Five Movies That Should Be Remade
Jun. 18th, 2009 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficThe strange thing about remakes is that if they have enough name value to warrant a remake, they usually don’t need a remake, and if they have enough problems to need a remake, people are scared off by the title. So it ends up that most remakes are of things that were either done right the first time or were memorable because of some x-factor that can’t be replicated (like Madmartigan in a Willow remake). So here are five movies that could probably stand a do-over.
I could make a list of poor adaptations, comic books especially, and even good adaptations that didn’t properly capture the flavor of their source material and could be done again. But I’ll limit myself to one. Daredevil the comic is famous for Frank Miller pioneering noirish comic art and darker storytelling techniques into what up to then had been a fairly rote Spider-Man rip-off. Keyword there is dark. Although Miller didn’t go overboard on the grim and gritty as he would later in his career, incorporating comic relief characters like Turk and the much-maligned Stilt-Man into the narrative, his work was filled with melancholy, lost love, redemption barely glimpsed, and salvation shakily grasped.
So, for the movie, Fox got the director of Simon Birch to do it.
Other adaptations at least have scenes where you feel “hey, so this is what a Conan movie” (for instance) is like. There’s precisely one scene like that in DD. Matt Murdock, wearied from a night of killing rapists (in one of many rip-offs of the 1989 Batman), pops painkillers, tugs out a loose tooth, and listens to his girlfriend break up with him on the answering machine. Consider this neither a promising beginning or a hopeful ending, but an oasis of in-characterness in a sea of genericness, mediocrity, and miscasting. In the very next scene, Matt Murdock (in his secret identity of a blind man) is cheerfully kung-fu fighting Elektra in a playground so he can get her number.
Unlike a lot of comic characters who don’t have a definitive story arc, making adaptations a morass of condensing and appraising characters and events from decades apart, everyone agrees on which Daredevil story arcs are the best. With Frank Miller’s famously cinematic storytelling, the work is half-done. All you’d have to do is find a director with the right sensibilities, lock him in a hotel room with a few TPBs, and you’d have a movie.
Hook has an awesome premise: Peter Pan has grown up. Hook is out for revenge. It’s just where the story goes with that that messes up. Robin Williams never manages to come across as a grown-up Peter Pan so much as, well, Robin Williams doing funny voices (appropriate for his characterization as a buttoned-down lawyer). What could be an elegant meditation on aging and family becomes mediocre family fare. What this really needs is the Spike Jonze treatment Where The Wild Things Are got, or an adaptation by Pixar. Instead, we got, well, bang-a-rang.
Another case of an awesome premise that dies a swift death. For those of you who don’t know, Professor Abraham Van Helsing is a character in Dracula who is both an accomplished scientist and an expert in vampire lore, turning that scientific knowledge against Dracula. Eventually, someone came up with doing a prequel explaining just how Van Helsing came about all that knowledge and what he did before his famous meeting with Dracula.
It’s an interesting, intriguing idea. Imagine Peter Cushing narrating a journal of his early days, his first meeting with the supernatural, his research into them, his destruction of that first menace. All that was summarily dismissed so that Stephen Sommers could make a movie about Gabriel Van Helsing, a fallen angel who works as a sort of supernatural enforcer for the Catholic Church. Not only does he face Mr. Hyde, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein, but he also kills Dracula… completely missing the point of doing a Van Helsing origin movie in the first place. The good thing here is that you don’t even have to do a remake, just a rip-off. Call it something cool like ‘Before Dracula’ or whatevs, cast some British character actor to play the young Van Helsing, and off ya go.
Breaking my own rule on adaptations, here you can see the gem of an idea in the movie itself. It’s just overwhelmed by poe-faced solemnity (if your movie features a small child spontaneously singing America The Beautiful, you’d better know damn well that you’re not sailing in narm waters) and a bladder-testing three-hour runtime, including a long interlude where our nameless hero recuperates from a gunshot wound in a snowed-in cabin with Olivia Williams (yes, they do fall in love, why do you ask?) while a bunch of other people do all the work of restoring the republic, a lengthy opening in which the Postman performs Shakespeare with his donkey and is drafted by the baddies, and finally a climactic final showdown in which Kevin Costner and Will Patton roll around in the dirt for a few minutes before Costner decides not to kill Patton, Patton goes for a gun, and someone off-screen shoots him.
The result has a lot of stuff, but not much of it is worth watching. Characters have subplots lasting a few minutes, then disappear. Tom Petty shows up playing a future version of himself. There’s a character named Ford Lincoln Mercury. An army of rapacious barbarians boo a screening of Universal Soldier but hunker down for The Sound of Music. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a fun B-movie or a solemn melodrama, and Kevin Costner having comedic sensibilities that are positively Teutonic doesn’t help.
Most importantly, the central story of a con man who comes to believe in his own con never really comes together. Costner finds a postman's uniform and letters, then starts delivering them to con himself some food and shelter, but before you know it he's a messianic figure that "hands out hope like it was candy in his pocket." That hope is accepted too readily and too easily, making you wonder why these hardened, post-apocalyptic survivors are all such suckers. Other characters have more interesting storylines, yet get shunted aside so the Postman can be appropriately mythic. Even the moment you’re waiting for, where the Postman has to finally admit or have it revealed that he’s a fraud… never really happens.
Oh, and no evil overlord should have a rule that anyone can challenge him for the window office at anytime. That’s just asking for trouble.
Cut it down, make the Postman more of an active participant, give him a name for God’s sake (most amusingly, at the end of the movie a statue is dedicated to the Postman by his loving daughter… and it doesn’t even have his name! It just calls him the Postman!). Get someone like Ryan Reynolds to give the Postman some charm, put in some more conflict of him trying to rein in the people who are taking his con and running with it (yet, at the same time wondering hey, what if?). Cut down on all the would-be Capra with some cynicism and snark… this is a story about a guy who lies to people about saving the world so he can get fed, for Christ’s sake! You could have a good movie with a good message that doesn’t need butt-anesthetic to watch.
Another case of a good premise that was then given to the director of Batman & Robin. Guess if it turned into a good movie. No, c’mon, guess.
All those who said yes, your parents have been contacted.
The premise is that a man steps into a phone booth and then is held hostage by a sniper who calls him on the booth’s phone, trapping him in the booth for the rest of the movie. So right away you can see two question in the premise.
A. Why is the sniper doing this?
B. How does the man escape?
Naturally, both questions are answered about as well as on Celebrity Jeopardy. Not the real thing, the SNL version. It turns out that the sniper is some kind of serial killer who targets dishonest men and forces them to tell the truth, for some damn reason. There’s no particular reason for the hero to be chosen.
And as for B, the police figure out what’s going on with unbelievable ease and shoot the sniper, but then (READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED FOR THE AWESOME ENDING OF PHONE BOOTH!) it turns out he’s not really dead. Auteur. Auteur.
Now rebuild this from the ground up. Say, make it an espionage movie/conspiracy thriller. Frank steps into the phone booth, makes a call, then is about to leave when the phone rings. He picks it up. A voice on the other end says he’s been following Frank, he has a high-powered sniper rifle trained on him, and if Frank doesn’t tell him where the bomb is, he’s going to pull the trigger. Frank says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And carry on from there, with a proper ending this time. I’m not saying it would be a classic, but you could get a good Red Eye-quality thriller out of that.
I could make a list of poor adaptations, comic books especially, and even good adaptations that didn’t properly capture the flavor of their source material and could be done again. But I’ll limit myself to one. Daredevil the comic is famous for Frank Miller pioneering noirish comic art and darker storytelling techniques into what up to then had been a fairly rote Spider-Man rip-off. Keyword there is dark. Although Miller didn’t go overboard on the grim and gritty as he would later in his career, incorporating comic relief characters like Turk and the much-maligned Stilt-Man into the narrative, his work was filled with melancholy, lost love, redemption barely glimpsed, and salvation shakily grasped.
So, for the movie, Fox got the director of Simon Birch to do it.
Other adaptations at least have scenes where you feel “hey, so this is what a Conan movie” (for instance) is like. There’s precisely one scene like that in DD. Matt Murdock, wearied from a night of killing rapists (in one of many rip-offs of the 1989 Batman), pops painkillers, tugs out a loose tooth, and listens to his girlfriend break up with him on the answering machine. Consider this neither a promising beginning or a hopeful ending, but an oasis of in-characterness in a sea of genericness, mediocrity, and miscasting. In the very next scene, Matt Murdock (in his secret identity of a blind man) is cheerfully kung-fu fighting Elektra in a playground so he can get her number.
Unlike a lot of comic characters who don’t have a definitive story arc, making adaptations a morass of condensing and appraising characters and events from decades apart, everyone agrees on which Daredevil story arcs are the best. With Frank Miller’s famously cinematic storytelling, the work is half-done. All you’d have to do is find a director with the right sensibilities, lock him in a hotel room with a few TPBs, and you’d have a movie.
Hook has an awesome premise: Peter Pan has grown up. Hook is out for revenge. It’s just where the story goes with that that messes up. Robin Williams never manages to come across as a grown-up Peter Pan so much as, well, Robin Williams doing funny voices (appropriate for his characterization as a buttoned-down lawyer). What could be an elegant meditation on aging and family becomes mediocre family fare. What this really needs is the Spike Jonze treatment Where The Wild Things Are got, or an adaptation by Pixar. Instead, we got, well, bang-a-rang.
Another case of an awesome premise that dies a swift death. For those of you who don’t know, Professor Abraham Van Helsing is a character in Dracula who is both an accomplished scientist and an expert in vampire lore, turning that scientific knowledge against Dracula. Eventually, someone came up with doing a prequel explaining just how Van Helsing came about all that knowledge and what he did before his famous meeting with Dracula.
It’s an interesting, intriguing idea. Imagine Peter Cushing narrating a journal of his early days, his first meeting with the supernatural, his research into them, his destruction of that first menace. All that was summarily dismissed so that Stephen Sommers could make a movie about Gabriel Van Helsing, a fallen angel who works as a sort of supernatural enforcer for the Catholic Church. Not only does he face Mr. Hyde, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein, but he also kills Dracula… completely missing the point of doing a Van Helsing origin movie in the first place. The good thing here is that you don’t even have to do a remake, just a rip-off. Call it something cool like ‘Before Dracula’ or whatevs, cast some British character actor to play the young Van Helsing, and off ya go.
Breaking my own rule on adaptations, here you can see the gem of an idea in the movie itself. It’s just overwhelmed by poe-faced solemnity (if your movie features a small child spontaneously singing America The Beautiful, you’d better know damn well that you’re not sailing in narm waters) and a bladder-testing three-hour runtime, including a long interlude where our nameless hero recuperates from a gunshot wound in a snowed-in cabin with Olivia Williams (yes, they do fall in love, why do you ask?) while a bunch of other people do all the work of restoring the republic, a lengthy opening in which the Postman performs Shakespeare with his donkey and is drafted by the baddies, and finally a climactic final showdown in which Kevin Costner and Will Patton roll around in the dirt for a few minutes before Costner decides not to kill Patton, Patton goes for a gun, and someone off-screen shoots him.
The result has a lot of stuff, but not much of it is worth watching. Characters have subplots lasting a few minutes, then disappear. Tom Petty shows up playing a future version of himself. There’s a character named Ford Lincoln Mercury. An army of rapacious barbarians boo a screening of Universal Soldier but hunker down for The Sound of Music. It never quite decides whether it wants to be a fun B-movie or a solemn melodrama, and Kevin Costner having comedic sensibilities that are positively Teutonic doesn’t help.
Most importantly, the central story of a con man who comes to believe in his own con never really comes together. Costner finds a postman's uniform and letters, then starts delivering them to con himself some food and shelter, but before you know it he's a messianic figure that "hands out hope like it was candy in his pocket." That hope is accepted too readily and too easily, making you wonder why these hardened, post-apocalyptic survivors are all such suckers. Other characters have more interesting storylines, yet get shunted aside so the Postman can be appropriately mythic. Even the moment you’re waiting for, where the Postman has to finally admit or have it revealed that he’s a fraud… never really happens.
Oh, and no evil overlord should have a rule that anyone can challenge him for the window office at anytime. That’s just asking for trouble.
Cut it down, make the Postman more of an active participant, give him a name for God’s sake (most amusingly, at the end of the movie a statue is dedicated to the Postman by his loving daughter… and it doesn’t even have his name! It just calls him the Postman!). Get someone like Ryan Reynolds to give the Postman some charm, put in some more conflict of him trying to rein in the people who are taking his con and running with it (yet, at the same time wondering hey, what if?). Cut down on all the would-be Capra with some cynicism and snark… this is a story about a guy who lies to people about saving the world so he can get fed, for Christ’s sake! You could have a good movie with a good message that doesn’t need butt-anesthetic to watch.
Another case of a good premise that was then given to the director of Batman & Robin. Guess if it turned into a good movie. No, c’mon, guess.
All those who said yes, your parents have been contacted.
The premise is that a man steps into a phone booth and then is held hostage by a sniper who calls him on the booth’s phone, trapping him in the booth for the rest of the movie. So right away you can see two question in the premise.
A. Why is the sniper doing this?
B. How does the man escape?
Naturally, both questions are answered about as well as on Celebrity Jeopardy. Not the real thing, the SNL version. It turns out that the sniper is some kind of serial killer who targets dishonest men and forces them to tell the truth, for some damn reason. There’s no particular reason for the hero to be chosen.
And as for B, the police figure out what’s going on with unbelievable ease and shoot the sniper, but then (READ NO FURTHER IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED FOR THE AWESOME ENDING OF PHONE BOOTH!) it turns out he’s not really dead. Auteur. Auteur.
Now rebuild this from the ground up. Say, make it an espionage movie/conspiracy thriller. Frank steps into the phone booth, makes a call, then is about to leave when the phone rings. He picks it up. A voice on the other end says he’s been following Frank, he has a high-powered sniper rifle trained on him, and if Frank doesn’t tell him where the bomb is, he’s going to pull the trigger. Frank says he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. And carry on from there, with a proper ending this time. I’m not saying it would be a classic, but you could get a good Red Eye-quality thriller out of that.
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no subject
Date: 2009-06-18 07:03 pm (UTC)Also Hook... hook would be beautiful in a remake I enjoyed it as a kid but in a I like watching Robin Williams way not in a the plot matched acting and what it should have way.
To me the grown up Peter either needed to be a weary whimsy still rake of a man because peter is so classically played by women, or a far more hardened man that makes it darker. When you see that playful Peter has become say John Cusack it's a punch, a 'woah!' kind of moment you know? But we also know the actor can lighten up and be a bit more playful in a way you can see echoes of that child. *also willing to believe RDJ or Johnny Depp or maybe even call a newcomer in for the part but honestly my fancasting would have Cusack*
no subject
Date: 2009-06-18 07:34 pm (UTC)And then of course I loved the chemistry between Ben Afflick and Jenifer Gardner.
And I admit they were a few things that did to "hollywoodized" it, but I think that was fixed in the directors cut.