??? I’m confused as to what you were looking for. Some sort of disclaimer in the trailer that this movie contains wuxia action? What sort of “hint” would they have given in the movie? It takes place in a fictional world where a martial arts master can dodge bullets by anticipating the shot by hearing/seeing muscle contractions. You either buy that bit when Chiun does it, or you don’t. And if you don’t, that’s fine. Again, varying tastes. Not everyone likes wuxia. There are plenty of hardcore martial arts action fans who despise it as a sub-genre, and that’s fine. But I have no idea what the movie should have done to establish that wuxia techniques work in its fictional world other than just showing them working.
Haha, great, thanks for knowing and sharing about this. It seems I am not alone in the disappointment of that flick!
Dazed and Confused, but with a compelling plot.
Better yet…
Idiocracy, but without a narrator.
The Shining - No, not Kubrick’s film. I love that one for what it is, a great mood piece and horror film, but a lousy adaptation of the source novel.
What I’d like to see is a remake of the 1997 TV miniseries, done with King’s script and input, but without having to tone it down for mid-1990s broadcast network television, or pacing it for 2 hour installments with commercial breaks every 10-12 minutes. Give it to a premium cable channel or streaming service and go nuts with HBO levels of non-censorship. Let the longer form chronicle Jack’s gradual descent into madness. I just rewatched the Kubrick film this weekend and strongly agree with King’s main objection that Nicholson’s Jack is already clearly unwell at the film’s start, and loses it way too early.
+1 for a re-do of the Hobbit.
Looks like multiple fan-cuts have already been done; I’m off to watch these:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheHobbit/comments/82zg0q/what_is_the_best_fanedit_of_the_hobbit_trilogy/
…and the incarnation of Shiva.
We just had a whole thread on it!
For me it’s probably the big ticket items.
Star Wars: Episodes 1-3 - Keep the broad strokes of the story the same, but you know, with acting and directing and less shiny CGI.
Star Wars: Episodes 7-9 - Burn it all to the ground. Fire everyone, start completely over.
The Hobbit - Make it one movie, maybe two if you want to go all in on the Five Armies, but for god sakes stick to the book. Dwarves and Hobbits are not action heroes.
The Stand - This one would be tricky because it’s too big for a movie, but I have a feeling that as a Netflix CBS All Access miniseries it will lose something. It’d be a thorny movie to pace but I would like to see it.
The Dark Tower - This one should go without saying. I like Idris Elba’s casting a lot but everything else was basically trash. Another tricky one, but this seems like a nice fit for the Game of Thrones treatment but Amazon quit on it.
Dune - They are doing it already, but I’m prepared to be disappointed. We’ll see, I’m adding it here just to cover my bases.
Ender’s Game - This one feels like it’s best as a Netflix series, pulling in aspects of the various sequels. The less said about the Harrison Ford vehicle the better.
Game of Thrones/ASOIAF - I wouldn’t change much at all about the first few seasons, and recasting any of these roles at this point would be a fools errand, but holy shit were the last couple seasons awful. Shame on you D&D, shame on you George for not finishing. This isn’t so much “I want a remake” but more of a, “damn you were this close.”
Law & Order - Saw this one up thread a ways. For me, this is a little bit different in that I wouldn’t want them to change much of anything. It’s perfect the way it is, I just want more episodes. Please don’t adopt the mega-dumb schtick all of the modern cops shows have, stick with the hard-core procedural anthology where the characters personal lives barely get involved.
I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch of big ones.
“Master and Commander” was not a good movie; it was a great movie, just sensational, and doesn’t need to be remade. (It lost eight Oscar categories to “Return of the King,” and was a superior film in every one of those categories.) A series, aside from being hideously expensive - it didn’t make a profit despite doing reasonably well at the box office - would just drain it of life.
I loved that movie too and would hate to see it remade. I’m not familiar with the source material, so I don’t know why making it a series would spoil it.
I agree, Master and Commander is a great movie. But I always say it’s not based off any one novel. Rather it can be standalone novel by itself. Since it distills all the essence of the whole series into one movie.
They wasted the return of Palpatine in Episode 9 when it should have been the focus of a whole trilogy instead just blown through in a single movie.
This one is a bit obscure. My all-time favorite issue of National Lampoon magazine was 1982’s “The Utterly Monstrous, Mind-roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs”, featuring the misadventures of two goofball teenagers.
When I heard there was going to be an O.C. and Stiggs movie - directed by Robert Altman, no less, I was excited! Two of my favorite comedies, Animal House and Vacation, had been based on National Lampoon articles, so I had high hopes.
The O.C. and Stiggs movie was… not good. Even today, somebody (Judd Apatow? Mike Judge? The Farrelly Brothers?) should be able to take this source material and make a worthy movie out of it.
This is how tangents get started…
The pilot episode of Kung Fu (1972). There were some good parts, like how they brand themselves (around 2:20, as shown in preview frame below) but some special effects and better casting would have helped. Not bad for TV, though.
I doubt it’ll be super fateful to the original, but maybe.
Thanks for posting. I’ll keep an open mind and check it out.
The Final Countdown (1980) was a fairly good film that seemed to be the origin of an entire genre of speculative fiction (where a modern military unit gets transported back in time where their sheer technological advantage creates havoc in the earlier time period) where a (then) modern American aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz accidentally gets caught in a time warp off the coast of Pearl Harbor Hawaii in 1980 and suddenly finds itself in the same space on December 6th 1941. The rest of the movie is the crew dealing with this natural conundrum, do they hang back and figure out a way to get back to 1980 or take the opportunity of changing history for the better? While most people seem to like it, pretty much all the negative feedback comes from the ending which many people consider a cop-out where the Carrier command decided what the hell let’s prevent the attack by having American aircraft ready to intercept the Japanese aircraft over Pearl Harbor the moment they start the attack making it a legal self-defense to shoot down all the attacking aircraft then sending their own attack aircraft to sink all 6 Japanese carriers at once. However the moment they begin to launch this strike the time warp comes back and they wind up back in 1980 without having a giant final battle that was promised. I feel a remake of the movie with a less cop-out ending (which is now a hell of a lot expensive when you can use CGI to recreate it) would be even better than the original.
Only if they do as much as possible with real planes. Half the fun of the original was watching the Tomcats play with the Zeroes. Heck, you could make an entire 'nother movie about CAG and The Token Female getting rescued and trying to fit in, then secretly salvaging the helicopter for advanced tech they then use to launch their business empire.
They could also fix the little things that bug the crap out of me in the original, like showing “current” aerial photos of Pearl Harbor that were shots taken by the Japanese during the attack, right down to torpedo tracks.
Jumper should be remade, this time without screwing up the awesome story that Mr. Gould wrote. Heck, he’s even written a bunch of awesome sequels already.
The Matrix.
Not really remade, but ended differently. I think they should have stuck with their original idea of human brains used as parallel processors. That would imply that the Matrix actually existed in the human mind.
I think how it should have ended was that Neo and Trinity should have merged to become One and then when they dove into Agent Smith they achieved the Singularity.