Movies That Should Have Been Epic

[Cyberman]

The NostalgiaCritic did a surgical dissection on The Langoliers which is, as with so many of his reviews, far better than the film itself.

As for the subject at hand, I don't know whether to nominate the unnecessary remakes - or butchering - of The Ladykillers and The Wicker Man. The reason for my dithering is that they were so deeply flawed and misguided there was no way to rescue them. There was certainly no way they could aspire to the classic status of the originals which I would take over the remakes any day (or in the case of The Wicker Man, the non-theatrical uncut verion).

[The Grand Nudger]

Two good ones right thur....

[Cyberman]

I'm just wondering if the new Total Recall will end up on this list.

[Gambit]

I have nothing against remakes; what I do hate, however, is when they try to separate it so much from the original that they lose the whole thing. What's worse is when they do that, and then don't even bother to make a good (Far removed) movie. Dawn of the Dead was OK, as remakes go, but it was nowhere near as good as the original. The Wicker Man remake was complete shite, as was the remake of Fright Night, Precinct 13 and Planet of the Apes. However, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was an absolutely amazing movie.

[Cyberman]

I do agree, to an extent, bearing in mind the qualifier 'unnecesssary'. For example, A Fistful of Dollars is almost literally a shot-for-shot remake of the Kurosawa original and has become a classic in its own right.

[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Scifi channel makes some appallingly bad shit,but some of its series are very good.

I recently had the misfortune of trying to watch a stinker called "Doomsday Prophecy" .

[Angrboda]

I have nothing against remakes; what I do hate, however, is when they try to separate it so much from the original that they lose the whole thing. What's worse is when they do that, and then don't even bother to make a good (Far removed) movie. Dawn of the Dead was OK, as remakes go, but it was nowhere near as good as the original. The Wicker Man remake was complete shite, as was the remake of Fright Night, Precinct 13 and Planet of the Apes. However, Rise of the Planet of the Apes was an absolutely amazing movie.

What I hate is remakes that neither differ from, nor improve upon, the original. I still watch the American remake of Ringu, but after receiving the anthology for Christmas, and realizing that the American remake and the original are essentially the same movie, I was quite disappointed. (And while many of the original series aren't great movies, the whole story arc is fun to watch. Given what I've heard about the book, neither Ringu nor The Ring delivered on the promise of the book. FWIW, The Ring 2, imo, is awful.)

Along the same lines, I've got the American remake of Ju-On 2 handy. I'm not expecting much. The original Ju-On 2 theatrical release, imho, was a stinker. But I love Amber Tamblyn, so I'll force myself.


And I'm terribly hesitant about watching the Korean remake of A Better Tomorrow. I adored the original and am a big Chow Yun-Fat fan. I just have this feeling it will stink.

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Oh, and the Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum. Neither had the energy nor the human element of Identity, essentially turning Jason Bourne into a comic book hero.

Though I am looking forward to seeing Bourne Legacy. (I haven't read any reviews, so please, no spoilers.)

[Cyberman]

On the subject of Ringu: wanna see something really scary?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abegO5oyUZM?rel=0

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In case you've never heard of Pingu, all you need to know is it is "a British-Swiss stop-motion claymated television series created by Otmar Gutmann. The series was produced by The Pygos Group and Trickfilmstudio for Swiss television, and centres on a family of anthropomorphic penguins living at the South Pole. The main character is the family's son and title character, Pingu."



Every time I see the word Ringu, my brain insists on telling to read it as Pingu. To be honest, Pingu is scary enough on its own without being turned into a horror film.

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[Oldandeasilyconfused]

Jason Bourne? The timeline(in the books) confused the hell out of me. I think he would now be about 95.

The movies are not a patch on the books

I wish somebody would start making decent film adaptions of Eric Von Lustbader's stuff.

[Rev. Rye]

Well, there's three examples that come to mind for me, each one based on one of my favourite books.
1) The Killer Inside Me.
I read the book a couple years ago, and I loved it. To me, there's nothing so interesting as looking through the eyes of a man with no morals. So, you can imagine that when Michael Winterbottom was going to direct the movie based on this film, I was psyched. Alas, Winterbottom committed the one unforgivable artistic sin: this film is fucking boring. The sad thing is that a few years back, there was a report of a screenplay by the director of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford starring Leonardo diCaprio and Drew Barrymore, and I can't see how that would have been anything but awesome.

2) Lonelyhearts
This is a film based on one of my favourite books (Nathanael West's "Miss Lonelyhearts"), starring one of my favourite actors of the 1950s (Montgomery Clift.) How do you screw that up? Easy. By completely removing anything that made Nathanael West's novel feel like Nathanael West. I'm not sure whether or not Hollywood would dare to film an actually faithful adaptation of the story, especially in 1958, but I do know one thing: The man who produced the anti-racist classic Bad Day at Black Rock was probably not the right guy to bring a novel about the basic moral bankruptcy of 20th Century America to the screen. This film is not available on DVD, even in an archive collection.

3) The Brothers Karamazov
How did they make a movie based on The Brothers Karamazov? Easy: by stripping away everything that didn't have to do with the story of Dmitri Karamazov. The fact that the movie seems to have clearly been filmed in a set for an old western village really makes it seem like the filmmakers don't care. Especially when contrasted with the 1956 adaptation of War and Peace and the adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that the film's director helmed in the same year.