It seems to be all the rage to remake older movies(Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Fog, Poseidon, and the upcoming The Omen, opening 06/06/06, btw) or older tv series (Starsky and Hutch, the Dukes of Hazzard, the Honeymooners, and the upcoming Miami Vice).
Personally, I’d like to see an A-Team movie:
Hannibal Smith - George Clooney
BA Barracus - Ice Cube
Face - Matt Damon or Brad Pitt
Murdock - Brad Pitt or Ben Affleck
There are so many old TV shows that could be revived as series with new casts and perhaps updated technology. The movies that have been redone have almost all failed to capture the spirit or the glow of the old one(s).
I offer a challenge to name a movie remake that was at least as good as the original.
But for TV remakes or updates, I’d like to see:
Have Gun, Will Travel
Perry Mason
Peter Gunn (with some music that would be at least as pacesetting as Mancini’s was)
Mission: Impossible (the original concept, not the Cruise abortions)
The Twilight Zone
Maverick
Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing were both excellent remakes (reimaginings?) of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and all were based on Dashiell Hammett’s novella Red Harvest.
Payback, starring Mel Gibson, was much better-paced than Point Blank, with Lee Marvin.
The 2004 Manchurian Candidate remake with Denzel Washington was very good, although it’s difficult to say whether it was better than the original with Frank Sinatra.
And did you see the '90s remake of Maverick, with Mr. Gibson? It was decent.
Yes, I did. It was fun seeing Garner in the daddy role. Gibson was okay. It’s been a while since I saw it and I’ll watch it if it comes back around on cable. Doubt if I’d add it to our Netflix queue, though.
I’ll agree with you on this one. The chess game with Dunaway and McQueen was a highlight of the original and the bathrobe McQueen wore was really cool. But his laugh queered the whole thing for me, even though I loved the music by Legrand.
The second one had a better plot and was more exciting.
Half of Miller’s Crossing* was as entertaining as Bruce Willis’s Last Man Standing which was as much fun in the first viewing as Sergio Leone’s classic A Fistful of Dollars which was on par or better than Yojimbo, which was based on Dashielle Hammet’s tougher than a bag of hammer’s pulp novel Red Harvest. Same story, and very entertaining in each movie adaptation.
The Magnificent Seven the western is as fun as Seven Samurai.
I enjoyed the remake of Dawn of the Dead way more fun than the original…but then most of the members here would bludgeon me to death with my own limbs if they were to find out where I live after reading this.
Most people probably couldn’t tell you that there was a Scarface before the 80s one Al Pacino is famous for starring in.
If I remember this thread exists, I’ll be back with more later. This is just off of the top of my head
This is to say that half of Miller’s Crossing was an adaptation of Red Harvest, whereas the other half was based on another Hammet novel, The Glass Key. A blend of both really.
The only thing slower and more plodding than the zombies in the original was the plot.
Fact of the matter is that the remake is usually never as good as the original for the simple reason that we already know the damn story. They should do more remakes of sucky movies that no one has ever heard of. Not more remakes of classic movies.
This is no challenge. There are may movies better than the original. There have already been some good examples. Many are movies that most would not think of as remakes like ‘Ben Hur’, ‘Ten Commandments’ (both remakes of silent versions.)
Although both originals were damn good also.
‘Batman’(1989 version) and even ‘Batman Begins’ should be considered remakes.
There were also numerous versions of classic stories before the famous version -examples ‘Snow White’, ‘Three Musketeers’, ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’, ‘Jungle Book’
Do you consider those remakes?
I also want to challenge the OP about the number of remakes. I would say in previous eras there were more remakes. There certainly were in the 1930s and 1940s when they remade all the silent movies with sound. Also in the 1950s and 1960s they remade a lot of b&w movies into colour.
Like heck they should. The source material for Burton’s Batman and last year’s version was NOT the sixties tv show/movie (remember, the TV show came first, and the movie was made while the show was still in production.) The contemporary movies are based on the comic book (in particular, Batman Begins draws heavily from Batman: Year One.) Burton’s Batman and Batman Begins are no more remakes than The Lion King is a remake of Mel Gibson’s Hamlet.
The source material was Batman. I never said they were remakes of the 1960s movie or TV show. There was a 1943 serial. And of course the comic book.
The source is the whole Batman oeuvre.
Batman(1989) seems to me to be a telling of the start of Batman. As does Batman Begins. Obviously I know that Batman begins is based on a comic Batman Year one and partially on The dark knight.
I may be in the minority, but I think re-makes of films should only be done for films that were NOT good in the original version…why re-do Psycho or something like Casablanca or Gone With The Wind or Wizard of Oz?
Take a crap film based on a good book and try it again.
Hitchhiker’s Guide was bad. Re-do that.
The Stepford Wives, War Of The Worlds, or most of the Stephen King novels that were turned into films…those should be re-made.
13 Monkeys was better than the original La Jetee True Lies was better than the original (Can’t find the original name, but opening credits say it is based on another movie/screenplay?)
IMHO, most remakes from foriegn films suck: The Grudge/Ju-on Insomnia/Insomnia The Ring/Ringu The Vanishing/Spoorloos
etc…etc…