Hollywood Remakes
A couple of weeks back I returned home from an exhausting session at the gym to enjoy some junk food in front of the television, where I normally display the attention span of a gnat and watch whatever channel for half a minute before clicking to the next. Now, I stopped in my tracks for the remake of the Italian Job which was about to start, mouth moist with expectation.

Jebus.

I mean, why? Seriously, why?

The original Italian Job rewards with charm, uniquely British humour and of course the various cars in all their roles, from the utterly fabulous Lamborghini Miura being given some stick while Matt Munroe croons away, to the plucky little Minis being chased by Alfa Romeo Carabinieri around the landmarks of Turin. Yep, it was a showcase of British talent and an opportunity for British Leyland to thumb it's nose at the Italian car industry (oh, how ironic now), but we still loved it.

So why would the remake be a fetid bucket of donkeywank? Well for starters, it's got as much charm as Norman Tebbit. Gone is Matt Munroe and in it's place is an irritating techno rock soundtrack - the one played to death by Sara Cox a few years back, which punctuates every single notable event in the film. By the time the first Mini appears, you want to slap the television. Then there's the frustrating techno plot that meanders for ages without getting anywhere. You simply want to watch Minis being thrashed around a picturesque Italian city, but instead you're given multitudes of technobabble about hacking computers and breaking safes. Grr...

Of course, the New Italian Job must have something going for it and indeed it does. Donald Sutherland, the sole member of the cast with more than an ounce of mischievous charm. However, he's killed in the first fifteen minutes and replaced by the pretty but unengaging Charlize Theron.

Had I paid to have seen this utter tosh in a cinema I'd have left in disgust halfway through. So I'm left wondering how many Hollywood remakes are any good second time around? Let's have a quick shufty through the statistics shall we?


The Poseidon Adventure
Alfie
Get Carter
Wings of Desire / City of Angels
Bedazzled
Godzilla
The Manchurian Candidate
The Omen
Planet of the Apes

It's not all bad, after all we have Ocean's Eleven and a few films you probably didn't realise were remakes like A Fistful of Dollars, Never Say Never Again, Payback and Meet Joe Black. However, the odds are stacked against the forthcoming remakes of Barbarella, The Birds and even the original Star Trek currently in the works.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Tue 22 Jul 2008, 12:21, 9 replies)

Ooh
You forgot to add the Day the Earth Stood Still remake due out at the end of this year.

That looks like a bag of wank too.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 12:28, closed)

Get Carter 2000

The remake of Get Carter has to be the biggest pile of horse shit ever, I think I lasted about 20 minutes before the DVD was ejected and tossed in the bin.
( Stu71 ....bad money dies, I love the scene, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 12:43, closed)

And...
The Wicker Man. The original is fantastic, but I can't bring myself to watch the Nicolas Cage remake...
( Devil_In_Tights the *real* DiT!, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 12:59, closed)

I enjoyed both
La Femme Nikita and Assassin (I think I've got both film names right) but neither are hugely well known, although there is a TV series now as a spin off, but Assassin did bring Nina Simone tracks to a greater audience.
( chickenlady b3ta's very own Elizabeth Taylor, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 13:27, closed)

Hollywood remake doesn't always spell death
What matters is if it's a film being remade because a studio thinks it will make money or if a director really wants to make this film because they love it. Star Trek has the potential to be pretty good because Lost blokey what is directing it is a big fan of the series.
(Bazongaloid, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 14:48, closed)

Follow ups can be OK
But re-makes are a waste of time and money. Why re-make the 'Flight of the Phoenix' for example?? How could you better the original?

Next they'll re-do 'Ice cold in Alex' with Hugh Grant as the John Mills character, oh, and he won't be an alcoholic, and it'll be in Iraq, still, Omid Djalili could be the guy who pretended to be South Africa...that could be good. D'oh! I see how it gets done now.

Too much cocaine in Hollywood.
(Che Grimsdale Best before:, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 14:58, closed)

Some remakes can work
There has to be genuine affection for the original and it has to bring something new. The point about Flight of the Phoenix is very valid, the remake brings nothing new to the table.

We've got the remake of the Dam Busters coming up, which is perfectly ripe for soemthing enw to come out of the story, perhaps a more human retelling of a story so entrenched in modern British folklore - provided of course, Guy Gibson doesn't become Mel Gibson.
(Bicycle Repairman "you're also a bit of a wanker", Tue 22 Jul 2008, 15:09, closed)

Remakes are doomed from the start
Remakes are usually the idea of an accountant. This is because the accountant looks at a popular film, and decides that because they own the rights, it's going to be cheap to remake.

The problem then ends up in the lap of the director stupid enough to take it on, because he somehow has to make a film which is better than the one that we've all come to know and love, but doesn't repeat anything from the original film, because, for example, if you do a shot-by-shot remake, everybody thinks why bother buying/seeing it when it's practically the original?

So out comes the radical new "re-imagining" and everybody hates it, because it's missing everything they loved about it in the first place.

Clickage
( Stevedix http://www.stevedix.de/blog, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 15:50, closed)

..
Its not only old classics -also successful but "foreign" films like Taxi or The Ring.

Americans get treated like theyre a different species or something..
(Hikikomori** watching cartoons on, Tue 22 Jul 2008, 18:36, closed)