Had I truly known the plot of the 1973 original, I don’t think there is any way I would have gone my entire adult life without seeing Franklin J. Schaffner’s cult classic Papillon. With that information stated, I am glad I never saw the original before watching Michael Noer’s (Nordvest (Northwest) remake of the same title. I went into the film fresh, with no expectations. Nor did I know anything about the story other than it was a prison movie. But after watching just 30 seconds of the trailer and understanding that prison backdrops are often the set of some of my favorite movies, I knew I would see the film and that I would see it in the theatres.
Category Archives: Remake
The Magnificent Seven (2016)
I’m starting to think that Hollywood is either completely out of original ideas or knows that they are guaranteed a minimum hundred million dollars at the box office if it remakes a movie and has a starting cast of Hollywood A-listers. There is absolutely no reason why The Magnificent Seven needed to be remade. I have not seen the first one, but I imagine it was probably a pretty good movie when it was made…56 years ago. There have not been many great westerns produced in this century and, while they were good, most of them have been remakes (3:10 to Yuma, True Grit). There have been others (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Homesman). Still, there really haven’t been many in this genre of films when compared to others. While I appreciate a good western (Young Guns was my number one movie of all time from when I was 15 until I was about 25), I dislike a bad western just as much as I dislike a poor movie in other genres. And while I wouldn’t necessarily call The Magnificent Seven a poor movie, I definitely would call it an unneeded one. Unless you love westerns, there’s no need to see this movie. This absolutely is a movie that you don’t need to see on the big screen.
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The Equalizer (2014)
Man, The Equalizer was going very well through the first half. And then it unraveled. Denzel Washington (Training Day, Flight) was great, but this movie had many holes, most of which couldn’t have been avoided. Based on the television series of the same name. I was unaware that it even existed before the release of the film. This wouldn’t exactly be a show I would be watching when it aired between 1985-1989 (I was too busy watching shows like The Cosby Show, Family Ties, and Alf during that time). And I think I was offered a disservice by knowing nothing about the television show. It was inferred that those watching this movie had seen the television show, which was not the case. More important than the lack of knowledge of its lead character and how he got to be the way that he is would be the movie’s unevenness. How it starts is certainly not how it ends up. It’s an entertaining movie with Denzel taking out bad guys, but then again, so was home Alone with Macaulay Culkin doing the same.
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The Great Gatsby (2013)
It would be an understatement to say that Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic, The Departed) killed it in 2013. Before his Academy Award-nominating role as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, DiCaprio portrayed Jay Gatsby, one of the most legendary characters in literary history, most sincerely and intensely. It was a performance that F Scott Fitzgerald would be proud of and almost make him forget all of the other subpar attempts to recreate his work of fiction that nearly all of us have read in high school.
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The Crazies (2010)
I had one primary reason for watching this movie: Timothy Olyphant was the star. Olyphant was an actor I had not even heard of one year ago. F/X had a new show this season called Justified, and Olyphant was the star. I gave the show a chance. It hooked me from the first scene in the first episode. There are many reasons why I like the television show, but one of those is Olyphant. He plays the role of US Marshall well. So, I have been looking back at Olyphant’s filmography and saw he had the leading role in The Crazies. I like Olyphant, and horror movies generally perk my interest, so checking this film out was a no-brainer.