Seth Rogen ought to pay attention to this flick by French filmmaker Aurenlien Poitrimoult, who’s whipped up his take on The Green Hornet.
[quicktime width=”560″ height=”301″]http://www.lefrelonvert-court.com/videos/GH_Large_h264.mov[/quicktime]Now this is a film, I want to see more of!
2 Comments
Very cool fight choreography. Would be interesting to see what he could do with a big budget.
Fight scenes were spot on, big budget. Look of the film, stylistic, but left something to be desired.
Nice work. Could land him a big budget job I’d think.
Watching this clip crystallized what I think is the motivation for such an oddball direction for the upcoming film. See, the idea of the Green Hornet is all cool and retro, but it’s gotta be tricky trying to pull off a modern Kato in a realistic setting. Think about it: an Asian sidekick who is not only a subordinate chauffer, but he’s also (wait for it…) a martial arts expert. How…typical…for the 1970’s.
About a decade ago, Greg Kinnear was attached to this property. So imagine Kinnear (a smooth leading man type) paired with a Jackie Chan-esque Kato. It would have been too kitschy, too camp, and probably offensive in that benignly patronizing way minorities are portrayed in movies.
Like The Shadow, The Phantom, and other 1990s attempts to cash in on nostalgia of lesser-known properties, the core fan base of the original Green Hornet wasn’t enough to sustain a full fledged movie. To make GH work on the modern big screen, you gotta change the Master-Servant dynamic. It won’t work with Kato not being able to pronounce the letter R while bowing and scraping to the Hornet.
Make Kato more of a mentor/Sensei. Let Kato be the smooth boss as opposed to the Hornet. Maybe even make Kato a three dimensional character! Don’t write the Hornet as a standard issue, square jawed Alpha male, but more of the schlub so popular now (on TV and movies). And don’t hype it as a true “superhero flickâ€, relying on the public having more than a passing familiarity with the character, and instead hire a popular schlub to draw an audience.
So that’s how you get ubermensch Seth Rogen (because Steve Carell has already done this a la Maxwell Smart) paired with Steven Chow (even though he’s off the project now). Write a fish out of water story where the schlub grows up and grows a pair of nuts…add some Matrix fight choreography and a lead female way too hot for a guy like Rogen to pull in real life and presto! Your modern retelling of the Green Hornet avoids the obvious pitfalls of a faithful retelling.