Well, you know, technically the Wizard of Oz is a remake – as was the Humphrey Bogart version of The Maltese Falcon. (Also, IMO, the '70s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers was far superior to the original.) So it can be done, it’s just that the odds aren’t in its favor.
Hmmm, I liked it a lot. I like and admire Sean Penn as a person and as adore him as an actor, and I think he has ooodles of charm, in real life, and onscreen depending on the role. In his “shouting” his character was saying a lot of very important and truthful things to people who needed to hear it, and in most cases he had to speak to large gatherings of people without a microphone. None of that bothered me at all.
Sean Penn spends a lot of time on his characters so I have full faith that his accent was completely correct for the time and place.
I didn’t think the movie was a mess, but it was way too short. I think a lot of scenes got edited down/out for time and I’ll admit to being confused about a couple of things. I hope the DVD Director’s cut is much longer. The movie did make me want to read the book.
Besides, we saw it right before seeing The Black Dahlia, and any halfway decent movie would look brilliant compared to that silliness.
But I really did think ATKM was a good movie.