We know it's practically human nature to complain about remakes,
especially those ham-fisted profit grabs that feel like they're going to forever
tarnish an original sheen.
But sometimes, filmmakers get it right on the second take.
These are our picks for the five best remakes of all time.
[MUSIC]
We figured the best way to organize a tour of all the best remakes is to
start at the height of similarity and faithfulness and
then descend into the unfaithful masses.
So first up, we want to take a look at one of the more rare and
exotic species, as faithful as it gets.
The shot-for-shot remake, where the script is exactly the same, and so
is pretty much everything else, down to each individual angle and movement and
shot and cut and fade.
And here, we don't have that many to pick from.
1952's Prisoner of Zenda is a color updating that's nearly identical, but
worse for it.
1931's Dracula features an identical Spanish language version,
shot on the exact same sets at night,
while the English language version was shot during the day.
And Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a seven-year labor of
love by a bunch of Mississippi teens that is genuinely enjoyable, and
we're not kidding.
However, when it comes to serious shot-for-shot contenders,
there's really only two films we could pick.
One is Gus Van Sant's Psycho, which updates to color, deviates only slightly,
adds some questionable sound effects, but largely recreates the 1960 original.
And the other, and our first pick, is Funny Games,
where Michael Haneke completely remade his Austrian thriller as identically as
possible in English ten years later. >> Okay, we bet.
[FOREIGN] >> All three of you are going to
be [LAUGH] Kaput. >> What?
[FOREIGN] >> And we bet that you'll be dead.
[FOREIGN] >> You think they stand a chance?
[FOREIGN] >> So,
sure, remaking a masterpiece in order to try to understand it makes sense.
Gus Van Sant got a studio to pay for the best possible form of film school.
And so does wanting to put yourself in the shoes of your idol,
playing make believe as Indiana Jones.
And changing a language for
a foreign market is a good move from a profit perspective.
But Michael Haneke is a no commercial hack.
He's an auteur who makes movies intended to make people think.
So the question is, why?
And the truth is, he doesn't seem to give a damn about the money.
When he made the original German language film, he had apparently intended it to
reach English language audiences where, he has said, its message was really needed.
But then it didn't.
It languished in the Austrian art house and then disappeared.
So when he had an opportunity to remake it in English with Naomi Watts,
he accepted and set himself one more challenge.
Make the exact same film under entirely different circumstances,
without changing a thing, even if he might want to.
Which makes this very interesting film into a very interesting remake, but
one that just might accomplish his goal.
Once you move away from the limitations of shot for
shot, you get tons of filmmakers remaking a film with
pretty much the same script in just about the same way all the time.
And it's not even just today.
People like to bemoan how no one's making original content anymore, and
everything is a remake nowadays.
But as long as movies have been movies, this has always been the case.
Did you know that The Wizard of Oz is actually a remake?
And The Maltese Falcon, and Ben-Hur, and pretty faithful ones at that.
Hollywood has always milked the money cow.
But don't worry, clever filmmakers aren't going to stop sneaking good
originals past the gatekeepers this year either.
And it's not so rare that filmmakers remake their own movies either, and
not always with the restrictions of Haneke.
Sometimes they just want to take a second stab at a story they care about because
they want to get it right.
This is Hitchcock with The Man Who Knew Too Much, and
Cecil B DeMille with the Ten Commandments, and Ozu with his Floating Weeds.
And it's our next pick, Michael Mann's Heat, which you probably didn't even know
was a remake of his own LA Takedown. >> You see me doing thrill
seeker liquor store holdups? >> With a Born to Lose tattoo on my
chest? >> No,
I do not. >> Right.
>> I am never going back.
>> Don't take down Scores.
>> That's my job.
>> I do what I do best.
>> Take down Scores.
You do what you do best. >> Try to stop guys like me.
>> LA Takedown was trimmed from
the original, unproduced Heat script to a 90-minute NBC TV pilot that wasn't even
picked up, instead, getting released as a unremarkable TV movie.
And yeah, it lost a number of turns and subplots, but
the resemblance is crystal clear.
And six years later, Micheal Mann picked back up his original script,
remembered why he loved it, and decided to give it a proper go.
And the result is Heat, battle tested and
rapid prototyped into a well-oiled crime thriller machine.
It's actually fascinating to see what amounts to a public rough draft.
We're so often blind to everything but the final product and
a few carefully selected behind-the-scenes featurettes.
But LA Takedown shows us Mann's work in progress.
We get to see what a difference a few years and $75 million makes.
And you can track some of his directorial ideas as they emerge and
develop and refine.
Not just as he reacts to flaws and fixes them,
but also as he takes his successes and pushes them one step further.
[MUSIC]
Moving on to number three, we hit a remake middle ground,
a film that takes the same story, but just interprets it differently.
It covers all the same plot points, but with a totally new flavor.
These are films like Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven updating of the Brat Pack original,
Down and Out in Beverly Hills' take on Renoir's classic.
The Ring's big-budget Americanization of Ringu, Scorsese's versions of Cape Fear
and Infernal Affairs, De Palma's version of Scarface and
Birdcage, True Grit, True Lies, and the Jungle Book.
However, when it comes to balancing a familiar story with new brilliance,
nothing does it quite like Nosferatu: The Vampyre.
[MUSIC]
>> Please, let me do it.
It's the oldest remedy in the world. >> Forget it,
it's hardly worth mentioning, just a little cut.
[SOUND] >> Having declared Mernau's
1922 Nosferatu to be the most important film in German history,
Herzog set out to pay homage to the masterpiece with a remake.
And while the content is nearly identical on paper, the effect is wildly different.
Herzog’s sound and color and dialogue and shooting and casting transmute the source
material from high-contrast Impressionism into a languid, dreadful Gothic realism.
He delivers difference where it's meaningful and
stays faithful where it matters.
And, god, could there be any better actor to give Max Schreck's
vampire a second take and a voice than Klaus Kinski?
It's not just one of those rare sorts of remakes that holds up next to its
original, but the even rarer sort that leaves room for
them both to be masterpieces, both inter and independently.
[MUSIC]
Moving even further away from Funny Games's shot accuracy,
our next remakes dispense with the story and keep only the premise.
The changes are bold and
sweeping, imaginative re-envisionings of tired tales.
His Girl Friday takes The Front Page's screwball comedy and
morphs it into a romance by pulling a gender swap.
The Little Shop of Horrors musically casts a 1960s B movie.
Dawn of the Dead dispenses with almost everything but the zombies and the mall.
And Romero + Juliet updates Shakespeare in a visionary way, but not for
the first time or the last.
We've talked often about A Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven, and
how they're wonderful Samurai film westernizations.
And while The Fly is a fantastic radical retake of a 50's horror film concept,
there's nothing quite like the way The Thing did it.
[SOUND]
Both John Carpenter's remake and
the Howard Hawks-produced original, The Thing from Another World,
pull from the same John Campbell sci-fi novella.
Both follow a team of all-male researchers in a remote Arctic lab,
and both kick off with a crash-landed alien encounter.
But that is where the similarities end.
The original's Thing is a vegetable life form that can regrow from
any individual part of itself, only to be killed by fire.
While the remake's is a cellular shapeshifter that can take on the form of
any one or many crew members or animals near indistinguishably.
And from this one small change springs forth a fountain of difference.
A monolithic enemy is traded for an indistinguishable one.
Where the original is a monument to American cooperation and pulling together,
the remake is a fever dream of paranoia and mistrust.
A simple swap in the mechanics of the Thing sets off
a butterfly effect of changes that add up to this hurricane of a remake.
And finally, on the last stop of our tour, we get to those films that can be
considered remakes in only the loosest of senses.
So sure, they used an existing film as a starting point.
But whatever it is that happened between there and
the finish line involved something from a whole other universe.
This is the Good, the Bad, and the Weird in place of the Ugly, or the Last House on
the Left's exploitation remake of Bergman's artful The Virgin Spring.
It's the Lion King as a loose remake of the Hamlet story, or
Herzog's one other remake, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
It's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Sukiyaki Western Django.
But for our final pick, we think there's a clear winner here.
And it's gotta be Terry Gilliam's
incredible remake of
the French short La Jetée as
1995's Twelve Monkeys.
[FOREIGN] >> We're not productive anymore.
They don't need us to make things anymore, it's all automated.
What are we for then?
We're consumers.
Yeah, okay, okay, buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen.
But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask, what?
Mentally ill, fact, Jim, fact.
If you don't buy things, toilet paper, new cars, computerized blenders,
electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems and
brain implanted headphones, screwdrivers, miniature built-in radar devices,
voice activated computers. >> Take it easy,
Jeffrey, be calm. >> La Jetée is
a short black-and-white French film composed almost entirely of
a slideshow of still photographs projected over a simple voiceover narration.
And Twelve Monkeys is, well, Terry Gilliam.
And while the seed of the premise is preserved, a brilliant time travel loop to
rekindle an apocalyptic world that closes back in on itself.
It takes on two such radically different forms that the shared lineage is all but
indiscernible.
But they are both visionary and avant garde and hypnotic in their own ways,
calmly and quietly or colorfully and madly.
And there's something fitting about the time travel remake, about a film that
turns back to a celluloid impression of yesteryear like a memory.
And attempts to refashion it in a new image that rebirths a cinematic moment
since past.
And this is something that makes Gilliam's wild remix a more than worthwhile journey,
which is why we think that it's one of the best remakes of all time.
All right, those are our picks.
Let us know what you think about them.
Did we leave out some of your favorite remakes?
Are all remakes bad no matter what?
Is that just a rule you have in your life?
That's fine with me.
Let us know what you think about them in the comments section down below.
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