Post by remaxwell on Jul 18, 2008 16:42:28 GMT -5
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Verdict: See the original. It's casted better, it's more original, it stays away from the "oh that's goofy" humor that this movie constantly tries to use to to make up for the lack of slightly more biting humor in the original, and best of all, it doesn't have Will Farrel exemplifying the aforementioned school of comedic writing. It also has prodigious amounts of LSD.
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Having been well-nestled into The Producers (1968) for a long, long time now (it has quite comfortably sat at the top of my list for many years), I was part of that cautiously optimistic buzz way back before this movie ever came out, when they decided to fit the (in my opinion) classic Mel Brooks movie into the standard Broadway template, that is to say, a musical. I was even lucky, one snowy Manhattan eve, to be able to see the show as performed by Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane (who, in the interests of science, should be pumped full of horse tranquilizers to see how quickly he becomes a normal human being).
Well, to be honest, I hated it. I didn't hate it with the sort of burning passion that I generally dole out to Broadway musicals, but this was an aching, odious feeling in my stomach, a sick Tales from the Crypt morality play about getting my hopes up about adaptations. I have since become the Eternal Adaptation Cynic, although I was on the road long before as both a gamer and a reader.
Now, for those of you that haven't seen the original, I suggest that you skip over this and see the original with Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel and Kenneth Mars. I have to say that casting was nigh perfect for that movie - Wilder plays an impeccable timid accountant/soulless office type, Mostel seems oddly in his element as a desperate, on-his-knees dignity-absent sleezebag, and Mars.. well, he's THE stereotypical crazy(-harmless) German. There is also a character in the original that's completely cut out from the musical (which, in my opinion, makes the musical nonsensical at worst and empty at best, Lorenso St. DuBois (his friends call him LSD, the eternal stereotypical flower-child.
This all just comes together in the end so radically that the characters are just caught up in their tide of terrible, terrible folly.
Now, enter the remake, the 2005 Producers. Keep in mind that this was made for the stage (esp. Broadway) before, as far as I know, the idea of a film remake ever came up. The basic premise is the same, Max Bialystok is a down-and-out producer that once all but ruled Broadway and has resorted to being a gigolo of sorts to old women for rent money (he convinces them that they're investing in a play). Enter Leo Bloom, timid accountant, who comes up with the idea after glancing through Max's books that, if they produce a horrible play, the investors won't try and collect on their investment and the IRS won't tax the income, since no money was made off of it anyway.
Max jumps to the conclusion that if they raise a godawful amount of money and put on a play that flops (actually suggested by Bloom to himself in a "oh, that's a nice little idea" moment), then they could keep the money. Max adds in a final destination to Rio De Janiero.
After a bit of a bumpy start, they look for the worst play ever written and happen upon Springtime For Hitler, a "gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden" (I'm actually not entirely sure if this subtitle was in the remake or if I'm pulling it out of the Original, but there you go.)
Now, I'm going to find the casting director of this film and have him torn apart by wild dogs for committing what I consider to be one of the poorest casting decisions I've seen in recent years - Will Farrel is cast as the crazy German formerly played by Kenneth Mars, named Franz Liebkind. While Mars sort of bordered between being merely unbalanced and outright insane, he did it with a sort of natural panache that told me at least that it was in no way forced.
Farrel, however, goes through his standard caricaturish, overblown sort of act that fully well informs us, incase we didn't know, that his character was strange (including having him do a singing/dancing number that they flat out destroyed from the original). Now, don't get me wrong, I loved Anchorman (and still do), and eagerly eat up movies like Talladega nights, Blades of Glory and Semipro with the guilty pleasure of a crack-addicted Catholic priest, but his over-the-top frat-house style "look at me, I'm kooky" doesn't work when one can look back on the nervously unhinged Kenneth Mars.
Broderick and Lane aren't such great choices either, and I especially think Lane was a bad Bialystok even if we didn't have to look all the way back to Zero Mostel. Broderick never quite pulled off the timid accountant to the degree that Wilder did, but he's passable. Lane, on the other hand, is so far gone away from the sleazy, poverty-stricken, desperate, womanizing (though oddly likeable) scum he's supposed to be that he seemed to me to be like the nerdy, overweight kid on the playground that tried to act like he was tough. The "mean face" scene from Let's Go to Prison comes to mind.
In other words, Lane seems so far away in his personality (which shines through every role his plays like grease soaks through a paper bag) that he just isn't believable as a scumbag, despite the fact that many of the funny scenes from the original were premised off of this character trait. I actually don't mind Lane, and I'm probably one of five people in the world that doesn't mind sitting down and watching Mousetrap. But he doesn't pull it off here. (Not to mention that the last trait anyone would ever give to a character played by Nathan Lane or in the Nathan Lane style would be "willing and able to seduce old women for money, and be a general womanizer.")
They then seek the services of a truly horrible director (Roger De Bris), played here by a passable Gary Beach, although I still maintain, once again, that he's outshined by Christopher Hewett in his deliciously overblown self-important director character. (How do I reconcile this last statement with the one I made about Farrell? Different kinds of over-the-top - Hewett's in the original was a sort of exaggerated self-importance and undeserved sense of talent and vision that was nonetheless able to keep from going into "oh, that's so wacky!" territory. Farrell strays into that territory in that way.)
Along with De Bris, there's also Carmen Ghia, who, despite the fact that he has a total of maybe two or three scenes in the movie, is sometimes just as known as Bialystok and Bloom, at least by those who've seen the movie (if you don't remember the name, he's the one that purrs: "We're not alone!") In the original, Ghia was the super-effeminate cat-like stylist and partner of De Bris. Much like the other characters in the musical remake, Roger Bart (who plays Ghia) plays him in a sort of over-blown caricature of the original character, taking the scenes and styles that made Carmen Ghia funny as all hell and magnifying them to the point where it's not even really that amusing.
Now, this is where we get to the point where the remake radically diverges, for reasons I'm not too sure of. First, Lorenzo St. DuBois, the aforementioned LSD, is completely cut from the remake. Being the beatnik flower-child, I can sort of see why: it would date the movie (and show) horribly, but seeing as how the rest of the show makes it obvious that this happened in years past, I don't see why this is necessarily a problem, not to mention the fact that a great deal of the humor from LSD was not necessarily that he was a beatnik in specific, but that he was just simply the wrong person to ever pick to play Hitler if you wanted to derail the play, and a sign that in trying to make the play so horrible, they made it good.
But, anyway, LSD is gone, with De Bris (the director) playing Hitler after a mishap. There's a serious complication towards the end of the story with Ulla (played by Uma Thurman), who was only an eye-candy receptionist with two or three scenes in the original.
All in all? The movie isn't actually as horrible as maybe I'm making it out to be. It's passable, although, to me, the music is standard Broadway fare without any sort of special flair to it, but perhaps I'm jaded. If you seriously like showtunes, get the soundtrack of this movie and watch the original - but in my opinion, the best song (Springtime for Hitler opening) is already sung in the original. But the thing that, for me, kills this movie is the fact of, a) the casting decisions, b) leaving out certain parts, and c) cheap, "isn't that goofy!?" humor, especially from Farrel The Original had parts like this too, but they were generally contained and interspersed, where Farrel and others like him are spread throughout the remake.
None of these things are the death knell for this movie, however. The killer is that horrible shadow that exists, looming over the remake for some of us that have seen the original movie, and can't even conceptualize the remake without also putting it in terms of the original, since that's the one we've grown up with. And when brought into the context of the original, this one can't stand up to snuff, especially compared to the (in my opinion) near perfect casting choices.
Verdict: Go see the original. Nuff said.
Verdict: See the original. It's casted better, it's more original, it stays away from the "oh that's goofy" humor that this movie constantly tries to use to to make up for the lack of slightly more biting humor in the original, and best of all, it doesn't have Will Farrel exemplifying the aforementioned school of comedic writing. It also has prodigious amounts of LSD.
==========================================
Having been well-nestled into The Producers (1968) for a long, long time now (it has quite comfortably sat at the top of my list for many years), I was part of that cautiously optimistic buzz way back before this movie ever came out, when they decided to fit the (in my opinion) classic Mel Brooks movie into the standard Broadway template, that is to say, a musical. I was even lucky, one snowy Manhattan eve, to be able to see the show as performed by Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane (who, in the interests of science, should be pumped full of horse tranquilizers to see how quickly he becomes a normal human being).
Well, to be honest, I hated it. I didn't hate it with the sort of burning passion that I generally dole out to Broadway musicals, but this was an aching, odious feeling in my stomach, a sick Tales from the Crypt morality play about getting my hopes up about adaptations. I have since become the Eternal Adaptation Cynic, although I was on the road long before as both a gamer and a reader.
Now, for those of you that haven't seen the original, I suggest that you skip over this and see the original with Gene Wilder, Zero Mostel and Kenneth Mars. I have to say that casting was nigh perfect for that movie - Wilder plays an impeccable timid accountant/soulless office type, Mostel seems oddly in his element as a desperate, on-his-knees dignity-absent sleezebag, and Mars.. well, he's THE stereotypical crazy(-harmless) German. There is also a character in the original that's completely cut out from the musical (which, in my opinion, makes the musical nonsensical at worst and empty at best, Lorenso St. DuBois (his friends call him LSD, the eternal stereotypical flower-child.
This all just comes together in the end so radically that the characters are just caught up in their tide of terrible, terrible folly.
Now, enter the remake, the 2005 Producers. Keep in mind that this was made for the stage (esp. Broadway) before, as far as I know, the idea of a film remake ever came up. The basic premise is the same, Max Bialystok is a down-and-out producer that once all but ruled Broadway and has resorted to being a gigolo of sorts to old women for rent money (he convinces them that they're investing in a play). Enter Leo Bloom, timid accountant, who comes up with the idea after glancing through Max's books that, if they produce a horrible play, the investors won't try and collect on their investment and the IRS won't tax the income, since no money was made off of it anyway.
Max jumps to the conclusion that if they raise a godawful amount of money and put on a play that flops (actually suggested by Bloom to himself in a "oh, that's a nice little idea" moment), then they could keep the money. Max adds in a final destination to Rio De Janiero.
After a bit of a bumpy start, they look for the worst play ever written and happen upon Springtime For Hitler, a "gay romp with Adolf and Eva at Berchtesgaden" (I'm actually not entirely sure if this subtitle was in the remake or if I'm pulling it out of the Original, but there you go.)
Now, I'm going to find the casting director of this film and have him torn apart by wild dogs for committing what I consider to be one of the poorest casting decisions I've seen in recent years - Will Farrel is cast as the crazy German formerly played by Kenneth Mars, named Franz Liebkind. While Mars sort of bordered between being merely unbalanced and outright insane, he did it with a sort of natural panache that told me at least that it was in no way forced.
Farrel, however, goes through his standard caricaturish, overblown sort of act that fully well informs us, incase we didn't know, that his character was strange (including having him do a singing/dancing number that they flat out destroyed from the original). Now, don't get me wrong, I loved Anchorman (and still do), and eagerly eat up movies like Talladega nights, Blades of Glory and Semipro with the guilty pleasure of a crack-addicted Catholic priest, but his over-the-top frat-house style "look at me, I'm kooky" doesn't work when one can look back on the nervously unhinged Kenneth Mars.
Broderick and Lane aren't such great choices either, and I especially think Lane was a bad Bialystok even if we didn't have to look all the way back to Zero Mostel. Broderick never quite pulled off the timid accountant to the degree that Wilder did, but he's passable. Lane, on the other hand, is so far gone away from the sleazy, poverty-stricken, desperate, womanizing (though oddly likeable) scum he's supposed to be that he seemed to me to be like the nerdy, overweight kid on the playground that tried to act like he was tough. The "mean face" scene from Let's Go to Prison comes to mind.
In other words, Lane seems so far away in his personality (which shines through every role his plays like grease soaks through a paper bag) that he just isn't believable as a scumbag, despite the fact that many of the funny scenes from the original were premised off of this character trait. I actually don't mind Lane, and I'm probably one of five people in the world that doesn't mind sitting down and watching Mousetrap. But he doesn't pull it off here. (Not to mention that the last trait anyone would ever give to a character played by Nathan Lane or in the Nathan Lane style would be "willing and able to seduce old women for money, and be a general womanizer.")
They then seek the services of a truly horrible director (Roger De Bris), played here by a passable Gary Beach, although I still maintain, once again, that he's outshined by Christopher Hewett in his deliciously overblown self-important director character. (How do I reconcile this last statement with the one I made about Farrell? Different kinds of over-the-top - Hewett's in the original was a sort of exaggerated self-importance and undeserved sense of talent and vision that was nonetheless able to keep from going into "oh, that's so wacky!" territory. Farrell strays into that territory in that way.)
Along with De Bris, there's also Carmen Ghia, who, despite the fact that he has a total of maybe two or three scenes in the movie, is sometimes just as known as Bialystok and Bloom, at least by those who've seen the movie (if you don't remember the name, he's the one that purrs: "We're not alone!") In the original, Ghia was the super-effeminate cat-like stylist and partner of De Bris. Much like the other characters in the musical remake, Roger Bart (who plays Ghia) plays him in a sort of over-blown caricature of the original character, taking the scenes and styles that made Carmen Ghia funny as all hell and magnifying them to the point where it's not even really that amusing.
Now, this is where we get to the point where the remake radically diverges, for reasons I'm not too sure of. First, Lorenzo St. DuBois, the aforementioned LSD, is completely cut from the remake. Being the beatnik flower-child, I can sort of see why: it would date the movie (and show) horribly, but seeing as how the rest of the show makes it obvious that this happened in years past, I don't see why this is necessarily a problem, not to mention the fact that a great deal of the humor from LSD was not necessarily that he was a beatnik in specific, but that he was just simply the wrong person to ever pick to play Hitler if you wanted to derail the play, and a sign that in trying to make the play so horrible, they made it good.
But, anyway, LSD is gone, with De Bris (the director) playing Hitler after a mishap. There's a serious complication towards the end of the story with Ulla (played by Uma Thurman), who was only an eye-candy receptionist with two or three scenes in the original.
All in all? The movie isn't actually as horrible as maybe I'm making it out to be. It's passable, although, to me, the music is standard Broadway fare without any sort of special flair to it, but perhaps I'm jaded. If you seriously like showtunes, get the soundtrack of this movie and watch the original - but in my opinion, the best song (Springtime for Hitler opening) is already sung in the original. But the thing that, for me, kills this movie is the fact of, a) the casting decisions, b) leaving out certain parts, and c) cheap, "isn't that goofy!?" humor, especially from Farrel The Original had parts like this too, but they were generally contained and interspersed, where Farrel and others like him are spread throughout the remake.
None of these things are the death knell for this movie, however. The killer is that horrible shadow that exists, looming over the remake for some of us that have seen the original movie, and can't even conceptualize the remake without also putting it in terms of the original, since that's the one we've grown up with. And when brought into the context of the original, this one can't stand up to snuff, especially compared to the (in my opinion) near perfect casting choices.
Verdict: Go see the original. Nuff said.