The game's afoot

I never thought the screenplay of Joseph Mankiewicz's 1972 Sleuth - adapted by Anthony Shaffer from his own play - was particularly in need of a rewrite. Still, if the movie's gonna be remade, there's the obligatory punching up to do. With Shaffer sadly departed, one option might have been to ask his twin brother and fellow playwright Peter Shaffer (Equus and Amadeus being his most successful filmic ventures). Producers didn't go the Shaffer route - it might have been weird - but, to their credit, have actually taken a step up in the British dramatist echelon (in hierarchy terms; no value judgment here).

Harold Pinter's been arguably the top guy in British drama for half a century, but this is definitely the largest I've ever seen his name on a movie poster.

All parties are quick to claim that Sleuth isn't a remake. To lend this some credibility (as opposed to, say, Rob Zombie claiming his Halloween isn't a remake), Pinter stated that he has neither seen the play nor the film, and kept only the basic plot concept. Michael Caine says he wouldn't have been interested in a remake.

Caine plays an English mystery writer engaging his wife's younger lover in a complicated scheme; in the original, he played the opposing position (with Laurence Olivier in the writer's role).

Despite the film's overwhelmingly English pedigree - Caine and Jude Law starring, directed by Kenneth Branagh from a script by Harold Pinter, based on a play by Anthony Shaffer (Brits one and all), the U.S. gets to see it first. The film's making the festival circuit, with a limited U.S. premiere on October 12, and a UK premiere November 23.

Alone again, naturally

Lousy corporate bigwigs, always interested in the bottom line, never in the integrity of an artist's vision. Thank goodness we can finally pick up the unrated Director's Cut of Alone in the Dark, on DVD this week. Along with a new commentary, Uwe Boll adds eight minutes of new footage and removes five (reportedly mostly Tara Reid), achieving his vision. (On this count I am with Boll; my artistic vision tends to involve removal of Tara Reid as well.) Hopefully this is what the film needs to salvage it from its 2.2 IMDb rating (currenly #44 worst), its 1% critics' freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes (currently #2 worst!), and its generally accepted status as one of the most laughable movies in recent memory.

Alone in the Dark, like much of Boll's ouevre, is based on a videogame, a Lovecraft-inspired mystery that helped launch survival horror as a game genre and paved the way for the Resident Evil games. Very successful and still respected today, the game spawned three sequels; a next-gen adaptation is in the works.

A quick look at the IMDb bottom 100 films indicates that Alone in the Dark will soon be the third lowest-rated film to receive a sequel. In second place is Baby Geniuses. The lowest-ranked film to receive a sequel is, unsurprisingly, Boll's earlier "effort," House of the Dead. For Alone in the Dark 2: Fate of Existence (a working title), Boll-related writing/producing team Michael Roesch and Peter Scheerer (who wrote the first film, along with House of the Dead 2) will share writing and directing duties.

As with BloodRayne 2, which we discussed a few days ago, Boll has a perplexing ability to lure well-known and even talented actors into his films, and even his sequels. While not-too-famous Rick Yune takes over the lead role from Christian Slater (playing the same character), Boll has also assembled genre standouts Lance Henriksen, Bill Moseley, P.J. Soles, and Michael Paré. Somewhere down the line, Time magazine will ask every single one of these people what they were thinking.

Alone in the Dark 2 is currently filming, expected for a 2009 straight-to-video release.

This is Spartan

It's covered pretty widely elsewhere - maybe even a sidebar link on whatever news page you check, unlike the topics I tend to cover - but today's biggest sequel story is inarguably Halo 3. The game released Monday/Tuesday at midnight (I'd love to see national school attendance figures and compare Monday to Tuesday) at more than ten thousand retailers, including not only the usual GameStop-type suspects, but from Wal-Mart (which designated a special Halo-only checkout line) and Best Buy on down to 7-11 and White Hen.

Microsoft's press release is out: an estimated $170 million in sales, breaking the record for biggest day in US entertainment sales history, previously held by Halo 2. Granted, with a $60 price tag ($70 special edition, $129 super-special edition), it's got a sizeable jump on a $10 movie ticket, but still, pretty newsworthy in the realm of sequeldom.

Both Best Buy and GameStop project Halo 3 to wind up the top-selling game of all time.

For those of you not interested in video games, the Halo movie is still in the works. A deal was announced in 2005; Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh were on as executive producers, though they've since dropped out as the project developed. The original plan was to release it simultaneously with the Halo 3 game, which should give you an idea of its progress, since it's still in limbo after studio changes and rewrites (the original script, by Danny Boyle favorite Alex Garland, has been worked over by D.B. Weiss and A History of Violence adapter Josh Olson). Guillermo del Toro had been attached to direct at one point, but dropped out in favor of Hellboy 2 (more on that flick in some future post); currently director is still listed as Neill Blomkamp, but I expect that to change. Blomkamp was picked by Jackson, who's no longer involved to champion him, and a first-timer getting the reins for such a sizeable flick seems unlikely, especially with the budget being what it is. When Microsoft agreed to the initial deal, there was a stipulated budget minimum of $75 million to avoid any shenanigans, but part of what reportedly led Universal to bail out on the flick was the ballooning of the projected budget up into the $135 million range.

Feel free to assume that with Halo's payday on Tuesday and Microsoft's press release today, numerous studio execs will be taking Halo meetings before they head home for the weekend.

Fools

Long before Scream and Behind the Mask, there was 1986's April Fool's Day, and even that wasn't the first self-aware slasher film. Hot on the heels of Friday the 13th came Saturday the 14th, the directorial debut of Howard Cohen (who'd previously scripted Vampire Hookers, among others). Not long after, we'd see Student Bodies in 1981, then Pandemonium and the brainless National Lampoon's Class Reunion in 1982. More would follow, but these other films could as easily be considered comedies as slashers. The very fine April Fool's Day isn't funny; it demonstrates that the conventions of its subgenre can be embraced and even pointed out without doing so just to be snide, and as a result, it functions both as a slasher and as a movie about slasher movies. Director Fred Walton had previously made the widely seen slasher-influencing When a Stranger Calls and seemed to understand the genre well enough both to utilize it and to comment on it.

Filming has just started in Monroe, North Carolina on a remake, expected in 2009. Confirmed casting includes Scout Taylor-Compton, who has rapidly made the change from teen-friendly girl-based fare (Sleepover and short stints on The Gilmore Girls and Charmed) to horror features, with the After Dark Horrorfest offering Wicked Little Things and then the lead in the new Halloween, before moving on to another upcoming horror flick called Pearblossom and April Fool's Day.

There's more Horrorfest connection: the new April Fool's Day script is written by the Butcher Brothers, who wrote and directed the not-too-bad Horrorfest installment The Hamiltons. That flick was produced by Mitchell Altieri and Phil Flores, who share the directing credit on April Fool's Day.

Cast is still mostly listed as "rumored" on IMDb, and the Charlotte newspaper says that a film publicist declined to mention cast. Why the secrecy? Desperate Housewives actor Josh Henderson was spotted on set as well.

Perhaps the remake will lead to a new DVD edition of the original film; a small cult following for April Fool's Day has long speculated on missing material, due in part to a shot on the back of the packaging (but not in the movie itself) showing what would amount to a major plot element. Paramount has a poor history of pride in these films; fans have long clamored for an uncut My Bloody Valentine as well, a film you don't have to know well to easily spot numerous instances where violent content was excised.

Also, it's a minor travesty that Paramount redesigned the DVD box. The film's original one-sheet, VHS box, and early DVD edition are one of the best-loved and most-remembered pieces of key art in slasherdom, and the replacement with some generic screamy cover, to those of us who haunted video stores back in the day, borders on blasphemy.

Post-extinction

Resident Evil: Extinction opens today. Too soon to start blogging about the next one? Co-star Ali Larter doesn't think so (well, I don't know how she feels about blogging): she said at last night's premiere that she's "heard whispers" about the fourth in the series, going on to imply that the box-office returns on this installment would decide. Current projection has it at #1, in the high teens, shooting for $20 million. Anything resembling that would assure a profit on its $45 mil budget; the first two films had opening weekends around $18m and $23m, respectively. (Regardless of whether you'd like to see Ali Larter in Resident Evil 4, I think the fewer people go to see Good Luck Chuck, the better off we all are.)

Director Russell Mulcahy says that as far as he's concerned, Extinction completes the trilogy, but that shouldn't hold much weight.

It's not the first we've heard of it. A couple of years ago, rumors started about a "second trilogy," moving away from Milla's Alice character. Considering the variety of game characters that'd still draw fans, it's not much of a stretch. Larter's mention of it, combined with the high profile she enjoys on Heroes, makes her Claire Redfield a likely lead. The earlier rumors had pointed to Leon Kennedy (he appears in videogames RE 2 and RE 4), citing genre TV standby Jensen Ackles (Supernatural, Smallville, Dark Angel) as 'in talks.'

A script, ostensibly for a fourth film, has been floating around; the project is being called Resident Evil: Afterlife, an earlier working title for the third film. Authored by Josh Friedman (remake experience on 2005's War of the Worlds, and attached to the upcoming Terminator TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles), it seems to take the series in a new direction; brief plot summary indicates a sort of Bermuda Triangle angle, with a disappeared luxury ship, a scarcity of zombies and mutants, and a mysterious note from a family member (Chris Redfield, if you're keeping score at home). Shades of Silent Hill?

More on this (of course) as soon as I hear it.

Re[d]acted

Redacted is neither sequel nor remake, but may offer a glimpse of the more interesting motivational forces behind the concept of the sequel/remake: a filmmaker's continuing focus on a set of themes and ideas.

Iraq films, both documentary and fictionalized (okay, usually they're both) are all over the film festivals this season. Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha, Paul Haggis's In the Valley of Elah, George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, Charles Ferguson's No End In Sight, Phil Donahue (different one) and Ellen Spiro's Body of War are all making the rounds to various degrees of acclaim and discussion.

Redacted is Brian De Palma's Iraq entry, currently making the film festival circuit (Venice, Toronto, Telluride, New York). At Venice, after the film's premiere, De Palma received a ten-minute standing ovation on the way to picking up the Silver Lion for best director.

The piece tells of a group of U.S. soldiers in Iraq who rape a young girl and kill her and her family. It's based on a true story, the Al-Mahmudiyah killings of 2006. It's nearly twenty years since Casualties of War, when De Palma told of a group of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam who rape and a kill a young Vietnamese woman. It almost seems like cheating to bring up the parallel. Mortal outrage at war crimes hardly makes De Palma an obsessive filmmaker, and it's almost disingenuous to mention this even in the context of a thematic remake - after all, Casualties was based on its own true story, forty years before Al-Mahmudiyah. It's its own story, and it's very nearly dismissive to frame it as something worth mentioning in the context of allowing De Palma to make a new film updating an old angle. I leave it in on the basis that it feels in keeping with some of the loftier ideals of remaking: that some things are cyclical, regardless of how long ago they were buried. The soldiers responsible had probably seen Casualties of War, but if Anthony Swofford is right in Jarhead, the experience of going to war may have robbed it of its lessons, converting it, with Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, into personal fuel for American military power. The soldiers failed to learn the lessons of the past: they repeated it pretty faithfully, and three of four are in prison, with the last awaiting trial. Redacted is criticized for being anti-troop (more on that in a moment) but those critics fail to comprehend the idea of an American taking a few moments to point out that it's not just those who fail to remember the past who suffer the effects of its repetition.


Redacted is already drawing fire. Chief among its critics is Bill O'Reilly, who refuses to see the movie and has been making a habit of denouncing De Palma as a traitor on numerous occasions. His chief salvo can be seen here, in which he says he'll call for boycott and protest of any American theater chain with the nerve to carry the film.

Fox's Neil Cavuto (against whom Eli Roth mounted a solid defense, despite what was presumably Fox's attempt to stack the deck by booking an easily-attackable defendant) and CNN conservative Glenn Beck have chimed in as well. As Redacted draws nearer, expect all the heavyweights to make their opinions known. It should be noted that O'Reilly did not make clear any desire to embarrass Ellen Knickmeyer or bury the Washington Post for reporting the story as linked above. Slate, NPR, CNN, etc. all similarly escaped O'Reilly's wrath for publishing reports of troop uninfallibility.


On the filmic side, this ad for Redacted is basically useless. There might be something useful to say about integrating making-of footage - De Palma is interested in blurring the film/making of film line, as seen in both Femme Fatale and Redacted - but the ad sure doesn't offer it, opting instead for clips of Carrie and The Untouchables. I get the impression they show behind-the-scenes footage both to heavy-sell De Palma himself, who's the focus of the ad, and to avoid telling potentially cowed viewers what the movie's actually about. HDNet softpedals by calling it controversial but assuring us not that the film won't disturb - which, by all accounts, it will - but that your old pal De Palma (oh, he's the Scarface guy) knows what he's doing.

Redacted will have a controversy-filled multi-stage release in November and December.

Pater Argentosus

(If this post seems familiar, check back a few days.)

News broke this morning that The Weinstein Company, after buying George Romero's Diary of the Dead, picked up another horror sequel after checking it out at the Toronto Film Festival: Dario Argento's The Mother of Tears (in its native Italian, La Terza Madre, or The Third Mother). Mother is the long-awaited third in Argento's Three Mothers trilogy, based loosely on Thomas de Quincey's Suspiria de Profundis (itself deserving of a mention on this blog, being a sequel to his better-known Confessions of an English Opium Eater). Suspiria de Profundis posits three Sorrows: Mater Suspiriorum (Mother of Sighs, portrayed in Suspiria), Mater Tenebrarum (Mother of Darkness, portrayed in Inferno), and Mater Lachrymarum (Mother of Tears).

Compared to the $2+ million paid for Diary of the Dead, the Weinsteins got a good deal, picking up Mother for somewhere in the mid-six-figures. This doesn't include theatrical release, which will be handled by partner Myriad Films. Myriad will offer a limited release early next year, which makes the Weinstein's Blockbuster-exclusive deal seem likely to prevent even more people from seeing it, as a widespread release seems unlikely. Diary may get around, but unless internet hipsters make "decrepit, hypersaturated witches" the new zombies, I can't see Mother of Tears playing Peoria.

And happy birthday tomorrow to Mother star Asia Argento!

Reign in Blood

An interruption from the De Palma material to mention today's straight-to-DVD release of Uwe Boll's first-ever (but not last) sequel: BloodRayne 2: Deliverance. A semantic query: can a movie be considered a director's cut if it hasn't had a previous release?

BloodRayne 2 is a sequel to the first film, not an adaptation of the sequel to the original videogame source. Come to think of it, it may not be particularly related to either; the cast is replaced (Natassia Malthe takes the title role) and the setting, rather than 18th century Romania, is now the Old West. Michael Paré and Zack Ward join Malthe as, respectively, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

2005's BloodRayne was the third consecutive video game adaptation from Boll, based on a relatively high-profile 2002 actioner (the character appeared topless in Playboy) about a sexy knife- (and gun-) wielding vampire fighting an occult Nazi splinter group. After the universal distaste for House of the Dead and Alone in the Dark, it's hard to conceive of Boll being able to hook either famous or talented cast, but check the roster for BloodRayne: Kristanna Loken, Michael Madsen, Geraldine Chaplin, Udo Kier, Meatloaf, Billy Zane, Michelle Rodriguez, Sir Ben Kingsley.

Loken wasn't exactly a star, but coming off Terminator 3 in 2003, was certainly at her prime moment of casting-director awareness.

Additionally unexpected: a script by the respectable Guinevere Turner, who came to notice in 1994 with Go Fish and again with the American Psycho script.

BloodRayne cost an estimated $25 million. It tanked, grossing about a tenth of that in the U.S. and about 3.6 mil worldwide, though DVD rental and sales would help out. BloodRayne 2: Deliverance came in at about $8.5 mil.
BloodRayne 3: Warhammer is in the early stages.


From Time's 10 Questions segment:
TIME: What were you thinking when you accepted a role in BloodRayne?
BEN KINGSLEY: I don't know whether to be upset or flattered by that question. To be honest, I have always wanted to play a vampire, with the teeth and the long black cape. Let's say that my motives were somewhat immature for doing it.

I kind of like him even more now.

Cast system

Closing out Brian De Palma's birthday week (he turned 67 on the 11th) with the highest-profile of the blog-relevant projects: the prequel to his Oscar-winning*, Potemkin-borrowing 1987 The Untouchables. The movie was based on Eliot Ness' 1957 memoir-novel of his famously incorruptible unit's quest to take down Al Capone; two years later, it was a TV show starring Robert Stack.

*Sean Connery for Supporting.

The Untouchables: Capone Rising will probably have its title changed before release (currently projected 2008). Thanks to the poor returns on 2007's Hannibal Rising, the word "rising" is not currently a viable origin-property-branded term. The plot deals with young Al Capone's dealings with young Jim Malone (the character played by Connery), Capone's rise to power, and Malone's rededication to the right side of the law.

David Mamet, who scripted the 1987 film, had no dealings with the prequel. Three writers have credits: Brian Koppelman, David Levien, and David Rabe. Rabe wrote the script for De Palma on Casualties of War. Koppelman and Levien are writing partners and no strangers to crime drama: Ocean's 13, Runaway Jury, Knockaround Guys, Rounders. They're also responsible for Belmont Boys, the upcoming Clooney-directed and Ocean's-similar (a group of thieves reunite to work on a heist) flick, as well as Frankie Machine, the upcoming Scorsese-directed mob flick starring Robert DeNiro as an ex-hitman going back to work. Apparently, it seemed he was out, but just when he came to think so, he was somehow pulled back in.

Nicolas Cage was confirmed in May to play Capone, but has since left the project. At 43, Cage might not be the best choice to play the "young" Capone; DeNiro was 44 when he played Alphonse in '87. Gerard Butler (37 years old) is cast as Malone. (If the age gap between Capone and Malone is consistent with the first film, Capone should be 24 or thereabouts.) Speculation remains rampant; early rumors of Colin Farrell and Sean Penn have yielded little. The questions remains: who will play a young Charles Martin Smith?

A 1993 TV show was spurred by the success of the film; it met with somewhat less success than its 1959 predecessor. It cast Tom Amandes as Ness and William Forsythe as Capone. Just three years earlier, Forsythe had played henchman to Al Pacino's Al Caprice, an analog of Al Capone, in Dick Tracy.

An additional henchman note: Billy Drago played Frank Nitti as a crazy assassin in '87; Anthony LaPaglia would handle the role in a more even-tempered treatment in Frank Nitti: The Enforcer, made for TV the following year and surely fast-tracked due to Nitti interest.

I also recall a fairly good Super Nintendo game.

Redress

Sisters isn't the only Brian De Palma flick going into the shop for retooling. De Palma's 1980 Dressed to Kill is getting a remake, due to go straight-to-DVD in 2008. No director announced, but writer is Rick Alexander. Alexander's self-penned biography lists numerous projects and lofty claims, but his only real credit so far is extensive writing duty for woman-positive medical drama Strong Medicine.

Dressed to Kill was almost Cruising. De Palma adapted Gerald Walker's 1970 novel (murders in the NYC gay community) into a screenplay, but it didn't work out, and William Friedkin's screenplay was the one that turned into Cruising. De Palma shuffled elements of his own script around and turned it into Dressed to Kill.

Both films made it to theaters in 1980. Cruising, beset by protesters upset at the portrayal of the gay community, struggled at the box office; Dressed to Kill had more success. Enough for a straight-to-DVD remake three decades later!

Deadjournal

After a strong showing at the Toronto Film Festival, George A. Romero's latest, Diary of the Dead (according to Romero, not a proper installment in the Dead series, though likely to be considered canonical), has been picked up for U.S. distribution by the Weinstein Company. Purchase rights are reportedly somewhere in the $2 to $2.5 million range.

On the upside, this deal includes a theatrical release; some of the offers made for Diary were for direct-to-DVD distribution. On the downside, you might want to make sure you catch it in theaters. The Weinstein Company is Blockbuster-exclusive, so you won't be able to line Diary up in your Netflix queue.

Land of the Dead dislikers should be happy: Romero made Diary for about $10 mil, without studio oversight and the slick production values of the last film. If you can handle some introductory drunken rambling (not Romero's), you'll find here a letter from Romero which makes Diary of the Dead sound pretty appealing, especially for those preferring their zombie flicks sans Leguizamo and all the requisite studio touches.

Romero told an interviewer in Toronto that if the film is a hit, the Weinsteins will ask him to work on another Diary chapter.

Another tale of two sisters

Since when is Stephen Rea a staple of horror film? Rea's last two finished flicks are Stuart Gordon's Stuck and Stephen Hopkins's really very silly plague-countdown thriller The Reaping; he's also got a starring role in an upcoming version of Kafka's Metamorphosis.

Already finished but waiting for U.S. release (though it premiered at the Sitges film festival nearly a year ago and has already aired on cable in Argentina [?]) is Rea's turn alongside Chloë Sevigny and Lou Doillon in Sisters. (Doillon, daughter of Jane Birkin and director Jacques Doillon, replaced Asia Argento, who was slated to star but dropped out due to 'personal reasons.') The original is great early-70s fun from Brian De Palma (try a double feature with Dead Ringers), featuring Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt in a tale of twin sisters, murder, and Svengali science.

The flick is directed by Douglas Buck, whose Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America, an assembly of his three previous well-regarded shorts, pops up occasionally in discussions of low-budget but well-done independent psychological drama fare. On this basis, he seems like a good match for Sisters, though early reviews are average.

The appearance of a matched pair (natch) of very nicely done one-sheets might indicate Sisters is looking at a release in the near future, but a release date is still nowhere to be found.

Crummy Captain

In the heady, sexy early days of the NC-17 (1990 onward), filmmakers seized upon their chance to make their films a little more explicit, with the hopes that their uncompromisedly dirty visions could make it to a handful of theaters. Directors - many European - seized on literature both for suitably blue source material and arthouse cred.

Louis Malle adapted Josephine Hart's steamy novel Damage. Jean-Jacques Annaud adapted Marguerite Duras' steamy novel The Lover. Lorenzo Onorati loosely adapted D.H. Lawrence's steamy Lady Chatterley. Todd Haynes adapted Jean Genet's work into Poison. John Duigan adapted Jean Rhys' mildly steamy novel Wide Sargasso Sea.

Compare Abel Ferrara. After 1990's King of New York, Ferrara got to work on Bad Lieutenant, a heavy performance by Harvey Keitel in a grim study of a nameless cop's moral deterioration. Anti-literary and unabashedly unpleasant, the flick was a fine example of how the NC-17 could be more than a haven for period-novel medium-core bodice-ripper erotica. As with Ken Russell's Whore, it envisioned the NC-17 as a place to make films for adults, which might mean 'wallowing in sleaze' in some (Ferrara, Russell) cases, but wallowing in sleaze with an intendedly non-pornographic purpose.

Bad Lieutenant wasn't the kind of film to have a sequel or remake, but it's got both. After Bad Lieutenant came out in 1992, Ferrara's followup was the 1993 Dangerous Game, which received a visibility boost thanks to costar Madonna's public trash-talking stint about the movie's quality. Dangerous Game starred Harvey Keitel as a movie director, struggling with a troubled production as well as his own behavioral excesses and moral deterioration. My friends and I couldn't have been the only ones to refer to it as Bad Director.

Bad Lieutenant was produced by Ed Pressman, who's hard at work in the planning stages for another take. Bad Lieutenant '08 (if anything, Bad Lieutenant '09) is in the script stages. It's the debut feature from William Finkelstein, who seems well-versed in the procedural cop/lawyer one-hour drama, with writing stints on NYPD Blue, Law & Order, L.A. Law, Brooklyn South, Murder One, Civil Wars, and, of course, Cop Rock.

Ruthless Super-Cop

1992's Hard Boiled (I prefer the literal English translation title, Hot-Handed God of Cops) was John Woo's last real hurrah. Though his film credits date to the late 1960s, he hit big in 1986 with A Better Tomorrow and The Killer in 1989. As Woo's output kickstarted Hong Kong action's international reputation, American studios took notice. Soon after Hard Boiled, Woo would head to American shores, directing tough-guy trio Jean-Claude Van Damme, Arnold Vosloo, and Lance Henriksen in 1993's soft-boiled Hard Target.

In reporting a movie's spinoff properties, this blog often has occasion to discuss video games, but this may be a first: Woo's sequel to Hard Boiled hit Gamestops everywhere on Tuesday. It may be a pointless exercise in semantics (or marketing), but Stranglehold has been billed since conception stages not as a licensed product, but a full-fledged sequel to the film, simply in a different medium. This opens up a whole kettle of arguments with regard to the differences - is a TV spin-off series a sequel? - but this has been Woo's standpoint, and to my knowledge, he becomes the first major film director to direct a video game. With the games-as-art debate raging, I'm surprised Stranglehold hasn't been used as example more often.

The Playstation 3 version of the game comes packaged with a Blu-Ray copy of Hard Boiled.

It's not surprising that Woo would lend his credibility to a game; he seems to feel video games are the way of the future, or at least a workable commodity. He's producing Zack Snyder's film adaptation of Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six video game series (technically, it might be based on the novel that preceded the series, but the massive popularity of the games are what got the film its green light), set for 2010. The same year, he's set to produce a film version of a video game that isn't out yet (so don't expect that date to hold steady), game auteur Warren Spector's Ninja Gold.

I believe John Woo is the first major director to be a playable character.