You are right. Another SHOULD have been Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
Total travesty. Took Wonka, who was protrayed by Wilder and turned him from a kind, eccentric, fun-loving candyman into Depp’s semi-psychotic, bi-polar, sadist. Not cool.
To Burton’s credit, what they screwed up with Wonka they did make up for with the kids and Charlie’s family.
But still, I don’t get the idea of remakes. Especially seeing how people only remake popular things. Why not remake movies that bombed and do them good? It’s like how they make movies out of books like “The Wild Things”. Is the movie industry so low on ideas that they have to adapt ten-page children’s books and plunder old ideas? If that’s the case, I’ll go and think up fifty or so possible things for them to use.
Esp. when they take a book (like Wild Things) that was intended to spur a child’s imagination and let them “fill in the blanks” and then try to DO IT FOR THEM, thereby negating the whole purpose of the book in the first place!
Ugh!
I think we ought to be able to disrupt movie studios on Talk Like A Pirate Day. (What better day to break out the bloody cutlass and put it to good use?)
Totally! Excellent idea! (Call in the MoH forces!)
The thing about adapting children’s books is that they have pretty simplistic plots with little conflict. As a result, stuff has got to be added. This does not always (in fact it rarely) ends well. An example of this is the adaptation of “We’re Back!”, which was a children’s book that was charming and funny and I loved as a kid. They made a movie out of it which was recently reviewed by the Nostalgia Critic. Case in point.
I mean, if they must adapt books and the like, it’s not like there’s a shortage of young adult novels or children’s books with actual conflict and plots. I mean, they’ve totally dropped any sequels for “The Golden Compass” and while follow-up for “A Series of Unfortunate Events” has been confirmed, it won’t be for awhile.
Mm.. I think the Chocolate Factory remake was pretty good except for Depp.. If you’d had Wilder’s Wonka instead of Depp’s, it would have been so awesome they’d need to put warning labels on it.
Often times it’s not ‘lack of ideas’ or ‘using a classic name to make more money’, or even ‘modernizing’, but rather ‘renewing copyright on an old franchise’. They have to protect their intellectual property, lest it fall into general usage. It’s kinda what happened a few years back with the Van Helsing movie. Did you notice that it had all the classic Universal Studios monsters in it (except the fishman, nobody loves him)?
But yes. I can think of very, very few instances wher the remake was better than the original, or even equal.
But yes. I can think of very, very few instances wher the remake was better than the original, or even equal.
LOTR and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe perhaps. But then, like Burton’s Willy Wonka, those were more of updated adaptations than actual remakes (they weren’t trying to redo the originals, just adapted the same material).
If they have to remake Yellow Submarine, they could at least have the decency to leave it to the British to handle!
With every start of a new century, people become nostalgic and tend to look back rather than ahead. Every turn of the century has had its technological revolution paired with some sort of renaissance. That, or the directors we ‘all know and love’ are going through a collective mid-life crisis.
