Remakes and originals

Steve_Ch · 06-15-2003, 03:10 PM

This just occured to me, I wonder what everybody think of the idea of packaging the original and remake together as one single package (I assume there will be some legal probelms, but just for argument..)? Personally, I do not watch remakes, but I do understand there had been some decent ones over the last few years, say, Ocean 11, Sabrina, Itlalian Job..

John Watson · 06-15-2003, 03:17 PM

Like you say, legalities may be overwhelming.

I'm not keen on many remakes I'm aware of, but I like to compare sometimes, think I have 4 different Draculas, as many Phantoms of the Opera.

And Disney's BEAUTY AND BEAST sits beside my Criterion Cocteau B&B

Patrick McCart · 06-15-2003, 03:20 PM

The question is...

Who will buy a 2-disc package with the original Casablanca and the J. Lo-Ben Affleck remake?

Dave Mack · 06-15-2003, 04:47 PM

I would NEVER buy the new "The Haunting"...

The original.... Can't wait!

DeeF · 06-15-2003, 04:56 PM

Of course, somebody has thought of this.

The Truth About Charlie and
Charade

came in one package. Presumably, everybody watched Charade first, and then put the box on the shelf.

I ended up buying it, even though I already had the Criterion version of Charade with the best commentary ever recorded on it, that of Peter Stone and Stanley Donen.

I was hoping the Charade version on the newer disk would be a better transfer (it was anamorphic).

It turned out to be a mistake. So, now I have two Charades.

I still haven't watched the other movie, though.

**HTF Ads**

Patrick McCart · 06-15-2003, 09:36 PM

Quote:

I would NEVER buy the new "The Haunting"...

WHAT? You mean it's not worth watching just for the BASS?

Dan Rudolph · 06-16-2003, 03:40 AM

Meet Joe Black Ultimate Edition is like this as well. And if you want to get a little looser with your definitions, the I Love Lucy sets have the radio shows that many episodes were based on.

And Steve, why won't you watch remakes? You're depriving yourself of many great movies that way. Notably Ben Hur, The Magnificent Seven the tv show All in the Family and depending on your definition, perhaps the Lord of the Rings series. While a lot of remakes are crap, so are a lot of original movies. No sense scrapping them all.

Patrick McCart · 06-16-2003, 03:53 AM

Quote:

And Steve, why won't you watch remakes? You're depriving yourself of many great movies that way. Notably Ben Hur, The Magnificent Seven the tv show All in the Family and dependign on your definition, perhaps the Lord of the Rings series. While a lot of remakes are crap, so are a lot of original movies. No sense scrapping them all.

Good point.

Great films such as The Maltese Falcon, Young Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Airplane!, Phantom of the Opera (1943), and even The Adventures of Robin Hood are all remakes.

Some could argue Citizen Kane is a remake of The Power and the Glory, too.

Steve_Ch · 06-16-2003, 04:24 AM

>>And Steve, why won't you watch remakes?<<

This, in some ways, is the heart of the thread. Remakes are a bit tricky, as being an older person, some movies are almost "sacred", like Psycho, Hepburn and Bogart and Holden in Sabrina, Noel Coward and young Michael Caine and the sexy Mini Coopers of the Italian Job, a fresh and handsome Alain Delon in Purple Noon, Hepburn and Grant in Charade..Some of the remakes, such as the new Sabrina, Italina Job, Talented Mr Ripley, are supposedly really fine movies, and the new Ocean Eleven could well be much better than the original. I do not watch these films because I will watch them with great prejudice and just mentally comparing them with the original the whole way.
Now, I did watch some remakes and thought they were great, but inevitably, they were all movies that I did NOT know they were remakes. I watched Heston's Ben Hur around 1960, I was young and have no idea it was a remake, ditto with Cleopetra. I really enjoyed Against All Odds, but if I knew before hand it was a remake of Out of the Past, I probably will skip it, ditto with Paul Sharder's Cat People. Now, with Ben Hur and Cleopetra, they might as well be the "original", as far as I am concerned, as they were the first version Isaw, with total ignorance of the real original. With Against All Odds and Cat People, it's a little different, as both directors are reluctant to call the respective movies remakes, because they changed the whole thing so much.

DeborahK · 06-16-2003, 05:50 PM

I am categorically against one kind of remakes -- those of fine foreign films that simply get remade with American casts, usually including some Big Name Stars. There are so many writers/creators out there with new ideas they are trying to get made that grabbing something that has already been recently and successfully produced in another market and language seems like a total cheat to me.

But there are many reasons why the remaking of certain stories (such as the Dracula story and the Phantom of the Opera story mentioned above) can be very interesting as they are often totally different kinds of films,with completely different agendas and points of view that are simply hung on the bare story outline from an earlier "original." The 1940s Phantom, for example, is a completely different kind of movie than the one from the 1920s and both can stand quite successfully on their own. The same can be said for the Dracula films. I think a remake of a film that tries to explore a classic tale and add new understandings or interpretations is a very valid endeavor and collecting different versions of certain stories can be an incredibily interesting and worth while thing to do.

Deborah