What movie from yesteryear would you like to see remade and who would you think would be a good candidate to play the character(s)
Although Gene Wilder did a great job in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” the rest of the movie was bland. I think its a great story, and would be a great place for Hollywood to show off how far its come with special effects.
as Willy Wonka… hmmm…Jim Carrey? Robin Williams? How about Christopher Lloyd
Charlie: Haley Joel Osment
Hard to say. I’ve felt that remakes only really work if no one has really heard of the original movie.
Case in point, I’m watching the Sci Fi Channel version of Frank Herberts Dune. It sucks compared to the full length David Lynch version.
The TV miniseries remake of The Shinning also had strong suckosity. Why? No Jack Nicholson and no Stanley Kubrik.
As cool as Tim Burtons Planet of the Apes looks, it can’t compare to Charton Heston yelling “you damn dirty ape” and seeing the Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand. One movie is a summer blockbuster that will be forgotten by next year. The other is still a classic after 30 years.
There’s several problems with remakes. One is that special effects alone do not make a great movie. IMHO Tim Burton (Batman, Sleepy Hollow), Steven Spielberg (ET, Jaws) James Cameron (Aliens, T2, Titanic), and Ridly Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator) are directors who are able to use high tech effects to tell great stories. John Woo (Hard Target) and Michael Bay (The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor) basically just crank out explosion-fests with a characters as 2 dimensional as a silhouette target.
Another problem is that there are so many movies that the same themes are starting to repeat over and over again.
ie
Raiders of The Lost Ark=The Mummy, Tomb Raider
War of The Worlds=Independence Day
Greece = Dazed and Confused, American Pie, Can’t Hardly Wait
Animal House = PCU, Road Trip
The Longest Yard = Necessary Rougness, The Replacements, The Waterboy
and so on
And finally, many great movies were great because they did something new and unexpected. No one had ever said “damn” on screen or showed the aftermath of a civil war battle before Gone With The Wind. No one fought an all star gang of evil terrorists in an office building before Die Hard. How can you be surprised in Planent of the Apes if you already know he’s on Earth the whole time?
Sorry for the long rant, but in case you haven’t noticed, I’m very much against remakes of any classic (or recent) movie.
Re: Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake—
I’m not sure what to expect of it quality wise either. I consider myself a great fan of Tim Burton, but he really has practically no grasp of narrative in directing action. In that respect he’s kind of the anti-Cameron. Everything Cameron’s a genius at – building tension, maintaining a sense of place even in the midst of frantic action, “setting up the dominoes” subtly to heighten the emotional payoff when they all come down at the climax… Burton is utterly clueless about almost all of these.
Burton’s style is much more emotional, intuitive, and dreamlike. His genius is in evoking powerful emotional payoffs /without/ obvious mechanical effort. The classic example for me would be Batman Returns, where Burton sets up references to Schreck’s plot (a giant capacitor?) only to wander off having apparently lost interest. The climax of the movie lacks any dramatic battle or similar structural payoff (a battle with the Penguin’s sideshow henchmen apparently ended up on the cutting room floor, and the Penguin’s plot essentially disintigrates with minimal intervention from Batman), but I still find it enormously emotionally powerful because of the tragic climax to which it brings the relationship of Batman and Catwoman.
Having digressed excessively, I wish only to point out regarding Planet of the Apes that I have heard that it completely jettisons the “It’s Really Earth in the Future” plot twist, placing the action on a truly different planet (which has just, for some reason, evolved apes and humans in parallel with Earth?). There’s obviously no way that the payoff of the original could have been matched without the element of surprise, but I wonder what’s left without it.
So far as remakes are concerned, I’m reminded of David Cronenburg’s “The Fly”, about which more than one reviewer at the time essentially commented: “This is the right idea for remakes… Don’t remake classics, remake films that sucked!”
While that might be a bit harsh on the original Vincent Price/David Hedison film, which worked in its own cheesy '50s way, I think there is something to be said for remaking films where the limitations of special effects, or budget, or acting, or other elements of the original worked to hold back the potential of the story. Consider also the '80s remake of The Blob. Beyond being grosser than the original (for better or worse), it’s also keyed to more of a roller coaster pace, and has a lot of great unexpected twists.
My choice for a remake along these lines would be: “It Conquered the World” This was a pretty good old Roger Corman film featuring a great performance by Lee Van Cleef opposite a somewhat wooden but still effective Peter Graves. The one real weakness of the film is the perfectly ridiculous-looking “giant turnip” alien. The paranoiac mind-control themes would likely appeal to modern audiences, and the scenes with Graves confronting his zombie wife, and later with Van Cleef, who has been assisting the alien, could certainly be even more effectively done in a remake along the lines of The Fly.
I agree. It’s ok to remake movies that are so old my parents barely remember seeing them. The Blob remake was OK. The Fly is a good example. So is John Carpenters ‘The Thing’.
Once again, it’s hard to keep coming up with new ideas. How many ‘alien terrorizing an isolated research station/space ship/planet’ movies have been made?
As for movies to remake, I might like to see a Tim Burton version of Wizard of Oz.