Sacha Howells,
Jan 23, 2008
When a TV series jumps to the big screen, one question always begs to be asked: Why? Sure, sometimes it's to finish what a series started; yeah, occasionally it expands on or reinvents the original. But usually it's a cheap ploy to trade in on nostalgia and name recognition. With Sex and The City, Get Smart, a new X-Files movie, and Speed Racer all hitting this year, now's the time to look at just a handful of the best and worst, and hope that the people behind the new crop are paying attention.
Great TV translations do something new that couldn't be done on the small screen, or reintroduce or re-purpose great characters. And guess what? They have good stories and scripts!
Serenity
Sex and The City gave its viewers a satisfying finale, and has some fans wondering if a follow-up movie will just ruin things. Not so for Firefly, Joss Whedon's sci-fi Western. Canceled after just 11 episodes, its DVD sales were strong enough that a different studio greenlit the film. Whedon was able to tie up loose ends and give the fans the resolution they needed, and somehow managed to make a film that made sense to people who'd never seen the TV show.
The Brady Bunch Movie
Rather than setting the film in the '70s or "updating" the characters, it dropped the old Bradys into the '90s. The bad clothes, silly plot points, and hammy acting became part of the joke.
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
What did the movie bring to South Park? Swears, of course. For a show so defined by obscenity, it was liberating to actually hear the foul things falling out of these kids' mouths. Finally no bleeps, and just as f%@!ing funny as the show. Hey, I didn't type that. You suck, you guys, seriously.
The Untouchables
This was a great movie on its own merits, and introduced audiences to characters and a story that most of us didn't know. It just took a great story from a classic series, and told it well. See? Easy.
So good movies can be built on the old bones of prime time. Unfortunately, then there are all the rest. There's no way my list of the worst is, or could ever be, complete. Consider these bad remakes:
Miami Vice
This was a hit, but I barely stayed awake for all one hundred and thirty-four minutes of it. Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell mumbled and shrugged their way through with none of the style and snap that made the TV series so influential. The show didn't just change how people dressed (I never said it was all positive influence), but how people made cop shows. Dark storylines, moral dilemmas, fast jump cuts, and synth-rock music montages were fresh, once upon a time, and it was in the mid-'80s. No one's going to change how they roll their sleeves -- or how they make movies -- because of the remake.
The Flintstones
The classic cartoon was already a bastardization of The Honeymooners, which also had an awful remake -- whoa, I'm getting dizzy -- but the film took things to new lows, with schticky sight gags and limping puns that felt older than dirt. (Univer-"shell" Studios, anyone? Oh, my sides.) Of course, it was a masterpiece next to the Stephen Baldwin vehicle Viva Rock Vegas.
The Nude Bomb
I love Get Smart, I really do. But despite a pretty great title, this 1980 film follow-up was a disaster. No CONTROL (it's called PITS), no Barbara Feldon, no Agent 99 (they didn't even recast, just pretended she never existed), no Siegfried, and a different guy playing the Chief. Steve Carell better have something funnier up his sleeve than this. And Evan Almighty didn't exactly inspire confidence.
Josie and the Pussycats
Just because something was a cartoon, doesn't mean you have to do a remake. This was one of a pile of Archie Comics spin-offs where everyone's in a band, with only the outfits and a rockin' theme song to make it memorable. The film was a mess, with a particularly annoying plot about an evil producer's scheme to embed subliminal messages in the Pussycats' pure, unsullied music. This, of course, in a movie so plastered with product placement that it could have raced at Talladega.
The demon spawn of Saturday Night Live skits
There's a whole sub-genre of movies spawned by SNL skits, some of which are good (OK, two), and most of which are not. A lot of these sketches were already thin at 11 minutes, so stretched to 90 they're 79 minutes longer than too long. The Blues Brothers turned Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi's musical prank into a hilarious, anarchic ride that absolutely stands the test of time. Wayne's World, too (I didn't say 2), still holds up. But Blues Brothers 2000, It's Pat, Ladies Man, Superstar, Night at the Roxbury? People, these are bad.
Any other votes? Man, this could go on forever. From Avengers to Wild Wild West, there's an alphabet of crap out there. Let's hope 2008 serves up some for the first list.
