I mentioned this one in an Intermission - it just came to me off the top of my head at the time, but the more I think about it, I believe Buckaroo Banzai was just too ahead of its time, both culturally and cinema-technologically.   In the right hands, a Buckarooboot could be awesome - for example, it could be the uber-movie we've been waiting for Zak Snyder to make.

<<<<WELL THIS WAS A FAIL, FEEL FREE TO READ IT, BUT IT"S MOSTLY JUST A JUMBLED MESS OF CONFUSED THOUGHTS THAT I CAN'T SORT OUT RIGHT NOW>>>>

"Why do we think of films as events in history, not as evolving pieces of culture?"

Simply, because they are, they are individual little snapshots of the period in which they're made. A 70's movie feel slike a 70's flick, you know a 50's flick when you see it. What I mean to say, is that the technology behind filmmaking has been evolving so fast that every decade has it's own feel, whether thats sound, color, film grain or digital noise. Music, and especially theater doesn't have that.

Films are so directly linked to the medium in which they are made, because, well, they are so tightly linked to the medium in which they're made. In theater, you can see the same play 15 different times, and you will see 15 diffreent shows, sure, the differences will be subtle, but they'll be there. I've seen perforamnces of Romeo and Juliet done as Orwellian-esque science fiction, I've seen Romeo and Juliet done as classicly as Shakespeare can be done. Whereas with a film, no matter how many times you watch it, Judy Garland will always say "there's no place like home" exactly the same every single time you watch it. It can't be a constantly evolving piece of art, it is what is. And unlike with theater the system hasn't evolved to the point where it can treat it as such. I can give you a copy of Romeo and Juliet and we could perform it right now, and it would be something new. You can't do that with film, at least not in any meaningful way. And definitly not in any profitable way; which really defines why it hasn't grown into that type of thing. The system has never been able to support that type of theology, so no one hs ever seen it treated as such, so no ones knows what it could bring, so no one is ever going to try it; at least not until making a movie becomes as easy as getting 5 people in a room with a script. It's sad, but it's the truth.

As far as covers of songs go, I still say they work because they're easy. It's 4 minutes, you listen to it and you go, eh, alright, and you move on with your life. Just look at Jimmy or pbpproductions and any number of other channels on youtube, they pump covers out like nobodies business, some of them are great, some of em suck. But they pump out cause they're quick and easy. (Yeah yeah, whatever, but compare a 2 hour full hollywood production to a single guy with a camera and a mic in his garage and you tell me which ones easier) Which means hey can be produced judged and adapted too.

You can not do that to movies. It just doesn't work that way. At least not in the current system, with the way people see movies today,  and unless something dramatically changes, that won't change anytime soon. I think people today, though they may not realize, still hold a very high regard for original works, just look at hard people are trying to prevent people from using thier works in new pieces of art (ala remix artists on youtube and elsewhere) the EXTENSIVE EXTENSIVE copyright battles being fought nowadays. When people think of Wizard of Oz (as a film), they think of Judy Garland as Dorthy...thats it, no one else can be Dorthy...cause, well Judy Garland is Dorthy...didn't you see the movie?

Purely theoretically though, I don't think it would work. Under the system you project you would have virtually every good movie being remade after 30 years. When...exactly...will new stuff be produced from what we learned from all these covers? I mean we can barely get a new story out there now, and we're only remaking a few movies a year.

Random thought: I would like to hear you explain the incredbvly vast difference in your view to original works. I've heard you profess on several occasions at your dislike of the lack of good original storytelling in cinema today, and yet here you profess that we need to boost the production of remakes.

I'd never heard the term "script-remake" before, so I didn't know what you were talking about. What you're calling script remakes are pretty much never done -- PSYCHO is the only one I can think of and that didn't fly -- so I was taking it as a given that if we were talking about a remake, we were talking about going back to the drawing board, developing a new perspective on the material and writing a new script.

If there is a point to remaking a film at all, in my view, it's to do something different and take fuller advantage of certain opportunities, which is what I was asking about in the initial post.

Resident Evil is in need of a serious reboot.

maybe something, I don't know, closer to the games?

I actually think that they should have just remade Tron instead of doing a sequel. Tighten up the story, get all our fancy new effects in there, and you've made a remake worth watching.

There are a handful of ways to look at this. 

I think the guiding principal should be, generally speaking, to remake BAD movies that have great premises.  It can range from basically phantom editing (Sunshine, sans the Sun Zombie, or circumcising the last 25 of A.I.) to total reworking.  Michael Bay's The Island could very easily, and with little effort, be a brilliant story and film.  It never explores the ideas it flirts with fully, and the bad science can be fixed without changing the story.

And it would be a waste to spend 50 million to remake Sunshine just to take out a zombie.  You'd need an additional, stronger thematic reason.  But when you start changing the themes and mood of Sunshine, you lose the parts that make Sunshine great.  So movies like Sunshine and AI are in an un-remakeable  position.  Curse the filmmakers for not getting it right the first time and move on.

I'll tell you where I think coming close to direct remaking could work - Comedy.  Dirty Work and Mystery Men are the prime examples.  They're close to being perfect, but Dirty Work has some major flaws in pacing, editing and execution.  A good director who isn't Bob Saget could have made gold of that film.  It's a mean version of Ghostbusters, damnit.  Shouldn't fail.  And Mystery Men just suffers from being flat.  It feels lifeless.  It's so well written it overcomes the director.  But what if it had a good director?  But since a comedy is supposed to make you laugh, you can remake something almost shot for shot and I think the audience will forgive you.  Provided its funny the second time around.

Reinterpreting can be fun, but it's mostly child's play IMO.  I haven't really thought about it, but it seems taking an original story and transplanting it into a VERY different mold is interesting.  I don't pretend to be a Bill Shakespeare expert, but I read Hamlet a couple times.  And people tell me that Lion King is totes Hamlet n shit.  And I can see where someone would say that.  Good results.

To Teague's point on directors getting the same script - look no further than Fail Safe vs Dr. Strangelove.  The scripts are almost identical and were released within spitting range of each other. In plotting and premise, no difference.  Shows you how important interpretation is.

So yeah.  I'd love to see The Island remade.

Also, The Island was a remake.

Parts is actually okay, but it gets a bad rap because they did it on MST3K.