When the Charlton Heston Ben-Hur was the third Ben-Hur movie.
"I'm not arguing that with you. I know he can get the job, but can he do the job?"
Yes, but the first two Ben Hurs must have been pretty shoddy if nobody ever speaks about them. The third Ben Hur is a masterpiece.
LOOKING FORWARD TO:
-The Irishman
+1
In fact, we need more remakes.
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I actually wish they would remake LOTR. PJ totally missed the tone of the book and the beauty in it. Aragorn was all wrong. The hobbits almost got lost in the story. So, yes, I do want a remake of another movie which also won 12 oscars.
share11.
LOTR was different from the books...it was better.
Never Drumpf! Never Hillary!
Well, one could make the argument that each of the others was a different format.
The 1907 was a short film.
The 1925 was a silent film.
The 1959 was a feature-length, audio, colour film.
The 2003 was an animated film.
The 2010 was a miniseries.
The 2016 is a feature-length, audio, colour film - the same as 1959. So it doesn't really add anything. Perhaps if it were, I dunno, a Netflix series the 1959 had been black and white or whatever.
I mean I'm fine with remakes, I'm just saying that you can see where the complaint has merit.
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I think a lot of the criticism towards remakes is more about the lack of originality in Hollywood these days.
shareEverything is a remake these days, we burned all mans possible movies ideas in a few decades and now its just remakes either in full of just in idea. Ones the are are complete copies usually fail the ones that dont fail can be great.
shareIs it a remake of the 1959 >Heston classic, or a new adaptation of the book ?
What bugs me is that every time a new version of a story already told in a movie gets out, everyone goes "but why did they remake that movie ?" There are obvious movie remakes, like Van Sant remake of Psycho which was a deliberate copy of the Hitchcock version of Bloch's book, shot by shot, and using the original music. Then you get multiple versions of a story, like Ben Hur, where one becomes the "definitive version" (who decides that ? Even if the 1959 version is a true masterpiece in and of itself, and a movie I have seen several times with the same pleasure, it still is so very dated in many aspects !).
So this new version of Ben Hur can not succeed, unless it is an absolute marvel, because not matter what it will always be judged in relation with the 1959 version.
But endlessly retelling a story is nothing new. How many "Romeo and Juliet" have there been already ? And if the now classic Zeffirelli version stills stands the test of time, I personaly think that Luhrman's take is more than worthy.
It is so specific to movies that anytime some director gives his own version of a story, everyone screams bloody murder, whereas in music, no one bats an eye when a conductor gives his own vision of Beethoven's 9th symphony. Karajan even recorded the nine symphonies 4 times, thus giving 4 different versions of the same musical pieces.
So what is so special about movies that once a version of a story has been made, no one should give a new version ? Even if the previous one is good or exceptional ?
I have not yet seen that particular Ben Hur, but I think I will give it a shot.
Back in those days remaking movies was much more understandable and logical than now; there was no video, very few people watched the TV, let alone the appearance of youtube or streaming services in the last decade. This meaning; once a movie had been shown in the theaters there was very little chance for the public to watch it again...ever.
Add to that that in this case the previous Ben-Hur had been a silent movie in black and white. The Ben-Hur of 1959 had the obvious appeal of telling the story with sound and in colour.
Since all of this cannot be applied to the Ben-Hur of 2016, scepticism is more than justified. Remaking classics is an enterprise doomed almost always to failure, because the classics have already used up the artistic potenctial there was to the story - that´s why they are classics - so that either you simply repeat what has been done before, or you try to give a different perspective to the story, But the latter requires a talent that cannot be found everywhere.
Having said the previous I agree that a movie shouldn´t be precondemned only because it´s a remake. Let´s watch it and then judge it by its merits.
Come on man, the 1959 was the first with sound and colour... It's not exactly the same league there.
shareIn colour...not exactly. The 1925 version was mainly color tints (usually gold, purple, and blue) with scenes in 2-color Technicolor (The Nativity, Judah in Rome, the washer women scene, the adultress, Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, and the Crucifixion). The B&W scenes were Judah's death march, the Galley scenes, the Chariot Race, and Via Dolorosa.
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