Bonfire of the Vanities.
Among other things, not keeping the judge at least the same race kinda took some of the sting out of it.
Could have been classics:
Election and The Nutty Professor (Eddie Murphy) - it seems like they were held back or overworked.
Election had some good themes but was too long
I had high hopes for T.N.P. during the opening scene, but was disappointed.
Batman Forever
This could have been a GREAT study of a man struggling with the good and evil within him. The character of Harvey Dent, aka “Two-Face”, is portrayed in the comics as a tragic figure. He’s a good, honest, district attorney who is disfigured with acid. The accident drives him insane, and he becomes a criminal. Yet, his good side still tries to reappear, which manifests itself in his habit of flipping a coin before any decision. If the coin says commit a crime, he will. And while Batman fights him, he also tries to help his former friend.
An Academy Award winning actor like Tommy Lee Jones could have had a field day with a role like this. But for some reason, the writers and/or director decided to portray the character of Two-Face as a one-dimensional, snarling maniac. In one scene, he flips the coin several times until he gets the result he wants! A sad waste of talent.
Along the lines of woefully wasted comic books, I’d like The Punisher to be remade. Mortal Kombat 2, while we’re at it.
The running man is the movie that needs to be remade the most.
I enjoyed the movie …dont get me wrong…but having read the book I was totally like “gime that script…gimme a couple of million and let me make the movie the way it was meant to be made”
I think it interesting that we are in the advent of “reality based” TV programming. In the book a large element of the show was that the audience could see the runnerwhen the bad guys couldnt and follow him wherever he went.
the germans are running a cool tv/net show at the moment called Manhunter which is so close to the original concept of the running man its scary.
Great movie but could have been done better
Hey again, Jack Batty!
If you’ll be in Baton Rouge, yeah come on over! If not, I can tape it and send it your way. Got a VCR?
Godfather III
Get rid of Sophia Coppola.
ANDYMAN - I was just in Baton Rouge, wish I’d known you lived there!
Jonny Memnonic I couldn’t BELIVE that this sucked as much as it did.
It’s a short story, the perfect length for a movie
It’s Gibson’s most “traditional” story, in that 3/4ths of the action isn’t internal monologs and exposition.
Gibson WROTE IT, and hand almost complete freedom, and for some reason he basically threw away the whole story and started over.
The scary thing is Gibson can actually direct, he did that great episode of X-Files . . .
Just bitter, bitter disapointment . . .
–
“This movie just hates anteaters . . .”
Andyman, unfortunately I don’t find my self in the deep south too often (I’m a west-coaster). But, I certainly do have a VCR, that sounds like a fine plan.
{flipping frantically through one of his copies of DRACULA, just knowing the word “autopsy” does not appear anywhere in it}
Uh…which page?
I’m with lesa - I love the book “The Little Princess” and it pisses me off that every friggin’ version of the movie changes the ending. The recent re-do was much better than the Shirley Temple travesty, but THEN THEY GO AND COPY THE GODDAMN HAPPY ENDING! What’s with THAT?!?
And the funny part is, the book has a happy ending, just a different happy ending. I guess that they just think that kids nowadays can’t handle the fact that sometimes parents really do die, and they tend to stay dead.
The other movie that I’d love to see a remake of is Dune. I watched it again a couple weeks ago, and although I never hated it as much as most people I can see why they did hate it. For someone who hasn’t read the book, it’s hard to follow. I’d love to see a remake with today’s special effects (the effects look pretty dated nowadays) and a little more substance. Maybe a miniseries… (yeah, in my dreams…)
IIRC, didn’t Gibson write it with intention that it would be a short film costing maybe $3 mil tops. Then Hollywood got its hand around it and spent $20 million turning it into a pile of fetid dingo’s kidneys
This isn’t a complete remake, but give me a few minutes of editing “No Way Out” with Gene Hackman and Kevin Costner and I could turn a movie with a pointless shock ending into
a “Sixth Sense” type movie where you see the ending and all sorts of things make sense immediately.
SPOILER AHEAD, just in case someone decides to rent a 13 year old movie and hasn’t heard about the ending yet…
OK, the idea is that Gene Hackman has killed his mistress, Sean Young, who was also sleeping with Costner (Remember the steamy limo scene? And he got paid for this…). Costner is assigned the case to find out who killed her. Suspicion focuses on a Russian mole who was blackmailing(?) Hackman? (Question marks are because I don’t actually remember how the Russian mole entered into the equation.)
OK, so lots of tension as we watch the noose tighten inexorably around Costner. There’s a blurry Polaroid that’s going to nail him if he doesn’t solve the case first.
So finally he figures it out and Hackman is hauled away in chains (excuse me if I’m not remembering this correctly). This is followed by a WHOLLY gratuitious ending in which Costner is revealed to really be the Russian mole all along.
This makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the movie.
The reason it doesn’t work is that the director shows us Hackman flinging the woman down a staircase (or whatever), just as Costner is coming in the back door for another tryst. Now…do some judicious re-editing. Show the fight. Show Costner enter the building. Show Hackman hurry out, looking guilty. DONT show Hackman actually kill the girl.
Then we, the sucker movie goer would be gaffed but good. We’d assume that clean cut Costner is being framed for the murder and would emphathize with the poor bastard for the entire movie. Then in the last scene, we’d suddenly realize the ambiguity – HE could have been the one to push the girl down the stairs in order to frame Hackman.
This would have made so much more sense that I’ve wished for over a decade that I could do a “director’s cut” of the movie.