No time for sleep. On the subject of remakes, some more shocking news has come to hand.

In looking up stuff for my article on the remake of (sequel to) Soylent Green I discovered an Astro Boy movie in the works.

At first I was too scared to look – please, please don’t be live-action! Could you imagine just how awful a live-action Astro Boy would be?

Turns out it is animated. Unfortunately there are some worrying aspects:

• It is an American production (though a Hong Kong animation company)
• It is CGI
• It has Nicolas Cage in it

I say that is a recipe for disaster. I actually can’t believe that Tezuka’s family let a foreign company have the rights to make this movie.

Anyway, here’s the trailer. I have a bad feeling about this.

So, the other night I was enjoying a Charlton Heston evening. No, I wasn’t outside shooting at targets with an assortment of high powered weapons – I was watching Charlton Heston movies. Two movies in particular – The Omega Man and Soylent Green.

I enjoyed them both immensely, as I have many times before. Afterwards I reflected on the movies, and how much I enjoyed The Omega Man over Will Smith’s I Am Legend (even if, apparently, Will’s movie was closer to the book). That got me thinking about remakes – and a little angry when I recalled that Will Smith is going to remake The Karate Kid.

Angry, because I’m not convinced The Karate Kid needs a remake. But also because the movie studios can’t even do an original movie any more. Let me help them out a little – make a movie called The Kung Fu Kid. Similar plot, but have the kid learning Kung Fu, and get Jackie Chan to play the old master. There you go – that has winner written all over it.  And a little bit (very little) of originality. You can send the cheque directly to me.

So, an angry old man am I. But then I reflected on Soylent Green and figured everyone has seen of or know the ending to that movie, so no one would make a remake of it. That is one movie that no one will mess with.

And then I did a quick search and discovered IMDB lists a remake for 2012. I was very very sad.

Fortunately I also discovered it isn’t a remake – it is a sequel. So they figure everyone already knows the “secret”, so they’d just continue on after a bit of a recap.

So you, like I, can sleep easy tonight. Just don’t think about The Karate Kid remake.

Regular readers may recall an earlier article this year about my moving away from mobile network 3. To recap, I left 3 in August, paying out my contract. In September I received a new bill from 3 for $1.61 – that being the surcharge on my credit card I’d used (automatically) to pay the final bill. Then in October I received a bill for 1 cent – that being the surcharge on the $1.61 I’d paid the previous month. I joked about what would happen in November.

November came, and I received a new bill.

Yep, 1 cent again, though the total to be paid is $0. Insanity!

So, I mailed 3 about this. I wrote, through their web interface:

Enquiry details : I have left 3, but you keep sending me a bill each month for 1 cent. It is probably costing you more each month taking 1 cent from my account than the 1 cent. Can this please stop!

Action : Stop sending me a bill each month for 1 cent!

I waited, and got the following email response:

Hi Sir/Madam,It looks like you’re asking about your invoices, you can access the last 12 invoices for your account from My 3 online.
Visit http://my.three.com.au and register or login.
…

Ok, the paperclip didn’t come with the email, but I swear that that is the text response I received. Complete with odd grammar and spacing. And it sounds like the Microsoft Office paperclip, though you’d think if it was automated they would have got the grammar and spacing correct.

I replied to the email:

This does not answer my question. I will repeat the problem.
…

And repeated what I’d said in the first email. Ten days later I finally got a reply (I’d almost given up):

Dear Jamie,
Thank you for your email regarding your 3 Account. We apologise for the delay in responding to your query.
We have made an adjustment to your Account so that you will no longer receive any further invoices. We apologise for this error.

So far I have not received any further bills, so I may be finally free.

I’ve mentioned before how insulting it is for the TV stations to deface TV programmes – either with annoying popups or watermarks. I had thought they’d gone as far as they possibly could with this lack of respect, until I noticed the end credits of Channel TEN’s police drama “Rush”.

Read the credits carefully. Well, what they are passing off as credits. Who created the show? Who stars in the show?

Yes, you need to go to the website to find the credits. Now having the credits online is great – and TEN to their credit have them all online as easy to read PDFs, though I had to do a search on the site for “Rush credits” to find them. But are TEN going to maintain the PDFs forever?

I applaud TEN for putting the credits online. But why take them off the show itself? So you can fit in an extra minute of advertising?

Are other shows starting to do this? Is this happening overseas as well?