Rants

Rant on.

I have a message for Hollywood:  Some old movies do not need to be remade.  Some are, quite frankly best avoided, in fact, as the original is a classic which would be hard to live up to.  For example, True Grit, originally starring John Wayne and more recently Jeff Bridges.

True Grit is a classic western:  There’s a bad guy, he kills an innocent man, and his child seeks justice.  Said child, in this case, hires a gunslinging lawman who is mostly concerned with bringing justice to lawbreakers, usually by killing them rather than seeing due process of law followed.  The newer movie starts out faithful to this formula and to the original story, but it has one problem:  Jeff Bridges is not John Wayne.

Yes, I know, John Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison, hardly the most manly name.  But he was John Wayne, the Duke, and he, as much as any man ever has, exuded masculinity in the most macho way.  Jeff Bridges simply does not.  He just doesn’t have that John Wayne swagger or the reputation.  I mean, c’mon–the guy was the nerd in Tron!  He’s a great actor, but he is not a symbol of masculinity or machoism.  John Wayne is a tough act to follow, and I can’t think of many actors alive today who might be able to step into his shoes in a role like that.  William Shatner, maybe, as Captain Kirk’s swagger and machismo was of a similar ilk.  Shatner’s not known for doing western, but I think he would have done better than Bridges.

Warning:  Spoilers ahead.  If you haven’t watched the movies and think you might, stop here.

In spite of this, I confess I enjoyed the movie until the last ten minutes or so.  It all went wrong when the hero of the story, Rooster Cogburn, faced four badguys across a field on horseback.  This by itself is a classic western thing:  The good guy facing down the badguys, outnumbered and outgunned.  The bad guys insult the good guy, who offers to see they get a free trial, to which the main bad guy offers further insult.  This particular insult was to call Rooster a “one-eyed fat man.”  John Wayne looked like an old fat man, but Bridges only looked old.  He didn’t have Wayne’s paunch.  (Another way Shatner would have worked better, by the way.)  At this point, Rooster offers up a classic line:  “Fill your hands, you son of bitch!”  When Wayne said it, he shouted it, and it was filled with manly anger.  Bridges…half-mumbled it.  He screwed the line up, badly, in my opinion.

Rooster, on his horse, charges towards the bad guys, who charge him on theirs.  Guns are blazing; it’s a great western scene.  Three bad guys go down, the main bad guy is mortally wounded.  Rooster’s horse is shot and falls down, trapping him for a moment, and the bad guy almost shoots him.  Good guy number two, waiting with the heroine up on a hill, shoots the bad guy, saving the day.  After this, the two movies diverge.  There’s still a bad guy alive up on the hill, the one who started the only mess when he killed the heroine’s father.  He attacks good guy number two (LeBoeuf, whose name is pronounced “la-beef”) and then the heroine (Mattie) shoots him.  The shot is a big much, and she falls into a hole.

Rooster arrives to pull the girl out of the hole, but not before Mattie is bitten by a snake which Rooster subsequently kills.  Rooster and Mattie are pulled out of the hole with LeBoeuf’s help, but LeBoeuf dies from the wound the bad guy gave him.  Rooster comments that LeBoeuf saved him twice, “once after he was dead.”  In the newer version of the movie, LeBoeuf survives, but is not seen again.  Rooster then rushes Mattie to medical help, running her horse, Little Blackie, into the ground in the process and carrying her for a distance after that.  In the original, he “borrows” a horse-drawn wagon (conveniently still hitched) in the process; in the newer film he carries her the rest of the way.

It’s at this point the new film takes a major deviation from the original.  In the original, Mattie’s oft-referred to lawyer, J. Noble Daggett makes an appearance to finish paying the debt Mattie owed Rooster.  In the newer film, Daggett does not make an appearance; he only has a voice over for a letter to Mattie early on.  The original then ends at the gravesite of Mattie’s father.  Her arm is in a sling, but she is otherwise in good health.  The newer film leaps ahead twenty-five years.  She lost her arm from the snake bite, and is going to see Rooster, who is now in a wild west show.  She arrives to find he’s died, and has his body moved to her family graveyard.  Touching, but a place the original film went, and wisely so, I think.  The newer version of the film is, by my understanding, truer to the book it’s based on in these details, but I still prefer the original movie.

Okay, I went into a lot of detail about the two films, but the point is what I originally stated:  Some films should not be remade,  True Grit is a classic, and the new film added nothing to it.  The new film screwed up the ending and Jeff Bridges was not a good replacement for John Wayne.

Some remakes are good.  John Carpenter’s The Thing was superior to the original, which was nonetheless a classic.  It was good enough that I don’t see the point in the third The Thing coming out soon, but at least there’s not an irreplaceable character in that film.  The new film can at least live up to the first two films and, more importantly, the original story.

There’s a few new Wizard of Oz films coming out soon.  I look forward to these.  They are not, to my knowledge, attempting to replicate the Judy Garland’s classic performance, but instead trying to live up to the book by L. Frank Baum.  The musical movie, as good as it was, was not a good portrayal of the books.  In the series of books, Oz was a real place, not some delusion of a dreaming girl.  So I have hope there, for these “remakes” which are not really remakes.

There are other John Wayne movies which could probably be effectively remade.  True Grit simply wasn’t one of them; Wayne was Rooster Cogburn and his performance simply could not be lived up to.

Rant off.