Yes, but I’m enough of a naive optimist that I think remakes at least have the potential to be great films in their own right.
I’m sure there are others but off the top of my head the only example I can think of at the moment is the version of The Wizard of Oz we all know and love. While not technically a remake it wasn’t the first film of Baum’s book either.
I had a hard time getting invested in the New Ghostbusters drama because of this, it felt like a soulless marketing gimmick, and a lot of the controversy felt manufactured.
I also have a hard time seeing “fill it with chicks!” As some sort of progressive Hollywood policy.
Further, I don’t like risking be called sexist because I didn’t like it, just because there was some manufactured social issues surrounding it.
I didn’t like it. The jokes weren’t funny to me. The cast often lacked chemistry. And the FX were just more cheap cg,where they had a chance to throw back to the masterwork effects of the fist movie.
Didn’t hate it, but also wouldn’t buy it in the dollar bin at Target.
Ocean's Eleven movie review & film summary (2001) | Roger Ebert --just three stars
My Dinner with Andre movie review (1981) | Roger Ebert --four stars.
Yup. Funny how that works, isn’t it? Good thing we don’t all have to like the same movies. Contrary to many of our fellow mutants, I loved the 60’s Rat Pack version of Ocean’s Eleven and hated the remake.
I don’t dislike Natalie Portman, but I admit I went “ew” when I saw that. I just don’t think fantasy-science movies are her jam. She was practically a cardboard cutout for the Thor movies.
Yeah, there is that.
I just am skeptical that they can make that a big-name-star Hollywood film as it’s written. It’s going to be more jump-scares and CHUD.
I haven’t seen the remake yet. I really have no desire to. The Ratpack version is not a great film by any means but it is inventive and a lot of fun to watch. It is hard to top Dean Martin singing A Kick In The Head with Red Norvo backing him up.
Y’know, I want to say something else about the marketing for Ghostbusters. I totally wanted to go see the movie. I was fully prepared to enjoy it (for my crush on Kate McKinnon if nothing else, I was basically sold the minute I saw her Real Ghostbusters Egon 'do). But sitting in the theater waiting for it to start, I was almost hating the movie before it began.
Why? The previews.
Previews are a good indication of who they expect to be the audience for that movie. And what did we get before Ghostbusters? Rogue One/Star Trek Beyond? 80’s-nostalgia like Ready Player One (which to be fair I don’t think there IS a trailer for that yet)? Action-comedies?
Nope. The trailers I saw were:
I felt insulted. It was like “Hey this movie is for ladies! These are also things ladies like!”
Edit: Okay the last one was “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk”. IMDB makes it look better than the trailer did, for sure.
EDIT AGAIN: I forgot this one, because it was SO SO BAD, but we also got a trailer for the Troll Doll movie.
Don’t even get me started on this one.
I have faith in Alex Garland, though. The Beach aside (actually, scratch that perhaps, he only wrote the book, not the screenplay).
Especially since it’s actually Bridget Jones’s Baby which made my eye twitch uncontrollably. Is it British English to put the extraneous s on there?!
Did you ever see Jennifer’s Body? It was a great movie, very funny and clever. But it got marketed via the sex appeal of Megan Fox, as opposed to the actually premise of the film, which is about toxic relationships between young women and the role that sexual violence can play in that. If I’m remembering correctly, the other actress starring, Amanda Seyfried, barely made it into the promos. I mean, look at this!
It’s a shame that they feel as if they have to market films in this way instead of acknowledging that different audiences might enjoy different things about a film. Or that they think men won’t watch a movie with women starring unless they are sexed up.
Set it somewhere other than the US.
I think that if you’d pronounce it “Bridget Joneses Baby”, you’d have “s’s”. If you’d say “Bridget Jones Baby”, you’d have “s’”.
With personal names that end in -s: add an apostrophe plus s when you would naturally pronounce an extra s if you said the word out loud:
After perusing the internets it seems that both versions are more or less equally taught, so I withdraw that objection. I was taught never to add a second S to make a possessive.
Me too, and I still think it looks ugly.
But I was looking this up the other day for some reason and came to the same conclusion as you.
So people calling Leslie Jones “an ape” on twitter was “manufactured”?
I didn’t say “all”, you always have the toxic background radiation is sexist/racist mouth breathers.
They will be there, especially when big media plays “up the controversy”, they force more of these asshats out of the cultural dung heap.
But it’s not a “real problem” in your opinion, despite the very real racism and sexism aimed at Jones (who is a real person, of course)? At what point does it become “real” to you? At what point is it okay to call out such thing as legitimate problems in our society that impacts a large segment of our society? What’s the line, in your view? It’s no longer feminism or anti-racism if a corporation is involved, because people working in corporations can’t possibly be affected by such things? It immediately becomes illegitimate once a corporation profits off it?
Corporations profit all sorts of things in our society (fandom being one) and it doesn’t make them any less real things, yeah? Star Trek and Star Wars, and other franchises still move people despite being owned by corproations. It doesn’t automatically negate them as works of art.
