Rant on.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I have a message for Hollywood:\u00a0 Some old movies do not need to be remade.\u00a0 Some are, quite frankly best avoided, in fact, as the original is a classic which would be hard to live up to.\u00a0 For example, True Grit<\/em>, originally starring John Wayne and more recently Jeff Bridges.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n True Grit<\/em> is a classic western:\u00a0 There’s a bad guy, he kills an innocent man, and his child seeks justice.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The newer movie starts out faithful to this formula and to the original story, but it has one problem:\u00a0 Jeff Bridges is not John Wayne.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Yes, I know, John Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison, hardly the most manly name.\u00a0 But he was<\/em> John Wayne, the Duke, and he, as much as any man ever has, exuded masculinity in the most macho way.\u00a0 Jeff Bridges simply does not.\u00a0 He just doesn’t have that John Wayne swagger or the reputation.\u00a0 I mean, c’mon–the guy was the nerd in Tron<\/em>!\u00a0 He’s a great actor, but he is not a symbol of masculinity or machoism.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 William Shatner, maybe, as Captain Kirk’s swagger and machismo was of a similar ilk.\u00a0 Shatner’s not known for doing western, but I think he would have done better than Bridges.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Warning:\u00a0 Spoilers ahead.\u00a0 If you haven’t watched the movies and think you might, stop here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In spite of this, I confess I enjoyed the movie until the last ten minutes or so.\u00a0 It all went wrong when the hero of the story, Rooster Cogburn, faced four badguys across a field on horseback.\u00a0 This by itself is a classic western thing:\u00a0 The good guy facing down the badguys, outnumbered and outgunned.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This particular insult was to call Rooster a “one-eyed fat man.”\u00a0 John Wayne looked like an old fat man, but Bridges only looked old.\u00a0 He didn’t have Wayne’s paunch.\u00a0 (Another way Shatner would have worked better, by the way.)\u00a0 At this point, Rooster offers up a classic line:\u00a0 “Fill your hands, you son of bitch!”\u00a0 When Wayne said it, he shouted it, and it was filled with manly anger.\u00a0 Bridges…half-mumbled it.\u00a0 He screwed the line up, badly, in my opinion.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rooster, on his horse, charges towards the bad guys, who charge him on theirs.\u00a0 Guns are blazing; it’s a great western scene.\u00a0 Three bad guys go down, the main bad guy is mortally wounded.\u00a0 Rooster’s horse is shot and falls down, trapping him for a moment, and the bad guy almost shoots him.\u00a0 Good guy number two, waiting with the heroine up on a hill, shoots the bad guy, saving the day.\u00a0 After this, the two movies diverge.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He attacks good guy number two (LeBoeuf, whose name is pronounced “la-beef”) and then the heroine (Mattie) shoots him.\u00a0 The shot is a big much, and she falls into a hole.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rooster arrives to pull the girl out of the hole, but not before Mattie is bitten by a snake which Rooster subsequently kills.\u00a0 Rooster and Mattie are pulled out of the hole with LeBoeuf’s help, but LeBoeuf dies from the wound the bad guy gave him.\u00a0 Rooster comments that LeBoeuf saved him twice, “once after he was dead.”\u00a0 In the newer version of the movie, LeBoeuf survives, but is not seen again.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It’s at this point the new film takes a major deviation from the original.\u00a0 In the original, Mattie’s oft-referred to lawyer, J. Noble Daggett makes an appearance to finish paying the debt Mattie owed Rooster.\u00a0 In the newer film, Daggett does not make an appearance; he only has a voice over for a letter to Mattie early on.\u00a0 The original then ends at the gravesite of Mattie’s father.\u00a0 Her arm is in a sling, but she is otherwise in good health.\u00a0 The newer film leaps ahead twenty-five years.\u00a0 She lost her arm from the snake bite, and is going to see Rooster, who is now in a wild west show.\u00a0 She arrives to find he’s died, and has his body moved to her family graveyard.\u00a0 Touching, but a place the original film went, and wisely so, I think.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Okay, I went into a lot of detail about the two films, but the point is what I originally stated:\u00a0 Some films should not be remade,\u00a0 True Grit<\/em> is a classic, and the new film added nothing to it.\u00a0 The new film screwed up the ending and Jeff Bridges was not a good replacement for John Wayne.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Some remakes are good.\u00a0 John Carpenter’s The Thing<\/em> was superior to the original, which was nonetheless a classic.\u00a0 It was good enough that I don’t see the point in the third The Thing<\/em> coming out soon, but at least there’s not an irreplaceable character in that film.\u00a0 The new film can at least live up to the first two films and, more importantly, the original story.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There’s a few new Wizard of Oz<\/em> films coming out soon.\u00a0 I look forward to these.\u00a0 They are not<\/em>, 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.\u00a0 The musical movie, as good as it was, was not a good portrayal of the books.\u00a0 In the series of books, Oz was a real place, not some delusion of a dreaming girl.\u00a0 So I have hope there, for these “remakes” which are not really remakes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are other John Wayne movies which could probably be effectively remade.\u00a0 True Grit<\/em> simply wasn’t one of them; Wayne was<\/em> Rooster Cogburn and his performance simply could not be lived up to.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Rant off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rant on. I have a message for Hollywood:\u00a0 Some old movies do not need to be remade.\u00a0 Some are, quite frankly best avoided, in fact, as the original is a classic which would be hard to live up to.\u00a0 For example, True Grit, originally starring John Wayne and more recently Jeff Bridges. True […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":590,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/588\/revisions\/590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}