

[Perry]

Mae Mercer is awesome. Go on YouTube sometime and look her up. You will see videos of her singling blues with some of the greatest blues artists in Europe around the early 1960's. Eastwood should had cast her somewhere in Bird in some role.

[Christopher]

Has anyone seen or plan to see this new one? I noticed it was playing at a fairly local theater to me, and I am curious about it. But I don't know if I'll go see it while it's in theaters or not.

[Matt]

I'll wait for it to show up on Netflix.

[antonis]

Has anyone seen or plan to see this new one?

Not a chance ...

[Perry]

                         I rather go see Baby Driver

[Gant]

Ms Coppola was interviwed on a BBC radio  film review prog last week promoting her re-make..

During the course of the interview she called the Siegal/Eastwood film..

"Very sordid"
"Its not very well known in America"
"B movie"
"Don Siegal film was all about the male point of view"
"Its an exploitation tawdry kinda thing"
"Male fantasy"

Funnily enough, after she leaves the studio the reviewer (Mark Kermode) talks just as much about the Eastwood movie as hers, admitting to being  a big fan of the original .. and saying that he felt the original film is taken from various points of view.. not just the male.. which is quite true..
He also felt it was a mistake cutting out the role of Hallie and they should have found a way to retain this character..

[Christopher]

That certainly doesn't make me want to check it out at the theater.

[Doug]

Ms Coppola was interviwed on a BBC radio  film review prog last week promoting her re-make..

During the course of the interview she called the Siegal/Eastwood film..

"Very sordid"
"Its not very well known in America"
"B movie"
"Don Siegal film was all about the male point of view"
"Its an exploitation tawdry kinda thing"
"Male fantasy"

Funnily enough, after she leaves the studio the reviewer (Mark Kermode) talks just as much about the Eastwood movie as hers, admitting to being  a big fan of the original .. and saying that he felt the original film is taken from various points of view.. not just the male.. which is quite true..
He also felt it was a mistake cutting out the role of Hallie and they should have found a way to retain this character..

So the male fantasy is to have women cut off your leg and then be killed with poison mushrooms? Okay. So is her film a female fantasy? I'm astonished she's so full of herself.

[Gant]

She's too keen to trash the original...

[Perry]

No one cares anyway. The movie is a bomb. Too bad Kermode didnt bring up her wonderful acting chops in Godfather III.