OFFICIAL! CHRISTMAS HAS COME EARLY!

Yes! It's really really true! Christmas has come early for cinema lovers everywhere!

In a terrific early present for film fans the world over, today Steven Spielberg has announced that his proposed remake of the Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey will no longer be going ahead. Not delayed, not on the back-burner but gone! Nixed! Cancelled!

Harvey is one of those classic movies that really just shouldn't be remade. Some films are just too iconic, and dare I say it, just too perfect to remake. And even though I'd have rather seen Spielberg in the director's chair than a host of lesser hands for a remake, his tendency to veer into the saccahrine would quite possibly end up replacing the magic and charm of the original with cloyingly sentimentality. Personally, I'd have picked Frank Darabont for the job, with Guillermo del Toro running a close second.

However the decison to not go ahead is the right one - and a wise one. If you are remaking a bona fide classic like Harvey, you either recreate the original or do something new with it. The latter obviously runs the risk of removing everything that makes the original work (see Neil Labute's The Wicker Man, and the former is a pointless exercise (Van Sant's Psycho.

So far, the reasons why Spielberg has decided to drop the Harvey remake have not come to light. But I reckon it went something like this....