Harold Becker and Al Pacino are onto a good thing in remaking Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955), a classic noir famous for a totally silent heist sequence that lasts roughly 30 minutes…no dialogue or music and next to no “action,” but hypnotic from start to finish. Brian DePalma shot a vaguely similar sequence in the first Mission Impossible (’96), but it wasn’t quite as long. Will today’s audiences sit still for another silent robbery, or will Becker and Pacino blow it off because they don’t want to deal with people like me hammering them if they don’t do it as well as Dassin? Becker will have to make the job as technologically challenging, of course, as the one Dassin’s thieves faced in their day. One assumes that Pacino will play the “Tony le Stephanois” character, an ex-con with a hacking cough who organizes the robbery (and who was portrayed to hard-boiled perfection by Jean Servais in the original). And Becker and Pacino need to come up with a new title since Rififi slapped onto an English-language remake set in the U.S. would sound precious and anachronistic. Together, Pacino and Becker have made two films before, Sea of Love (’89) and City Hall (’01). No distributor or start-date has been announced, but this story should serve as a reminder to those of you who haven’t seen Dassin’s film to rent or buy the Criterion Collection DVD.

This is why I love…no, worship Terry Gilliam. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Hugh Hart, Gilliam says “he hates most computer-generated imagery. He hated The Patriot, though he grew to love its star, Heath Ledger. He thinks mammoth battle sequences have been ‘done to death,’ doesn’t like Men in Black‘s ‘smart-ass’ humor [and] has no patience for ‘macho’ action movies.” Yes! But on the other hand…

“Whether I like it or not, or whether anybody else does, when I start a film I have a few ideas,” Gilliam tells Hart in the same piece. “And as you’re getting into it, you think, ‘Ooh, there’s another idea,’ and you’re shooting some more and, ‘Oh, here’s another thing. Let’s do that.’ I’m always changing and adding. That’s just the way my mind works.” And that’s pretty much why, I gather, Gilliam’s The Brother Grimm (Miramax, 8.26) feels like such a hyper crazy-quilt thing. It’s imaginative, all right, but Gilliam throws it all together in such scattershot fashion that his ideas begin to feel like flies you’d like to swat with a rolled-up magazine. Variety‘s Robert Koehler says Grimm is filled with “cumbersome action set pieces that are neither quite fairy-tale fanciful nor convincingly real…it’s this in-between-ness, along with Gilliam’s numbing use of filming with ultra wide-angle lenses that turn [it] into the director’s glummest and most visually clunky production.”