February 18th, 2008
12. I Think I Love My Wife (2007)
On its face, Chris Rock's unexpected remake of Eric Rohmer's Chloe In The Afternoon—the last of Rohmer's Six Moral Tales—could hardly seem more incongruous. What could the popular comedian and sometime filmmaker possibly have in common with a French New Wave stalwart known for his talky dissections of bourgeois relationships? And how might the sentiments of an early-'70s arthouse picture be reconfigured for today's American mainstream audiences? Unsurprisingly, the two films have virtually nothing in common on the surface, but co-writer/director/star Rock stays faithful to the spirit of Rohmer's original, grappling honestly with the uncertainties of settling down and the temptations that lurk outside even the most stable marriages. Rock has been doing stand-up bits for years about a man's responsibilities to his wife and family, and that moral streak finds some traction in Rohmer's basic story about a monogamous professional whose extramarital daydreams turn into real-life temptation. As for that bizarre, desperately unfunny 10-minute interlude about Viagra, that's where the two part company.
13. Ocean's Eleven (2001)
Both the 1960 Ocean's Eleven and the 2001 version are predicated on the idea that if the moviegoing public queues up to see stars, they'll come in droves to see lots of stars—particularly if those stars are stuck in a low-stakes Vegas heist plot and allowed to relax and be themselves. The difference is that in the 2001 Ocean's Eleven, the plot is tighter and twistier, the stars are more self-aware, and there's a strong director in charge. Steven Soderbergh helms a stylish, snappy neo-Rat Pack movie that out-heps the ultimate hepcats, playing off the memory of the swingin' '60s rather than the often-dreary reality. The 2001 Ocean's Eleven merely doffs its cap respectfully toward the original, then shows how to make a cast of Hollywood heavyweights entertaining, not just attractive.
14. The Manchurian Candidate (2004)
Remakes of well-established classics may seem like a fool's game, but director Jonathan Demme did two of them in a row: The Truth About Charlie, a French New Wave-inspired reworking of the Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn trifle Charade, and a post-Cold War makeover of the definitive 1962 Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate. The former, though graced by a radiant Thandie Newton and an affectionate running homage to French cinema and culture, collapsed into a confusing muddle around a listless lead performance by Mark Wahlberg. But Demme's take on The Manchurian Candidate is a lesson on how to honor the original film while rethinking and revitalizing it for a changed world. With the Gulf War standing in for Korea—and Meryl Streep as a more-than-capable replacement for the wonderfully insidious Angela Lansbury—the film uses the pulpy brainwashing premise as a metaphorical indictment of corporate culture and its overwhelming influence in American politics.
15. Sleuth (2007)
Anthony Shaffer's play Sleuth has never made much sense as a movie, relying as it does on a second-act switcheroo that requires a fall of the curtain and the sort of imaginative leap that's easier to make onstage than onscreen. Though still a dated treatment of male gamesmanship and sexual tension, the 1972 version, adapted by Shaffer himself, at least functions as gadget-crazed entertainment, with seasoned thespians Michael Caine and Laurence Olivier going mano-a-mano. Kenneth Branagh's disastrous remake must have seemed like a good idea at the time, with Caine returning in the Olivier role and Harold Pinter (who claimed never to have experienced Shaffer's play in any form) penning the relentlessly streamlined script. But Branagh's laughably baroque experiment sucks all the fun out of the original, needlessly dressing up the proceedings with surveillance cameras, a silly modernist set, and self-parodic Pinter dialogue that requires the actors to. Talk. Like. This.
16. The Fly (1986)
The 1958 film The Fly didn't veer too far from the George Langelaan short story published in Playboy just a year before. Vincent Price plays the brother of a scientist whose teleportation experiments go terribly awry when a housefly crawls into the booth with him, leaving him with a fly's head and a human body. In David Cronenberg's remake, Jeff Goldblum steps into the scientist role, making the same mistake, but emerging from his teleportation chamber seemingly intact. Except he isn't. Goldblum spends the rest of the film shedding his humanity as both body and mind become a hybrid of human and insect. Cronenberg depicts the process with all the gore that films like Scanners and Videodrome had led audiences to expect, while never losing sight of the story's connection to more commonplace disintegrations. Goldblum's transformation is the stuff of science fiction, but it can effectively stand in for any kind of unpleasant change, from mental breakdowns to crumbling relationships. It's just a bit stickier.
17. Living It Up (1954)
The 1937 screwball comedy Nothing Sacred offers a savagely cynical indictment of human nature, channeled through the story of a young woman who becomes the toast of New York—and a marketing gimmick for newspapermen—due to her courageous struggle with a fatal illness that she doesn't actually have. In the 1954 remake Living It Up, the faker is played by Jerry Lewis, and his doctor, Dean Martin, becomes a major character in the story, for no other reason than the fact that it was 1954, and you couldn't get Lewis without Martin. The acid misanthropy of the original is also drained away, replaced by high-spirited hijinks and musical numbers. Lying and swindling and exploiting no longer reflects the sorry state of the world we live in; it's fun fun fun!
18. The Heartbreak Kid (2007)
The Elaine May-directed The Heartbreak Kid, with Charles Grodin and Cybill Shepherd, could be called the ultimate anti-romantic comedy, a vicious dissection of love and marriage (and Jews and Gentiles) in which people treat each other with astonishing cruelty. Under May's watch, the loaded premise of newlywed Grodin abandoning his wife for an alluring blonde shiksa (Shepherd) on their honeymoon is contained by a consistently dark, controlled, provocative tone. Remaking the film would be a dubious proposition under the best of circumstances, but the crude-but-sweet formula perfected by gross-out auteurs the Farrelly brothers (There's Something About Mary) proves especially ill-suited for the occasion. Gone from their 2007 version is May's potent Jew/WASP angle, and they add a number of disposable characters and subplots on the periphery, including Carlos Mencia as a mustachioed Mexican yahoo named Uncle Tito. Yet somehow the Farrellys' version is even crueler than the original, because the abuses aren't relieved by any redemptive insight into what commitment means, or why good people hurt each other.
19. Rollerball (2002)
The 1975 action-drama Rollerball, directed by Norman Jewison and written by William Harrison, isn't exactly a masterpiece, but the striking design and futuristic setting give a sense of style and class to the heavy-handed commentary on corporate greed and the public's thirst for violence. The John McTiernan-directed 2002 version doesn't just lose the style and class, it loses much of the commentary. Now set in the present rather than the future, the 2002 Rollerball still casts corporate suits as the bad guys, and still revolves around a made-up sport that combines roller derby with rugby. But where the sports action in 1975 was meant to make the audience cringe, the 2002 version is all about thrills, and stoking the crowd's bloodlust, non-ironically.
20. Twelve Monkeys (1995)
It's basically an inescapable fact of life that anyone turning a low-budget black-and-white 1962 French experimental short into a full-length color American movie is inevitably going to change the tone and the content a wee bit. And that's without getting into the fact that Chris Marker's La Jetée is composed almost entirely of lingering still-frames, which fade slowly in and out under a narration, while the 1995 version is a full-motion film. But add in the fact that Terry Gilliam directed the 1995 version, and it's a wonder that they're even recognizable as the same story.
21. Little Shop Of Horrors (1986)
Like Hairspray and The Producers, Little Shop Of Horrors passed through Broadway before making it back to the big screen, which accounts for most of the alterations in tone and plot. Suddenly, Roger Corman's weird little black-and-white 1960s horror-comedy about a hapless schlemiel with a man-eating plant became a big, colorful, campy musical, with music and lyrics by Ashman and Menken, of later Little Mermaid fame. Broadway added the songs and the camp, and a bigger budget and a later date added the vivid color. But the removal of the Corman film's wry, downer ending came much later in the process: Frank Oz's 1986 version originally ended with the leads eaten by the killer plant, which went on to take over Manhattan, but poor test screenings led Oz to swap that ending for one in which the stars lived happily ever after, and the plant didn't.
22. The Wiz (1978)
Any aspiration toward making Sidney Lumet's The Wiz into a faithful adaptation of either the hit stage play or L. Frank Baum's Oz stories flew out the window the moment 33-year-old Diana Ross was cast in a role made famous by teenager Stephanie Ross. The project swung even further off track when New York-loving auteur Lumet decided the film should take place in a rotten, sickly nightmare version of the Big Apple rather than Oz. Just about the only thing The Wiz has in common with the legendary 1939 film also adapted from Baum's kiddie classics is a wiggy, bad-acid-trip vibe and a genius for traumatizing children with creepy psychedelic imagery.
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