Take the B Train

Grunt. Someone has remade the B movie classic "The Taking of Pelham 123" into a slam-bang Travolta-Denzel summer tentpole. Manhatten Transfer: The Remaking of Pelham 123

Mr. Scott admitted that before working on the movie — a retelling of John Godey’s best-selling New York City subway hostage thriller, made into a classic 1974 movie — he had never been in the subway. “Well, when I say never, I mean maybe once or twice quite drunk at night, when I couldn’t find a taxi,” said Mr. Scott, who was born in England and lives in Los Angeles. But he had been adamant from the time he oined the project that he would do it only if he could film as much of it as possible inside the actual New York subway system, which never stops running, not even for John Travolta, who plays an angry, neck-tattooed hijacker, or Denzel Washington, who plays a doughy, good-guy train dispatcher. (A 1998 television remake, filmed in Toronto, used subway cars that looked suspiciously Canadian.)

Jesus, what's next? A remake of "Breakheart Pass," starring Johnnie Depp? A "grittier" "Horse Soldiers," starring Russell Crowe? (Actually, both of those would kick ass. Cancel my lunch and get Robert Zemekis on the line!)

The real question is whether the new movie will have everything that made the original so good: gratuitious New Yawk attitudes, prodigous cursing, politically incorrect humor about women and minorities, the earnest depiction of transit people going about their business, and the near perfect blend of comedy and violence (the original has a lot of very funny lines, and the occasional violence is brutal and matter-of-fact). Somehow, I doubt any of this will be present.

There was one funny thing in the linked article. For all the talk of Our Crumbling Infrastructure, it is not crumbling fast enough. In fact, efforts to modernize the NYC subways proved ... inconvenient for Les Artistes:

Chris Seagers, the movie’s production designer, said transit officials even allowed the moviemakers to photograph inside the subway’s top-secret new control room in Midtown Manhattan, the largest rail control center in the world, so that they could recreate it — though the actual center was so sleek that Mr. Seagers ended up giving the set a rougher, more municipal patina.

“It was almost like the British Library in there, it was so beautiful,” he said of the real control center. “It seemed almost too Hollywood

Your movie ticket dollars at work.