Category: Polls

Stallone’s ‘Get Carter’ Voted Worst Remake
Sylvester Stallone’s 2000 reworking of the Sir Michael Caine crime thriller Get Carter has been voted the worst film remake of all time in a new poll.
In a survey of 2,000 film fans by DVD rental company Screenselect.co.uk, a majority voted the Rocky star’s version was abysmal compared to the 1971 classic.
Unfortunately for Jude Law, the recently-released Alfie film – another Caine remake – was also slammed and came in at number six in the poll.
The Anne Heche-starring 1998 version of the Psycho horror film followed Get Carter at two and this year’s flop Thunderbirds entered at three.
The top ten also included Point of No Return at four, Charlie’s Angels at five, Planet Of The Apes at seven, Starsky And Hutch at eight and Cape Fear at nine.
Surprisingly 2001 blockbuster Ocean’s Eleven came in at ten, despite most film reviews lauding the George Clooney film as better than the 1960 original.

Scientists pick Blade Runner as their favourite film; Asimov their top author
LONDON (AP) – A newspaper survey of top scientists has chosen Blade Runner as the world’s best science fiction film.
The 1982 movie was the favourite when 60 scientists were questioned by the Guardian, including evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the newspaper reported Wednesday. In the film, a retired cop played by Harrison Ford hunts down renegade human replicates in a dark futuristic vision of Los Angeles.
Stephen Minger, a stem cell biologist at King’s College, London, said Blade Runner was the best movie he had ever seen.
“It was so far ahead of its time and the whole premise of the story -what is it to be human and who are we, where we come from. It’s the age-old questions,” he said.
Stanley Kubrick’s epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, came in a close second, followed by the first two films of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy: Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.
The others chosen, in descending order, were Alien, Solaris (1972), Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, The Matrix, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Asked to pick their favourite authors, the scientists chose: Isaac Asimov (I, Robot); John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids and Chocky); and Fred Hoyle (The Black Cloud).
The other writers chosen, in descending order, were Philip K. Dick, H.G. Wells, Ursula Le Guin, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Frank Herbert and Stanislaw Lem.

Brits Vote ‘Blues Brothers’ best soundtrack
LONDON (AP) — The Blues Brothers was rated the best movie soundtrack in a British straw vote.
It nipped the soundtracks of Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting in a vote conducted for British Broadcasting Corp. digital radio.
“It’s a Sound of Music for hipsters, a film that lives and breathes music,” said Andrew Collins, who drew 10,000 voters for his survey.
The stars of the 1980 film, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, sang several of the songs, including, Everybody Needs Somebody to Love and the theme from Rawhide. Guest appearances included Ray Charles in Shake Your Tailfeather, James Brown in The Old Landmark, Aretha Franklin in Think and Cab Calloway with Minnie the Moocher.
Not one of the top 10 in the BBC vote were ranked in a similar survey done three years ago by British radio station Classic FM, in which Star Wars came in first, followed by Gone With the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia.
The BBC vote for best film soundtrack:
1. The Blues Brothers
2. Pulp Fiction
3. Trainspotting
4. Saturday Night Fever
5. Dirty Dancing
6. Grosse Point Blank
7. Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2
8. (tie) The Royal Tenenbaums and Lost in Translation
10. Fight Club.

Downloading doesn’t help music sales: Survey
The music industry hopes a new study will dispel the argument that people who download music are just song samplers who will eventually go out and buy the CD version.
Commissioned by the Canadian Recording Industry Association, the Pollara Inc. survey estimated more than 180 million tracks are downloaded every month by Canadians.
The results suggested that between the fall of 2001 and spring 2004, the number of people who admitted using Kazaa jumped from 8 to 26 per cent. It found that almost half of those who visit file-sharing sites downloaded between 20 and 100 songs in the past month.
Meanwhile, 28 per cent of the people surveyed who reported buying less music in the last 12 months said the decline was mainly due to downloading, file sharing and CD burning.
Fifty-two per cent of music consumers who don’t download said they paid for music in the past month. Thirty-five per cent of downloaders said they’d bought tunes in the past month.
When those who’d purchased were asked how they heard about the CD, only 2 per cent cited downloading.
The 1,200 people were surveyed between March 12 and April 5. Only people who’d either bought music or downloaded from file-sharing sites in the past six months were surveyed. There is a 2.5 per cent margin of error, 95 out of 100 times.

Beckinsale Voted Most Beautiful Brit
LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) – Kate Beckinsale’s character in “Van Helsing” may have never seen the sea, but British audiences think her face is worthy of launching a thousand ships.
The 30-year-old brunette beauty was voted Britain’s most beautiful actress in a UCI Cinemas poll, reports British news sources. Beckinsale won a significant 27 percent of the vote from movie fans canvassed in Cardiff, Manchester and Greenwich. The poll marked the UK release of the Greek epic “Troy” and asked moviegoers which actress was a 21st-century Helen.
Also faring well in the poll is the teenage “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” star Keira Knightley, who earned 21 percent of the vote.
Rounding out the Top 10 beautiful Brits are: Kate Winslet, Anna Friel, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Hurley, Helena Bonham Carter, Kristen Scott Thomas and Joely Richardson.
Beckinsale currently stars as a gypsy opposite Hugh Jackman in “Van Helsing” and will next appear in “The Aviator” opening in November. She is also known for her roles in “Pearl Harbor” and “Underworld.”

Poll: ‘Psycho’ Is Best Movie Death Ever
LONDON – Janet Leigh’s shower scene in “Psycho” is the “best movie death” of all time, according to a critics’ poll published Thursday.
The 1960 Alfred Hitchcock thriller beat other iconic movies such as “The Godfather” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” (23rd) in the non-scientific poll by Total Film magazine.
Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb” (1964) came in second, with its surreal ending in which Slim Pickens rides an atomic bomb.
Other highly rated movie deaths were the fatal plunge of the ape in 1933’s “King Kong,” which came in third place, and the demise of Bambi’s mother in the 1942 Disney movie “Bambi,” which came in sixth.
“Some of the deaths in the poll, like The Wicked Witch melting in ‘The Wizard Of Oz’ (13th), are iconic but laughable, but nearly 45 years on, ‘Psycho’s’ shower scene is still distressing,” said Total Film deputy editor Simon Crook.
“It’s the sheer violence of the edit rather than any explicit gore ó 70 different angles, over 90 cuts and those shrieking violins. It’s a master class in montage and audience manipulation.”
Crook added: “Knowing that the blood is Bosco’s chocolate syrup and that a pulped casaba melon stood in for the stabbing noises does nothing to reduce the impact.”

Poll: Limp Bizkit, Creed Worst Bands of Year
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Limp Bizkit, which suffered slow sales of its long-awaited new album, has been named worst band of the year by readers of Guitar World magazine.
Creed, another act that draws sharp reactions, came in at No. 2 even though the Christian combo took the year off. New York rockers the Strokes were No. 3, followed by “all pop-punk bands” at No. 4 and pop-punk band Good Charlotte at No. 5.
Limp Bizkit’s “Results May Vary” has sold one million copies after 13 weeks, and ranks No. 64 on the U.S. pop charts. Its previous release, 2000’s Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water,” ranked No. 5 after 13 weeks with sales of four million copies.
Metallica’s poor-selling new album, “St. Anger,” was named biggest disappointment, but it also came in at No. 2 as the best metal album, ranking behind Black Label Society’s “The Blessed Hellride.”
Metallica’s Kirk Hammett was named best metal guitarist, a possible consolation prize for having all his solos cut from “St. Anger,” and Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl was named best rock guitarist, notwithstanding his initial claim to fame as the drummer with defunct rock band Nirvana.
Another long-gone band, Led Zeppelin, released the best rock album of 2003, the 3-CD live package “How the West Was Won,” according to Guitar World readers. That category was rounded out by Audioslave’s self-titled debut, the White Stripes’ “Elephant,” Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Vicious Cycle” and Rush’s “Rock in Rio.”
The other big disappointments of the year were listed as “all new music,” the break-up of Texas metal veterans Pantera, the continued absence of a new Guns ‘N Roses album, and Marcos Curiel’s departure from Christian rock band P.O.D.