Remakes
 

What do you think of remakes?

Hollywood is now remaking some of my favourite movies. The first one (The Wickerman) sucked and I don't really have high hopes for Ofelas (Veiviseren). But I will most definitely see it. :P

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/pathfinder/

In general I hate them, I hate remake movies very much.
Remake movies just show how low the ideas are in Hollywood in some companies.

The only remakes that I remember being good right now are Jackson's King Kong and Christopher Reeve's Rear Window and even those are not even near perfect.

I dont know if these 2 classify as remakes Casino Royale was great and The Fly [Jeff Goldblum was majorly creepy].But I liked Charlie and the Choclate Factory with Johnny Depp.

I agree, King Kong, Charlie and the Choclate Factory was good (haven't seen the new version of The Rear Window) and The Fly is absolutely great (Cronenberg is one of the best).

Casino Royale is one of the best Bondmovies ever IMO but I haven't seen the original. I have heard it's more of a comedy so it's not a real remake in that sense (but that's based on rumors).

The original Casino Royale is a bizarre 1960s farce in the classic Peter Sellers/Woody Allen style, only with a spy theme. If you like Peter Sellers movies or the "Austin Powers" franchise, you'll like it, but it is a Bond movie in name only.

That being said, it does feature some truly stunning visuals and fairly snappy dialogue.

Hollywood has been remaking movies for a long time. :) For example, Miracle on 34th Street has been remade a few times. Scarface with Al Pacino is a remake of a 1932 movie. There are many more.

So the rumours were true.

Well I think there's a difference if they take an old Hollywood-movie and make a new version of it then if they take a fairly new norweigen movie (Ofelas, 1987) and make something that looks completely different. :)

I like some remakes, such as many posted. It's not necessarilly evil. But some are pointless. Let them never remake Casablanca, for instance.

It's not a binary subject. When they refired up the Batman franchise, I was totally aghast. Then I watched it... not bad, and I'm looking forward to the next installment.

But if you're going to do it, improve it in a way beyond advanced technology. War of the Worlds comes to mind. Aside from some interesting performances from Tim Robbins, it was most obviously a Hollywood corporate grab at revenue. As much as I can point to a handful of worthy efforts from Tom Cruise throughout his career, anymore, he's the kiss of death for any project to me. He's now just another blockbuster cog.

Give us the art, make it good, make it better!

That couldn't be more true. ;)

Would what they did with star wars count as remakes?

Either way, they've done some pretty slimy things with that franchise. Like taking forever to release the original trilogy on DVD, and supposedly having destroyed the master copy for the original version and selling a DVD version of it produced from the laserdisc version.

All I know is that when I watched the most recent version of the first SW film (Ep. 4, as it's now called) on DVD, it was so clean and lacking in the bad block masks of the space shots (ugly artifacts of an emerging technology) and what not, that I felt I had enjoyed the film, more so than ever. And I saw it on the big screen when it was first released.

It would be interesting to see a re-make of the "The Crow." Maybe they could keep in the raw emotion and intensity from the original comic book series by James O' Barr. And "maybe" the remake could re-vitalize the franchise the same way Christopher Nolan did with "Batman Begins." Just a thought (or a fantasy).

Remakes? The only "remake" I'd like to see at this point- and this is more of a "make properly for the first time ever"- is The Wizard of Oz. I find it pretty sad that so many people have never actually read Baum's incredible Oz books- which bear little resemblance to the musical. I'd choose someone like Neil Gaiman to do the screenplay, and perhaps someone like Ang Lee for the direction.

But having said that....personally, I am disgusted with Hollywood for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its apparent dearth of original ideas. Pretty much every release is an adaptation of a game, graphic novel, book, play, or TV show, or it's a remake of another film- often a foreign or an obscure black and white film which doesn't get credited so people think the remake is the original (eg. You've Got Mail).

I'm mostly sick of remakes. I'm sick of warmed over ideas, hackneyed one-liners, and blatant plagiarism. Where are the original scripts? Where are the fresh concepts? Where is the artistic integrity?

A lot of movies I see these days feel as if they've been carefully constructed by a team of psychologists and marketing experts who scientifically calculate the correct proportions of cleavage, buttocks, whole breasts, and buttered six packs/fart jokes/belches/tough guy one-liners/gratuitous gymnastics/surprising karate kicks/pointless peril/aesthetic abrasions/ product placement/obligatory and formulaic romance along the lines of boy meets girl boy loses girl boy regains girl or vice versa/35 year old characters played by 22 year old actors/financially struggling characters living in unrealistically expensive homes/clothes that always look ironed and taped/backflipping barnyard animals/Matrix style slo-mo gun fights/etcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetcetc.............BARF !


Say...maybe there ought to be [rant] [/rant] tags available. :D

Or "Nattevagten", except that it isn't all that different from the original (same director and writer involved, even :D), it's just the same bloody thing sans the original's charme and edgieness (Hollywood doesn't like that), but with actors the world might actually have heard about instead. To summarize: Likely pretty stupid, definitely redundant, but then it could have been worse. Maybe.

*sigh* If only Carpenter's remake of "The Thing" would be just once shown uncut on TV. It's embarassing, really, whoever cut that movie to fit a stupid FSK16-rating needs to be.. well, cut. :devil: :D Wouldn't be so bad, but the only thing available on the whole market is that damn same stupid cut! The movie doesn't even make sense anymore. Entire transformation sequences are taken out, so you just see the the cast morphing their faces into TERRIFIED-mode, and if you're lucky, you see a THING (HAHAHAH!) or two for about a split-second. And all of a suden, it's over. Duh.


edit: Shit, screw it all, Nattevagten is Danish. http://www.coccoplanet.net/mkportal/...embarassed.gif

I've only seen the remake of Nattevagten with Ewan Mcgregor, but I can't see why the director wanted to make the same movie twice.

Is the uncut version of Carpenters The Thing available on DVD? I didn't know it had been censored actually. But the scene where the doctors hands are eaten by the victims stomach is still there right? :P

The remake of 'The Fog' had a nonsensical ending.
The original is better.
:)

Yes it's availble and the scene where the doctor's hands are bitten off, is in there as well my friend. I own it!:devil:

I have nothing against movies based on books, where else would they get their ideas? What else are the idea people supposed to do, hope and gamble that some movie studio will accept their idea, and not write a book? It'd be especially good if they made it clear when it is based on a book, and had the writer be involved with the making of the movie.

I own it too, just wondering if it's the uncut version. :P

I agree. Many, many good movies are based on books. I'm not in general against adapting something from one medium to another. Too bad that not a single good movie based on a game has been made to this day. ;(

There was Yamibou. That's a series based on a game, but that's very close.

Was there really not one good movie based on a game?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...on_video_games
I notice there's a movie based on FFV. I wonder what it's like.

Now you lost me. :) Yamibou? FFV?

I saw that on wikipedia they also write about movies which theme is computer/console games. In that case I can say that eXistenZ is one of my favourite movies. That's a vision of how adventuregames can be in the future. ;)

I am relatively fine with revisiting old classics (or, better yet, old not-quite-classics) several decades later, although the sheer number of such upcoming remakes is pretty frightening (Halloween, 3:10 to Yuma, The Fly (...again :shifty: ); I am sure I'm forgetting many others). But, like Henke, I hate to guts hollywoodizing modern non-English spoken films. Doesn't US audience feel patronized by being basically told that they won't be able to follow a subtitled film? There are at least three very recent and very acclaimed "foreign" pictures that are (or so I heard) at various stages of being adapted: Brothers (2004), Caché (2005) and Das Leben der Anderen (2006). And now, with the recent shameful Oscar verdict (the inferior remake of a cult classic announced Best Picture), I expect the number of these pointless remakes to increase rapidly.

Incidentally, do people really consider the aforementioned Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Batman Begins remakes? They share the source material with previously existing movies, but are not based directly on them.

I forgot to mention my all time fav remake -Little Shop Of Horrors- man I loved Steve Martin in that ]phyco dentist]. Also told that Dirty rotten scoundrels was a remake, never saw the original but it had Marlon Brando and David Niven so I reckon that would be hard to beat. I also loved Manchurian candidate, but again I never saw the original..have to have a movie weekend to catch up.

*shifty*

Relevant excerpt:
:shifty:

That quotation is priceless.

I can just see a bunch of luvvies sitting in a room completely missing the point of the film, and asking questions like "So, what was the birds' motivation?"... :D

I think that Hollywood must be going through a dry spell creatively right now :D I mean, instead of making new films, they just remake the old
films :shifty: It just as if they don't get or have any originals ideas anymore, but instead they just burn through other people's creative & original ideas.

On sidenote, here in Denmark we have had a film called 'The Island of Lost Souls' (De Fortabte Sjæles Ø) which is sort of a marriage between fantasy and the Danish tradition for social realism. And which is deeply original and have gotten great reviews. We have also gotten a movie called The Treasure of the Knight's Templar (Tempelherrernes Skat), which also is very original and have gotten great reviews.

In the US, all Hollywoood seem to be able to come up with is remakes of old Disney movies like 'the shaggy dog'. (wtih tim allen :shifty: and what's that about :shifty: --- ) Even Mexico (&spain) outshines the US with its great masterpiece *Pan's Labyrinth*. And Babel is also a very intelligent and clever made film. And all the US is able to come up with is re-make of *the birds*, and their motivation :D throughout the film. (anyway, the birds do not need a motivation as they are symbols used by Hitchcock to describe something else).

Wish I could argue against the lack of originality in American movies, but that's hard to do when the last good year for American film was 2004.

You've got to go with the times, honey! So they're gonna make them genetically modified carrier pigeons bred by some kind of far east terror organisation? Alfred's gonna be proud!


Ooops, I forgot to add that this only holds true for the only (German) edition that has been available in Germany now for ages. Maybe I should order it from somewhere else one of these days... And no, no hands getting bitten off, nothing. In that sequence, all you get to see is the most terrible cuts ever witnessed on film and a glimpse of the spider-head thing that crawls away. Plus, guess what, the terrified look on the actors' faces. It's REALLY that terrible, non-sensical and unwatchable. :/

Here's a list of sequences that where were cut. Pay attention to their length, almost NINE minutes are taken out in total. You never get to see a SINGLE transformation and are totally left in the dark as to what's actually going on. No director's cut, that's fo' sure.

I don't agree there, there are A LOT of movies made in America. ;) Many bad remakes but also a lot of original and good ones. For example I think Apocalypto was great.

Ha ha, they seem to have cut almost the entire scene with the dogs. :P The Swedish censorship used to be like that too but they have abandoned that notion now. Now they spend most of their time revising porn instead.

They are making a movie from my favorite old cartoon Underdog? Their is no shame left in the movie industry.

Really?! This is great! This isn't Scooby Doo-doo (a cartoon that is still produced and the films were pure poo-poo (for me to POOP on)). No, Underdog is a long forgotten character (with great cohorts) that many newbies will get to enjoy.

I have some Riff-raff decals that are supah-cool. And then there's Professor Peabody and his WABAC machine!

"Gee Mr. Peabody, you know everthing!"

"That's true, Sherman".

Of course, it could turn out badly...