John Travolta

The “Teflon Don,” John Gotti, jr., will get his story told on the big screen in the Fiore Film biopic “Gotti: Three Generations.”

After months of rumor, John Travolta has officially signed on to play the infamous leader of the Gambino crime family.

Producer Marc Fiore has scheduled an April 12 news conference in New York with Travolta, Gotti’s son John A. Gotti and director Nick Cassavetes.

Leo Rossi penned the screenplay, which Cassavetes will direct.

The story is described as focusing on the relationship between a father who lived and died by the mafia charter and a son who eschewed that lifestyle seeking redemption.

Don’t act surprised. It’s not like we didn’t all see this coming. At the rate Hollywood is going, every last frame of film in recorded history will be remade by the end of the year.  And since the original John Travolta flick made nearly $300 million worldwide and spawned two sequels, it was bound to be remade sooner rather than later.

As a general rule remakes are a bad idea. They smack of a lack of originality and are almost always accompanied by pedestrian, banal filmmaking and a cash-grab mentality.  But there are two kinds of films in particular that should never be remade: really good movies, and really bad movies.   The good ones are already done right, so why try to fix what isn’t broken? And the bad movies are bad for a reason.  And even if you could make significant improvements to a terrible movie, who would want to see it anyway?  The damage has already been done. (If you have to ask which category “Look Who’s Talking” falls into then this remake is probably targeted at you).

The sweet spot for good remakes exists somewhere in realm of the mediocre. Take the recent “The Crazies” for instance. The 1973 original from George Romero wasn’t the greatest flick but it had potential.  Breck Eisner’s update this year was an effective modernization of something that desperately needed a modern touch.  It wasn’t perfect but it was a slickly produced bit of B-movie fun that was a solid improvement on the original.

The project currently has no writers or a director yet, but that’s never stopped Hollywood from making anything before.

“The Takin of Pelham 123″ happens.

“Pelham” marks the fourth collaboration between Denzel Washington and Tony Scott after “Man on Fire,” “Crimson Tide,” and “Déjà Vu.”  Tony, the younger and less talented brother of “Blade Runner” director, Ridley, has managed to get by with the help of Washington, one of the best actors of his generation. Their relationship is inexplicable.  Tony’s films are amalgamations of excessive jump-cuts, awkward freeze-frames, unnecessary close-ups, and laughably misplaced titles and cues only made watchable by Washington’s presence. A remake of the 1974 film starring Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw, this go-around continues the tradition of weirdly inept direction of the talented star.

The plot is simple enough. A criminal mastermind calling himself Ryder, played by an utterly unconvincing John Travolta, hijacks a subway car filled with passengers and holds it for a ransom of $10 million, vowing to shoot a passenger for every minute the cash fails to arrive after a specified deadline.

The rest of the film isn’t important. What begins as a run of the mill summer popcorn flick good for a few cheap thrills steadily devolves into a comedy of increasingly astounding errors.  Inane and hilariously exaggerated car crashes, ridiculous expository sequences, tonally disjointed and erratic characterization, and banal technical gimmickry used to mask the absurdity of the narrative plague the final act.  This is not a good movie.

And with the deflating recent announcement that Scott and Washington will be teaming up on yet another project, one can only hope that Denzel finds his way into some better movies in the interim.

We also take a look at Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s dazzling doc, “Home.” This is a show you don’t want to miss!