Ernest Rister
Senior HTF Member
- Joined
- Oct 26, 2001
- Messages
- 4,148
Remake is the wrong word...Re-Do. Fix. Try again. Impossible in almost all cases, but sometimes you watch a movie that has a great premise, and captures one or two elements incredibly well, but then, something goes wrong...a bad bit of casting, a poorly-written scene, a misjudged bit of direction, truly rotten visual f/x, a bad score, etc. Walking out of the movie, you feel a sense of ennui. It should have been better. It danced close to greatness, then tripped and fell into the punch bowl. If only they had another shot at fixing the bad choices that hurt the film. If only they could take a mulligan.
List your choices for Cinematic Mulligans. Here's mine:
1. Hook (a great idea, a great score, and a few good performances completely flushed down the drain)
2. The Final Conflict (for two movies prior, we're told how terrible it will be when evil Damien Thorne comes to power. We're read some verses from the Bible and we hear creepy poems and we see paintings that predict what the anti-christ will look like. We constantly hear about the horror Damien will unleash on the world, and in this film, we're told Damien and Christ will do battle mano-a-mano. Well, none of that happens. Damien Thorne isn't scary in the slightest, there is no world-consuming battle, Christ and Damien never get to rumble, and we wonder what all the fuss was about.)
3. The Abyss (we've spoken about this at length on the board already - sadly, its a few re-writes short of being a great film)
4. The Godfather Part III (if you watch the original opening scene - which you'll find on the Bonus Disc of the Godfather Box Set - the whole film snaps into place beautifully. We see that Michael is lying to his daughter from the outset, that the fund he has created in her name is really a money-laundering front to pay off corrupt Vatican officials. We see that Michael hasn't changed, and the end of the film becomes even more tragic. Coppola - in a move that baffles me to this day - slashed the opening because he says he wanted Michael to be more likable. By doing so, he also cut the drama out of the 1st act, and the full dimension of the tragedy in the third. Next time you feel like watching Godfather III, watch the abandoned opening scene on disc five, then start the film. You may be surprised at how much better the overall experience is even though some of the footage reappears later in the film).
5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the Disney animated film is amazing...right up until the moment the gargoyles start talking and making fart jokes...a colossal misjudgement, marring what is otherwise a great achievement in modern character animation. Same goes for the dumb comedy of Terk in Tarzan, another great movie injured by "kiddie" humour)
List your choices for Cinematic Mulligans. Here's mine:
1. Hook (a great idea, a great score, and a few good performances completely flushed down the drain)
2. The Final Conflict (for two movies prior, we're told how terrible it will be when evil Damien Thorne comes to power. We're read some verses from the Bible and we hear creepy poems and we see paintings that predict what the anti-christ will look like. We constantly hear about the horror Damien will unleash on the world, and in this film, we're told Damien and Christ will do battle mano-a-mano. Well, none of that happens. Damien Thorne isn't scary in the slightest, there is no world-consuming battle, Christ and Damien never get to rumble, and we wonder what all the fuss was about.)
3. The Abyss (we've spoken about this at length on the board already - sadly, its a few re-writes short of being a great film)
4. The Godfather Part III (if you watch the original opening scene - which you'll find on the Bonus Disc of the Godfather Box Set - the whole film snaps into place beautifully. We see that Michael is lying to his daughter from the outset, that the fund he has created in her name is really a money-laundering front to pay off corrupt Vatican officials. We see that Michael hasn't changed, and the end of the film becomes even more tragic. Coppola - in a move that baffles me to this day - slashed the opening because he says he wanted Michael to be more likable. By doing so, he also cut the drama out of the 1st act, and the full dimension of the tragedy in the third. Next time you feel like watching Godfather III, watch the abandoned opening scene on disc five, then start the film. You may be surprised at how much better the overall experience is even though some of the footage reappears later in the film).
5. The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the Disney animated film is amazing...right up until the moment the gargoyles start talking and making fart jokes...a colossal misjudgement, marring what is otherwise a great achievement in modern character animation. Same goes for the dumb comedy of Terk in Tarzan, another great movie injured by "kiddie" humour)