Look out, world: Spielberg's HARVEY is coming

Steven Spielberg is going to make a remake of the Jimmy Stewart film Harvey... And it will almost certainly suck.

Spielberg is very good at awe. He is very good at fear. He is very good at excitement, and mystery and sadness. He is very good at many things. But there is one thing he is very, very not-good at: whimsy. He can do funny, and he's surprisingly good at dark humor. (Think of Richard Dreyfuss' UFO freakouts in Close Encounters, or the scar competition in Jaws, or the fate of Wayne Knight in the original Jurassic Park.)

But when Spielberg gets into twinkly, fanciful comedy, watch out. Remember Hook? His TV anthology series Amazing Stories? His Kick the Can sequence from the Twilight Zone movie?

Spielberg is at his best when his stories have real grit, whether they're set during the holocaust or they involve a little boy befriending an extraterrestrial. When he gets cute the results can be dire indeed, and Harvey's story of a man's friendship with a giant, invisible rabbit is the sort of thing that Spielberg should be kept as far away from as possible. (If he casts Robin Williams in the Jimmy Stewart role, we could be looking at toxic levels of cute, a cute that causes entire theaters full of people to die of saccharine poisoning.)

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