Movies that Should be Remade [Think Tank]

[This week’s Think Tank writers have seen a lot of crappy remakes in their time (*cough* Godzilla *cough*), but that doesn’t stop them from suggesting some of their own. Readers, be sure to vote at the end add your remake pitches in the comments.]

Mlawski, Dave

1993’s Dave has a spectacular premise that sadly fizzles out. It goes like this: the Secret Service hires a presidential look-alike (Dave) to stand in for the president while the real Commander-in-Chief has an affair with his secretary. Unfortunately, the prez has a stroke whilst in the act of coitus and goes into a coma. The evil Chief of Staff decides Dave will continue to stand in for the president for the foreseeable future so he can use Dave as a puppet.

Great set up, right? Sadly, the 1993 version doesn’t really go anywhere after that. Kevin Kline is far too bland. The pacing is lackadaisical. The script, which is supposedly comedic, doesn’t have any real laughs in it. The film seems to be trying to be inspirational, but the inspirational rhetoric rings hollow.

There are three easy ways to make Dave into a classic.

1. Make it a real farce.

Dave already has all of elements of an old-style farce: mistaken identities, highly improbable plot developments, broad physical humor. Now, a good director and screenwriter just need to take it to the next level. Instead of casting the milquetoast Kline, cast Ricky Gervais. Quicken the pace by 150%. Add more doubles; let’s say Dave also has an evil identical twin who’s trying to steal Lincoln’s legendary gold. Give the secondary characters more quirks. Now Sigourney Weaver is an incorrigible slut; Ben Kingsley falls unconscious every time he hears “Hail to the Chief;” Frank Langella’s even more insane. Oh, and the White House has a chimpanzee in it. Don’t ask why. Just roll with it.

2. Make it a wackier fish out of water comedy.

Dave is already a fish out of water comedy; the trouble is, it’s not funny. Maybe it needs to be fish out of water-ier. Rather than have the stand-in president be the owner of a temp agency, make him a con artist played by Eddie Murphy. Or a stoner played by Jack Black. Or a wacky Brit played by John Oliver. You see where I’m going here.

3. Make it a real satire.

Dave has the makings of an incisive satire about the emptiness of the executive branch, American voters’ preference of charisma over expertise, and the dangers of having sex with your secretary. The trouble is that Dave was made in 1993, back when we thought we were cynical about our leaders but didn’t yet know what cynical even meant. To make Dave a good satire, all the screenwriter has to do is set it in 2001. America quickly figures out that Dave is an airhead with no experience or knowledge of politics, but the country doesn’t care because he’s surrounded by clever men like Frank Langella. As in the 1993 version, this Dave eventually decides he’s going to use his new found executive powers to change the country for the better. Then suddenly we’re involved in two endless wars, the economy tanks, and torture and unwarranted wiretapping are suddenly legal. Things don’t get better for at least fifteen years.

Sorry, did things just get really dark? Uh… Well… Look! A kitten!

Fenzel, Dr. Zhivago

Movies should be remade when the script, concept or other material was really great, but the interpretation, direction, art direction, score or other execution leave you some room for improvement.

Movies tend to get remade primarily because they had wonderful scene-stealing acting performances or really great composition that the filmmakers want to emulate. If you’re only going to remake relatively few movies, don’t remake the ones that nailed it the first time, especially in ways you can only aspire to copy. Remake ones you know you can, and must, make differently and better.

Personally, I think movies should be remade much more frequently. It is a tragedy to see so many great roles and scripts to be interpreted only once. Imagine if Mel Gibson’s was the only version we ever had of Hamlet? But as much as I’d love to watch the Hugh Grant Under Siege, effective remakes are all about doing it for the right reasons.

The Ten Commandments would be the absolute worst movie to remake. You’ve got the two grandest, most inimitable film actors ever (Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner), a supporting cast full of film legends doing wonderful work, captivating set and visual design, legendary direction, and a script that sounds like it was written line by line on an Etch-a-Sketch (and shaken between takes).

This is why the remake of Battlestar Galactica (the original had a cool concept, but dumb execution) was such a good thing, why remakes/special editions/reimaginings of Star Wars (the original had a bad script, but wonderful execution) are almost always artistic failures, and why I suspect the remake of Star Trek (the original and TNG had boring concepts, but marvelously charming execution) might not be that interesting.

The best possible movie to remake? My vote goes for Dr. Zhivago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAWrXTn5Www

Many actors give really good performances in Dr. Zhivago, but they’re not the kind of performances that eat up the room left over for those who come later. Omar Sharif is great, but he’s better in other roles than in this. Same with Sir Alec Guinness. I always thought the pacing of this movie was really flat, the acting wasn’t urgent or naturalistic enough, especially for a drama that aspires to humanity above all else, the direction was too focused on splashy imagery and didn’t have enough dynamism, and the whole look relies a lot on convention to the extent that it looks way more dated than comparable movies — it’s like the director took the storyboards a bit too literally. It’s still a solid movie, but it succeeded in spite what I think are of a lot of dropped balls and had massive unrealized potential.

Zhivago is a sweeping, dramatic story with action, spectacle, compelling characters, exotic locations and cunning double-crosses. Exploring Revolution-Era Russia right now has tons of fresh resonance, given how much has happened to Russia and the world since Zhivago came out back in 1965 and the stresses cutting across the core of our societies these days.

There are a lot of sequences in this movie that were a bit too ambitious at the time, but would be a blast to see with today’s techniques. The blizzard scenes alone are almost as good as the desert pratfall scenes in The Ten Commandments — but I still think they can be done better.

I say Ultimate Zhivago 2012 (working title) would be a slam dunk. Clive Owen could win the Sean Connery Memorial Fake British Russian award and rake in a few hundred million dollars in the process.

Actually, Clive Owen probably isn’t the guy for it. You need somebody more sensitive. Like Ben Affleck.

Oh God, what have I done!!! >smashes stone tablets<

Lee, The Birth of a Nation

I know what you’re thinking. “Not cool, Lee, not cool. Not even as a joke.”

Well, first, this isn’t a joke. (My monster ballad Think Tank entry from a while back was at least partly in jest, but this is not.) I do actually think The Birth of a Nation should be remade, not as a joke, but as a straight-up retelling of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, or fell asleep during an American History college class screening, the plot centers around two families, one Northern, one Southern, and their relationships before and after the Civil War. Long story short, the Northerners become carpetbaggers, and the Southerners rise up in the form of the KKK to defend their land against Republicans and former slaves. The Klan lynches a black man for preying on a white woman, disperses a riot of “crazed negroes,” dispatches federal troops, and all is right with the world.

So how would a remake possibly stay close to these story elements without, you know, glorifying the Klan and racism? It’s not that much of a leap, actually. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of its portrayal of former slaves as evil womanizing barbarians. That’s basically how most white Southerners saw African American males well into the 20th century, and since we now know that wasn’t exactly accurate, a remake would simply show these former slaves as they actually were: mostly innocent victims of racist vigilante justice.

That’s not what would make the remake interesting, though. When it comes to the Klansmen, and more generally, Southerners, a remake should resist the easy route of demonizing them as bloodthirsty evil rednecks. Doing so would only repeat the mistakes of the original movie: using cheap stereotypes of a particular group to rally an audience against that group. Instead, there’s a far more interesting story to be told, that of the seemingly decent, ordinary family men who turn to extraordinary acts of depravity.

I’d imagine this would be a tough movie to sell and get people to watch. But what better time than now to tell this story? We all saw the latent racism of America come out during Obama’s presidential campaign. America can’t get through this by pretending like movies like Birth of a Nation were never made and aren’t part of our past. Bring it back out, I say, and keep the title: a nation was truly born after the Civil War, and though it’s on its last legs after a long life, it’s still not dead.

Belinkie, The Last Starfighter

I have to disagree with Mlawski about Dave; I’m a big fan. When I was in middle school, this was my mom’s favorite movie, and she watched it on a bi-daily basis.

Wait, does bi-daily mean twice a day, or every other day? Because I mean twice a day.

I didn’t love it quite that much, and would often sneak into the other room to watch Beavis and Butthead. But I happen to like Dave quite a bit. It’s got a latter-day Mr. Smith Goes to Washington vibe. If only a real, actual human being could be put in charge, he could single-handedly redeem our sordid little cesspool on the Potomic.

Then again, it may just be that I associate Dave with a simpler era in my life. Possible topic for a future Think Tank: pop culture that you will always like, for reasons having nothing to do with its merits.

But Mlawski and I do agree on our approach to remakes. Remakes are for movies with great premises and wobbly follow-throughs. And one of my favorite premises of all-time is The Last Starfighter. This is a sci-fi space adventure from 1984, a time when anything related to Stars and Wars could get greenlit. Lance Guest plays Alex Rogen, a teen working as a trailer park handyman, dreaming of a life anywhere else. Alex has one hobby – an arcade machine call Starfighter, which he turns out to be really good at. I mean, really good at. In fact, better than anyone else on earth.

Which normally wouldn’t mean much, except for the game was actually a test placed on earth by an alien looking for pilots to fight in a massive interstellar war. Through a somewhat implausible Act 2 twist, every single other qualified pilot in the galaxy is wiped out in an attack while Alex is in transit, leaving him the only person who can save the human race from total enslavement.

For every boy who grew up playing videogames, this is possibly the greatest premise in history.

The movie does some things right. For instance, the alien in disguise who takes Alex into space is played by the great Robert Preston, who was Harold Hill in the Music Man movie. This was Preston’s final film role, and he’s clearly doing a riff on his most famous role:

I must congratulate you on your virtuoso performance, my boy. Centauri is impressed. I’ve seen ’em come, and I’ve seen ’em go, but you’re the best, my boy. Dazzling! Light years ahead of the competition! Centauri’s got a little proposition for you. Are ya interested?

It’s a great part, and Preston has the easy charm of an old pro. In any remake, you’d be hard pressed to find someone better.

There’s also the score, which you’d almost certainly have to steal for a remake. It is just one of my all-time favorites. The main theme is this ridiculously epic, heroic thing, that will make you bitter you don’t have wings.

So what’s wrong with the movie? Mainly, the special effects. They are only “special” effects in the way that the Special Olympics is special. This was one of the first movies to lean heavily on CGI, and it was way, way too soon:

If your entire movie is about cool space battles, you better deliver the goods. The movie never makes me believe that Alex really does have the greatest reflexes in the universe, and certainly not that he can single-handedly take out Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada.

But the real reason this is due for a reimagining is that video games have changed. People don’t feed quarters to arcade machines anymore. They play on tricked-out PCs and consoles, in their own homes. And nowadays, if you become the best in the world at a particular game, you might very well be a minor celebrity for a certain culture.

Let me ask you a question: are there any good movies about gamers? Just The Wizard, right? I feel like there’s some interesting territory there. People who are dysfunctional losers in the real world, but absolute gods online. People who base their whole self-image on being the best at a videogame. It’s a complete waste of time, right? Or is it? I could see a remake focusing on a group of gamers – either friends who play together as a team, or maybe rivals who are all taken to space together. And yes, I realize you’d have to change the title if there were more than one starfighter. I’m thinking The Last Squadron.

Wait, I can come up with a tagline. “On earth, they’re losers. In space, they’re our only hope.” Eh?