From Daily Variety, I learn that DreamWorks has the rights to remake Kurosawa’s Ikiru.
The original concerned a Tokyo bureaucrat who, after learning he’s going to die within a few months, tries to do something with his remaining days. He befriends a young woman, and tries to get a park built. The film was shot in contemporary 1950’s Japan: not a shiny high tech place, and you see the unhealed urban wreckage left from the end of World War II throughout the movie.
The remake bristles with danger signs: Tom Hanks cast as the dying civil servant; it will be set in New York; and Jim Sheridan, who gave us the hyper-twee In America, directs.
It’s cross cultural grave robbery: stealing from Kurosawa to go steal from New York. Expect plenty of shots of Hanks looking fore-lonely at the hole in the skyline where the WTC once stood.
