Amph The Movie Thread: "The Lorax" Revives Interest in an Animated "The Cat in the Hat"

Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes is widely perceived to be a flop. But of the 14 movies Burton has directed it's # 4 in terms of it's gross.
Alice in Wonderland, Batman and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are the three ahead of it.

Planet of the Apes made 362 million dollars world-wide in 2001. One can debate the quality of the movie, even Burton thinks it was a mistake to
try and do it, but it sold an awful lot of tickets.

Domestically, it was # 10 out of 100 releases for that year.

2001 Box Office

 

The same thing happened with Tintin except we were able to run 2 2D shows. But both had to be before 5pm. So it was meh.

 

What Ails Hollywood? Six Experts Weigh in

 

I read through all six experts and you know what? I basically remember reading the same kind of comments twenty years ago in a different context. What amuses me is that when the box office figures go slightly south, it's the end of the world. Oh no! The last two weeks of October were 1.4% less than last year! The industry is dying. No, it just means the movies that are out aren't of interest, but eventually there will be another batch that are.

People don't love movies "in general." So they don't go to movies "automatically." This may seem like an obvious statement but people love the movies they love.
Or are curious about. So of course box office figures go up and down. Any idiot can figure out why. It's similar to the reason game attendance goes up when a sports
team is winning. The team is on fire, everyone's interested. There's nothing wrong with the film industry that a single really great movie that strikes a nerve
with the public won't cure. That was true in 1947 and it's still true today.

I think, and Zaz and I are of one mind on this, I think that trailers are one of the many factors killing movie attendance. Half the trailers I see nowadays
tell me so much of the movie I could not care less about buying a ticket. And I'm hardly alone in that feeling.

 

The problem with the film industry is that no one knows how to watch a film anymore. The amount of people who talk in the theatre or are texting or whatever is astonishing. And then they turn around and ask why the product is inferior? Well, A: How can they pass judgement on something they were only half paying attention to and B: Why would any filmmaker be bothered putting any effort into anything that people are going to attend only so they can do something else altogether.

People are morons. That's the problem with movies these days.

 

Exactly. This is one of the reasons I almost never see a movie on a weekend. I tend to go to the latest showings on weeknights
or weekday matinees because there are far fewer people in the theatre to annoy me with talking, texting etc. When I go to a movie with
someone I always tell them prior to going into the theatre that if anyone near us talks or is especially annoying, I will be
getting up and moving to a different section of the theatre.

 

I try and judge whether or not the offender will have the capability to belt the living suitcase out of me. If not, I'll tell them off.

If it's behind me, I have to resort to the half and then full head-turns, which sometimes work.

 

The Virture of Ambitious Failure

 

I?ve always found that ambition is a vice that deserves to be encouraged, and I think I?ve always admired an ambitious failure over a cautious success.

couldn't agree more. so come on ambitious filmmakers, ambish!

 

Why No Film Should Be Considered Unremakable

I vehemently disagree.

 

it's interesting that most of the "good" remakes he references were retitled and more or less presented as new films, whereas most of the ones that are being made nowadays are using the same titles as the originals, specifically so that they can milk the power of the title in the popular consciousness. it's like an alternate way of making a sequel.

 

Filmmakers can try and do anything - already, Marky Mark's Italian Job is forgotten, and people think of the Michael Caine one when you talk of it.

Let them remake whatever they want - if the product is inferior, then the original will hold its stature. If the product is superior, then it can only be a good thing. If it's about sameish, then it's kinda a waste of time but it's interesting to see someone else's take on the same material. I personally would never, ever do it, but there are no "rules."

 

I agree with the linked article. Any film can and should be attempted. If it fails it fails. If it works, terrific! But deciding that a film "should not" be made based on the imaginary premise that the source material is somehow sacred or untouchable is a death to creative expression.

In short, a movie stands on its own merits. Forget whether it's a remake: Is it any good? That's what matters.

And I stand by the excellence of the 2011 The Thing. Also, it's not a re-make.

 

I think when we say films shouldn't be remade, we're generally talking about a specific remake that sounds doomed to failure. Like, you know, when they were going to remake Casablanca with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. I said at the time that such a thing shouldn't happen; I stand by that. Now, if could imagine the creative team that might do something interesting with Casablanca, but Bennifer was not that team.

 

Sure, and I said the same thing about Clash of the Titans. I know a stinker when I sniff one out. The capitalistic timing, the gung-ho attitude of the producers, the 300-meets-the-Mummy aesthetic that I could sense in the early interviews, all of this led me to oppose that particular re-make with, as Nevermind might say, ardent vehemence.

But this across-the-board opinion that re-makes are always a bad idea quashes the creative urge. 20 years from now I hope someone gets the notion to re-make the LOTR films to be truer to the books, for example.

As Roger Ebert has said in a way I've been trying to put into words for several years, movies are not about what they're about, they're about how they are about it. If a story, any story, is worth telling again with a new vision or a fresh approach, perhaps offering some new insight into the material that arises from the mere process of existing through the intervening years, I say bring it on.

 

ive become a big fan of the remake in the last five years. and ive come to realize that the film industry has been remaking films either outright or subtly since the very beginning, and all media has been redundant in some fashion since we started talking lol. regardless of personal feelings on the matter, does anyone really think Star Wars isnt getting remade?

 

When I first glanced at the title of this thread, I thought it said, "Why No Film Should be Considered Unremarkable."

I have only made some small scale videos and commercials and so forth, but I'll tell you what, it's remarkable anything ever gets completed. Considering how much can go wrong, and how much infighting there is, when anything decent gets released, I'm always astounded. Even average films, I sit back in amazement and go, wow, another one that wasn't a train wreck. I wonder how that one slipped through?

Filmmaking is incredibly hard work.

 

Theyre close in quality. Lots of remakes are. The idea that the original rendition of a film is the best just because its the first i think has been proven, i believe, to be a falsehood. " The Horror Of Dracula ", The Thing, King Kong 06, Cape Fear, The Thomas Crown Affair, War Of The Worlds are good examples of where you can make a legitamite argument for the remake. Im sure theres others. The horror film genre.

 

In addition to the above list:

Casino Royale. The Lord of the Rings. Battlestar Galactica. The Fly. Nosferatu. Scarface. The Ten Commandments. Ben-Hur. Dracula. Frankenstein. The Wizard of Oz!

All remakes, all arguably superior to the originals.

 

I don't think I've heard anyone even mention that recent turd at all in the last three or four years, but people will always chuck a "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" in their Michael Caine impersonations. Or at least, most people seem to know where it's from. People will also bring up the ending, I've found.

As for the other films being touted as great remakes, more than half of them are re-adaptations, going back to the source material. No one can seriously call Campbell's Casino Royale a "remake" of the Huston/Guest/Hughes/McGrath/Parrish... thing. A true remake is when a second film is based on the script of the original, everything else is just a new adaptation, and hardly taboo.

 

I tend to agree, but the back-the-source-material "re-adaptations", like Carpenter's The Thing, nonetheless get grouped into the remake category right alongside the genuine remakes. The wikipedia page I trawled for re-makes is rife with them, as is every major media article ever published on the subject.

 

Of course, but I think it's a common misconception.

By the same tokens, some of these re-adaptations are what you would call remakes. Carpenter went back to the script of the Hawks film, didn't he? At any rate, the main title appears in the same fashion, I think. Could be wrong, since I haven't seen the original, that's just what I heard. If the new film throws back deliberately to a previou version in any way to any great extent then I think you could call that a remake, sure.

But Joe Wright's Pride and Prejudice isn't a remake of Robert Z. Leonard's Pride and Prejudice. That's the arguement I'd make.

 

[I meant to write "back-to-the-source-material 're-adaptations'..."]

It's a thorny and complex question most people solve by naming any revisitation to earlier produced material a "remake".

The similarities of Carpenter's 1982 film begin and end with the title card. Carpenter chose to do the title like that because it looks freaking awesome, and that title is better than the short story on which he based the film, "Who Goes There?" No character, setting, line of dialogue, nature of the antagonist or underlying theme is repeated from the 1951 to the 1982. Only the core idea -- that a group of people in a snowed-in facility are harangued by an alien -- is preserved. The 1982 easily meets your criteria for a re-adaptation: "going back to the source material", in the same way Wright's Pride and Prejudice does.

 

I hear what youse are saying about J.C.'s version and it is a very different film but he takes alot from the original. The Artic, the motley medley of scientists, military, and maintenance, the dogs, and most importantly the story's science fiction pedigree with regards to how the alien uses terrestrial blood. Thats where Carpenter really goes wild with his imagination, makes his twists, and creates his own classic version.