Here’s to hoping that people stop trying to remake Hitchcock films.
I’m hoping that no one ever tries to remake The Wild Bunch, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, or The African Queen. And having throuroughly farked up Diabolique, I don’t see any reason any direct need to put his grubby hands on The Wages of Fear. Oops, too late.
And please, Og, leave alone the Hepburn and Cary collaborations; Cate Blanchet aptly demonstrated that even a talented actress can’t imitate her particular countenance, and while George Clooney is a fair successor to Grant, any attempt to deliberately ape the latter would come off as a pale imitation.
And after The Ladykillers it’s clear that no one should attempt to remake a film staring Alec Guinness.
Actually, I’d really like to see this. It really does exist. They put it on at the University of Utah a year before I got there. A few years later I heard that it was touring the Midwest. I still haven’t seen it. Reports are that the first half is hilarious, but it bogs down and gets serious at the end.
I’m sorry to interrupt this thread, but is “A Clockwork Orange”, ah, explicit, bloody/gory, inappropriate? I’d like to watch this, but I’m kind of uneasy by the synopsis of the movie that I read (isn’t the main character a hobbyist rapist (rapist hobbyist?)?)
Anyways, I don’t think they should ever remake the original Star Wars trilogy. My friends said that they want Hollywood to do so and I was horrified. Am I the only one of the few younger teenagers of today’s generation who appreciates the original trilogy?
It’s real savage horrorshow, with lots of ultra-violence and a bolshy bit of of the old in-out-in-out. If you’ve not got the yarbles to slooshie such pictures, it’ll make yer glassies pop right out of yer gulliver and fag and shag and fash you. Perhaps you’d best not viddie it, least not without sharpening yourself up with a bit of the moloko-plus and some Ludwig Van.
Doesn’t count. That was not a remake, it was a sequel. It picked up after the events of the movie “The Great Escape”, and followed the efforts of some group of men (don’t remember who, exactly, they were supposed to be) to track down those responsible for murdering “The 50”. It was excruciatingly boring, but we have to be fair; it wasn’t a prison break movie, and it wasn’t a remake.
Valley of the Dolls: Probably won’t get remade, despite the resurgent popularity of the novel in recent years. The main problem is that the flick promises shocking, lurid, scandalous goings-on, but never delivers more than a typical daytime soap could. Even Sharon Tate’s “nudie movie” scene looks PG-13 at best nowadays.
And that musical number about “planting trees” or some such thing. WTF?
Well, actually it was a partial remake. They recreated the prison break and events leading up to it, added different characters (and eliminated others), then tacked on a stupid vengence ending. I remember catching this thing once on the televisor during the scene where (in the original) McQueen sticks his head out of the ground and sees that they’re thirty feet short. “Great,” I say, “I’ll sit down and watch this for a bit.” The shock of me life awaits when I see people who are not McQueen, Garner, Pleasence, Colburn, Attenbourough, et cetera escaping. “What,” I exclaim, “the bloody hell is this, eh?”
Too late, although, if it were to get remade again Michael Jackson could play a different role this time, maybe the Wicked Witch? Or some other role suited to a skinny middle-aged white woman.
Mary Poppins - Fuck off, Mike Eisner. Don’t touch it. Just leave it alone. The Sound of Music - No, no, no, and oh – no. The Thorn Birds - I know it’s panned a lot, but I loved Dick Chamberlain as Ralph de Bricassart and the always-perfect Barbara Stanwyck as Mary Carson. LEAVE IT ALONE, YOU REMAKING BASTARDS. My Beautiful Launderette - I see some indie shithead updating this. I don’t know why, but I see it. NO. It stands the test of time just FINE, THANKS.
Maybe you could tell, remakes tend to fill me with grrr.
If they followed the book fairly closely, a new Wizard of Oz movie would be different enough that it could stand on its own merits. The classic movie took some huge liberties with the story.