ginals. And tell us why.
*The Departed
Three Men and a Baby
*
I’m kidding about one of these.
Well, some of us think that Sorcerer is a better film than The Wages of Fear.
Not really a “remake,” but I always thought the Fox edit of the anime series Escaflowne (before they cancelled it…for the “NASCAR Racers” cartoon, I believe. I’m not bitter at all.) actually made the show more coherant, engrossing, and better paced. And without badly compromising the artistic “feel,” to boot. I even liked the new theme song.
I’m going to Hell for that, I know. I’ve come to accept it.
Insomnia. While the original starring Stellan Skarsgård was also very good, Chirtopher Nolan’s direction of the remake cinches it for me. Plus, I’m a big Al Pacino fan.
Nuh uh. You sure there’s an “us” there? I refuse to believe that more than one person on the planet would carry whatever mutated gene would make that possible. Cuz The Wages of Fear is a Great Film, while Sorcerer, well, sucks. I’m just sayin; these are the facts. You might want to check your pulse. 
I’ll vote for the original on this one too.
To each his own. I saw them both in the theater, and superfluous action sequences aside, I enjoyed the remake more.
How about The Magnificent Seven? Tighter than The Seven Samurai, better music too.
La Jetee became (or at least inspired) 12 Monkeys.
Boudu sauvé des eaux became Down and Out in Beverley Hills
Viktor und Viktoria had to wait 50 years to be rmade into Victor/Victoria
Any of these qualify
Despite the presence of Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, I’ll take Kurasawa’s original over the Western remake any day. “Tighter”, in this case, ain’t better. There’s a lot in Shichi no Samurai, and it’s worth keeping.
Plusd, it doesn’t have Horst Buchholz.
Star Wars (none of this “Star Wars 4: a New Hope” nonsense) over Kurosawa’s “The Hidden Fortress” although the latter is an outstanding movie. I will take Alec Guinness and Carrie Fisher’s cinnmon buns over Mifune and the “Princess”.
The Ring is one of my favorite movies of all time. Ringu just left me confused.
I’ll take Sorceror, too, but it took me a while to figure out why.
There’s a line in Sunset Blvd., where Norma is talking about the silent movies; “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces!” I think the style of moviemaking just changed between The Wages of Fear and Sorceror. The suspenseful scenes are just done differently. In Wages, they tell us that “we have to go fast enough to skip over the bumps”, or “I have to back up right to the edge of this platform”, and we see the tension on their faces, but we never really see those things happen. By the time Sorceror came out, people expected to actually see the action, not just the actor’s reaction to it. I think the former method is somehow considered more developed and mature, but I’m a child of my age and my culture and I like to see what’s going on.
Plus, there’s the endings.Wages ends like some bleak, existentialist parable. “Ah, you see, the fates will push you off a cliff and all is hopeless anyway.” Sorceror had the same defeat-snatched-from-the-jaws-of-victory type of ending, but it fit within the movie. Scanlon’s past caught up with him after all.
Star Wars really isn’t a remake of The Hidden Fortress.
Marc
Hear frakkin hear. HB was great in One, Two, Three, but all the acting was stylized and cartoonish in that movie. He’s rarely been well used in any other movie. The Seven Samurai is a great movie; The Magnificent Seven is a thin shadow of that. It has an almost made-for-TV feel to it, IMO.
La Jetee is flawless, perfect, powerful. 12 Monkeys is a trumped-up, watered-down, noisy mess. Boudu sauvé des eaux is really a masterpiece for the ages; * Down and Out in Beverley Hills* is a Bette Midler and Richard Dreyfuss movie.
Well everything from the moviefreak.com Top 10 on this list has been mentioned, except, True Lies, which is supposedly a remake of La Totale- which makes sense- I always thought it was too original to be a Hollywood original, now I know why- it wasn’t.
I honestly can’t think of any, but I will say that I thought Point of No Return was decent, and in the same ballpark as the original, though not better. The remake of Farewell My Lovely didn’t suck, but an 80 year old Robert Mitchum can’t compete with an in his prime Dick Powell- a younger Mitchum could though.
Sorry I forgot the OP, the 1944 Farewell My Lovely was definitely in English :smack:
I think Roxanne stands quite well against Cyrano de Bergerac (sp?), but then again it is more of a revisualisation than a simple remake.