What I liked about it
1.) The entrance of 93 in the opening scene, dressed like the original No.6, but now as old as the late Patrick McGoohan would have been (conflicting reports abound on whether PM wanted to play that role or not). As 93 lays there dying, he says “tell them I made it! I finally found a way out!” It was a sentimental moment which would have been even more powerful if the late PM was still around and had agreed to play it.

2.) Ian McKellan plays No.2, who has to deal with a gay son- turning the hidden homosexuality, silence-is-death motif into a prison within a prison. Perhaps McKellan had a say in the script – given his openly gay activism -but I felt like, “Hey! We got one of our guys going to bat for us on this!”

3.) The allegorical motifs that asks “what is freedom?” (the twin towers) “what is memory?” (the fake brother) “Is love and attraction truly nothing but chemistry?” (the DNA gene swap) “What is religion?” (the speech No.2 gives at the church). “What is choice?” (Wraps is the only choice of food in the village) “What is entertainment? (6′s brother’s family enjoying tv violence when their own father is dead)

4.) The Borges’ device of one person dreaming an entire civilization of people and how the moment she stops dreaming, holes appear. (See Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Circular Ruins.”)

5.) It didn’t try to remake the original Prisoner. It sampled here and there, but it was more a reinterpretation than a mindless note-for-note remake, which would have been a monumental disaster. Imagine it this way: look at the concept of the Prisoner itself as a Elizabethan / Tudor music composition or a jazz standard. There are no dynamic markings or tempo suggestions (how loud or how fast to play the piece), it is left up to the performer to decide how he or she is going to interpret the piece. It gives a loose structure, or in jazz, the head, and you then have to decide how you’re going to take it to the end. I give the creators of the remake credit in that they at least tried to make something new.

6.) The friendship between the cabbie and No.6. It shows a humane side of No.6 and the village people.

7.) Jamie Campbell Bower as No.2′s fabulously androgynous and innocent son.

8.) Whether intentional or not, a hilarious, running meta-commentary on the production of the remake itself (I may be reading too much into it here): 1) The Old Prisoner (dressed like Patrick McGoohan, looked like what PM would have look like today if he were still around) dying at the beginning of the show, signifying that the original prisoner won’t be “in” the concept of this production. 2) The new No.6 rummaging through what appears to be a facsimile of the old No.6′s home….almost as if Caviezel is desperately searching for clues on how to play No.6. 3)The Penny Farthing bike, once an icon of the village – and employed by McGoohan to signify the obsolescence in a rapidly progressing technological world- has now been relegated to some dive sex bar where people view peep shows through a slot (us, watching the remake?) 4) The holes appearing referring to the holes in the plot?

9.) The opening theme music cleverly samples the three notes from the iconic original and hides it in the closing lines. Though certainly no where near Ron Granier’s piece, it at least makes the attempt to create something new, instead of another mindless Hollywood remake.

10.) Caviezel is a better runner than McGoohan.

What I didn’t like about it
The lack of energy in this No.6. Part of the problem is that the original No.6 was a secret service agent before he arrived at the village. He was debonair, urbane, fit, a man of physical action who paces his room like a wild animal in an undersized zoo cage. He is suspicious of everyone, beautiful girls and their tears have no effect on him and his determination to escape. On the other hand, the new No.6 holds a desk job as an analyst at an office. So you can see the inherent problems that arises when the main character is limited by who he is. The moment he finds a hottie at a dating service, he thinks about marriage and all but forgets about escaping.

The tiring slo-motion shots. It looks much like filler to stretch a 2 hour concept into a six-hour one, just for the sake of the number 6.

The interweaving shots to disorient you. In the old Prisoner, disorientation was achieved via the layout of Portmeiron and the violation of the 180 degree rule. The interweaving shots, combined with the slo-mo made many scenes look like music videos that sacrifice content for stylistic tic.

The feeble opening sequence. It looks like a car commercial at certain points. It didn’t have the fire, thunder, and passion of the original, that always drove one to wonder at the beginning of each episode “who is the new no.2 and how is s/he going to slug it out with No.6 this time around?” You watch the original and you tell yourself, “if there’s one guy who is going to fight in the name of individuality, this is the man for the job!”

If Caviezel had more energy, it could have made the whole thing gel better. As it were, it seemed totally out of character the one time he got mad and yelled at no.2′s gate.

It feels like multiple writers were involved (some creative counterparts pulled out during the project) and the way sex and romance keeps getting inserted haphazardly made me wonder if some bigwigs were demanding gratuitous scenes for ratings.

They didn’t have to use the Prisoner as a framework. It could have just been called, say “The Cure” or “Gates” and it would still have been able to tell it’s story. Using the Prisoner seemed like riding on the coat-tails of a classic just for hype’s sake.

o

To the people who have known me for many years, my name will forever live in infamy as the biggest ice queen they know: I walked out of Terms of Endearment at a cinema. At the time, surrounded by the sobbing audience, I was thinking “what am I doing here?” Will I regret giving 2 hours of my life away to a celluloid death when what may be inevitable could happen in my real life years later? (Wise decision in retrospect: my father passed away of cancer some 15 years later)

Of course, it doesn’t help that I am trying to pitch a movie mashup for Hollywood to remake: Titanic meets Jaws.

When I was a young student, a favorite English teacher gave me the following nugget of advice: “to use death as a dramatic device to elicit strong emotions is an easy way out. A true writer will always have more creative resources than that to depend on.”

So I tried to think of movies that do get me teary eyed and emotional. Here they are:

1. Camera Buff (Amator) (Krzysztof Kieslowski 1979)
A Polish factory worker buys a cheap movie camera and starts filming everyday people around him. He enlists a midget co-worker to be the subject of his documentary, and gets criticized for exploiting a person as a freak for gawk value. The midget and his wife accommodates him, letting him into their lives, and Filip, the camera buff, doesn’t pay heed to his critics. When the short documentary is done, it airs on public television. He and his friends get together to watch it. What unfolds on the fuzzy black and white TV screen is a gorgeous, stately, and humane portrait of a man and his wife. The combination of video/audio/and narration in the tender sequence, with the midget leaving the room, overcomed with emotion, always makes me weep.

2. Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa 1975)
A Russian military surveyor goes out into the woods with a merry band of soldiers on a peaceful mission. They run into a Nanai hunter who proceeds to guide them, and save the surveyor’s life. Dersu Uzala beautifully echoes a deep respect for nature. Nani’s are shamanistic. The scene where Dersu sings a plangent elegy into the river for his dead wife and child is a memorable moment, but when Vladimir Arsenyev asks what he can give the trapper for his troubles and services, the look of hesitation and je ne sais quoi on Maksim Munzuk’s face always has an emotional impact.

3. A Short Film on Killing (Krótki film o zabijaniu) (Krzysztof Kieslowski 1988)
One of Kieslowski’s 10 short films meditating on the ten commandments (Decalogue), a young loner goes about the city, acting like a jerk to everyone. He eventually goes for a taxi ride and murders the cabbie. He is caught and sentenced to death by hanging. The lawyer, hired by the State, assigned to defend him finds out that his past involves a little sister dying prematurely in a tractor accident.

I always tell people that Lars Von Trier’s Dancing In The Dark is a retelling of Kieslowski’s award-winning piece. The final scene where the lawyer Krzysztof Globisz drives out to the forest and desperately repeats “I abhor it, I abhor it” is something I always cherish as a statement that we humans are not yet completely evolved. We still have a lot of work to do to improve what we are.

4. The Circle (Dayareh) (Jafar Panahi 2000)
This expertly crafted Iranian film takes us through a day in the lives of eight Iranian women, superimposed masterfully like a fugue, labyrinthine like a Borges tale. The scene where a poor mother dresses up her little girl and pushes her on the street in hopes someone will take her in always brings tears to my eyes. The tearful child, dressed so adorably, and the wailing mother behind a car wracks me with pathos.

5. Patch of Blue (Guy Green 1965)
A blind white woman befriends a black man in the park. They both enjoy the companionship. Eventually, Sidney Poitier brings himself to tell her about his skin color. As he braces himself for her reaction, she’s like “dude, I’ve totally known all along, so what?” (ok, maybe not those exact words) The look on Poitier’s face is pure gold. Who in the world doesn’t want to be liked and appreciated for who he is and not what he looks like? The closing scene, where the blind girl gets in the taxi and Poitier runs down the stairs to give her something and just misses the taxi pulling away always gives me that end-of-the-movie teary eyedness. Year laters, I experienced the same strong emotion watching a play in Edinburgh Scotland. It was about golfers trying to find an elusive ball that had been hit off course. At the end of the play, they leave stage left, and the lone ball rolls in from stage right.

People who don’t judge you for your looks are so rare in our world, the thought of them not being able to meet one last time is always heartbreaking. Taking into account Elizabeth Hartman’s talented and tragic bio, there’s an added sense of loss to the scene.

6. Mirror (Zerkalo) (Andrei Tarkovski 1975)
I love the opening scene where a stuttering boy is cured of his handicap and gets his flow on. It’s a metaphor of the artist’s wall. The closing scene of Zerkalo is one I will always love. The allegory to the mystery of creation, the gorgeous interweaving of generations, and the tears of joy when Margarita Terekhova is asked by her husband whether she wants a boy or a girl is cinematic ecstasy. Throw in J.S. Bach’s St. John Passion Herr, unser Herrscher capped by the young boy shouting into the silence as a coda to the movie, and the increasing darkening of the forest is an entire lifetime in 5 minutes.

7. Dreams: The Peach Orchard (Akira Kurosawa 1990)
The sparse storytelling on Kurosawa, bound with traditional Japanese minimalism illustrates a sad dream of a boy who wanders into an old peach orchard that has been chopped down by the present generation. The traditional folk Japanese music giving birth to the sudden blossoms, which then turns into a field of stumps conveys a true appreciation of the cycle of life.

8. Fitzcarraldo (Werner Herzog 1982)
The reaction I get from people who have “tried” to watch Fitzcarraldo is “you mean that damn movie where they try to get the boat over the hill in the Amazons?” Klaus Kinski arrives at a posh opera house, filthy, fresh off the boat just to listen to his beloved music (it’s the only way to arrive at any opera, really). After going through an odyssey only to see his dreams shattered, he spends his last dollars to hire classical musicians in an ensemble to play A te o cara, amor talora on the mud banks of the Peruvian jungle. Just the big triumphant smile on his face and the sweet music always brings tears of joy to my eyes.

9. Immortal Beloved (Bernard Rose 1994)
Three women. Who is the one that Beethoven wrote a love letter to. After he dies, his assistant tries to unveil this mystery. The scene where Isabella Rossellini sits in the audience and watches Ludwig attempt Piano Concert No.5 only to meet with endless false starts (due to his hearing loss) is for me, the stateliest romantic movie moment. As an entire opera house of people laugh at his failure, she rises, walks upstage, takes him by the arm and walks him out of the room, head held up.

If you asked me what love is, I would point you to this scene in Immortal Beloved.

10. Waterworld (Kevin Reynolds 1995)
Of the ten movies, I wept longest and loudest at the closing of Kevin Costner’s Waterworld. The deluge of tears poured all over my face when I looked at my wristwatch and realized three precious hours had been mauled from my short life.