The debate on movie remakes pits Ocean’s Eleven (2001, Soderbergh) over Sinatra’s Rat Pack flop, True Grit (2010 Coens) against Wayne’s cult classic, and Casino Royale (2006 Craig) as the best Bond ever. The Seven Samurai (1954 Kurosawa) outshines The Magnificent Seven, while Pride and Prejudice (1995 Firth/Ehle) edges out 2005’s Knightley-led version, praised for its social critique. The Woman in Black (1989) triumphs over Radcliffe’s jump-scare-laden trash, proving originals often preserve deeper artistry—though exceptions like The Mummy (1999 Fraser) prove remakes can deliver fresh fun. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, today we have a really interesting idea for a video.
I have to thank my producer, Tom, for coming up with this.
Usually he just sits around plotting on how to destroy me.
I guess he took a vacation from that and he decided he was going to give me this idea of looking at films that have been remade and judging whether the remake was better than the original or not.
That's really an interesting idea to me and so I'll take a look.
If I haven't seen them all, just skip over.
Ocean's Eleven.
1960, obviously, was the Frank Sinatra, was the Rat Pack, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, and then the Steven Soderbergh version with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, and everybody else.
You know, I'm sad to say it because I loved Sinatra.
I like the Rat Pack ethos was lots of fun, but the original is bad.
You go back and look at it now.
It's got some fun Rat Pack, you know, stuff in it.
They were sleeping with like 12 prostitutes a night and they were drinking and they weren't really paying attention to what they were doing as ad-living.
This is a recording.
You've dialed the right number.
Now please hang up and don't do it again.
That doesn't make any sense.
The Soderbergh original is really tight and good story and everybody's great in it.
And, you know, it's just better.
It's much better.
True Grit, John Wayne in 1969 and Kim Darby and True Grit by the Cohn Brothers in 2010 starring Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon once again.
Matt Damon's and everything.
And Hallie Steinfeld as the young lady.
Again, hate to say it, but the remake is the far better film.
The True Grit in 1969 has John Wayne in one of his best and most hilarious performances, making fun, satirizing the character he had played all of his life.
I think they finally gave him the Oscar for that, but he was really satirizing the great movies.
You know, his old movies with John Ford and Black and White are his best films.
If you're watching John Wayne in color, you're not seeing him at his best.
The Man Who Knew Too Much, Peter Laurie, The Man Who Knew Too Much with Jimmy Stewart.
These are both Hitchcock films.
And I think the first one is better.
It's old-fashioned.
It creaks a little bit.
But The Man Who Knew Too Much is one of Hitchcock's technicolor films in which the technicolor just takes over.
You know, it's Jimmy Stewart, it's Doris Day singing K-Sera, Surrah.
Stewart is wonderful.
It's still a fun film, but it's just a thriller.
I mean, when Hitchcock did a thriller, they were usually so much more than a thriller.
The original is much darker, much cooler.
And like I said, it dates, but it's still better.
And Peter Laurie is just wonderful in it.
Sabrina, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn.
You know, I only watched the Harrison Ford version, Harrison Ford and Julia Ormond.
I didn't finish it because it just wasn't as good.
The original, Humphrey Bogart is miscast in the original, but Audrey Hepburn is as beautiful as it is possible for a human to be.
After you get that beautiful, I think it becomes illegal to be that beautiful.
She's just as winsome and lovely.
Bogart, he's not cast right, but it is a fun film.
It's not a great movie, but I think the original a little better, 1954.
The mummy, that's a really good question.
The mummy starring Boris Karloff and the mummy starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weise.
The original Mummy is part of the Universal Famous Universal Monsters monster movies.
And it's pretty cool.
Normally, I have to say that I love the old movies.
I think the original King Kong is, they've never touched it, even though they date.
But the actual Brendan Fraser Mummy, 1999, is a genuinely fun, well-plotted picture.
I would have to say it's probably a little bit better, but if you like old movies, the Boris Karloff one holds up and it's got a fun atmosphere.
So I like the old film and I won't run it down, but the second one is very, very good.
It's really an entertaining, fun, and kind of sweethearted film.
Casino Royale with David Nevin, Peter Sells, Woody Allen.
Each scene has like a different James Bond in it.
Casino Royale, Daniel Craig, this is an easy one.
The Daniel Craig Casino Royale is the best James Bond film since Sean Connery, since the original films.
It's the only one that holds up to those original films.
And it's the only modern James Bond film that I think is any good, is really terrific, really captures it because Craig plays what Bond is, which is a killer.
The original Casino Royale actually sucks.
No, that's finished, is it?
And And so I think it's an easy comparison.
All right, next one is Scarface, Paul Muni versus Scarface by Brian DePalma with Al Pacino.
That's an interesting question.
That's a good one because the original film is actually a better film.
But who can not like Scarface?
It's so over the top.
It's so crazed.
And Pacino is so great at it.
He's just fantastic.
Michelle Pfeiffer is so beautiful that it's just a big, fun American gangster film.
I have to say, it's very hard to make a gangster film that I don't like.
I mean, I've watched gangster films that I've sit there and watched and think, this is terrible, but I love it.
But the original with Paul Muni is a classic.
And I think that, you know, it's worth going back and watching the original.
It's one of the very early gangster films.
Muny is great in it.
George Raft is great in it.
And it just rejects a sort of evil and menace that could only be done in a sort of tight way.
But I don't want to run down the De Palma film.
I'm not a big De Palma fan.
When he's good, he's really good, like in The Untouchables, but he's made a lot of bad films.
He's got great reviews for some reason.
But this film, it's just over the top, but it just works for some reason.
Part of it is because Pacino plays that part with such verve and it's fun and its violence is ridiculous.
It's just fun.
I would say that the original Scarface with Paul Muni is a better film, but you can't knock the 1983 Scarface.
It's too much fun.
The Seven Samurai by the great Akira Kurosawa and the Magnificent Seven.
You know, the Magnificent Seven is iconic, but the original Seven Samurai is a great, great movie.
Magnificent Seven is okay.
I've watched it pretty recently.
Doesn't really hold up.
It's just fun to watch all those stars being tough guys.
It's good, but the original is a great movie.
Pride and Prejudice with Colin Firth and Jennifer Ely.
That is the BBC miniseries, Pride and Prejudice with Kira Knightley, Matthew McFaden, and Donald Solomon.
Really good question for me because when I saw the original Colin Firth, Pride and Prejudice and Jennifer Ely, I had just moved to London.
Old Play, New Problems00:02:58
Jennifer Ely was hanging out in my local hot dog store.
What did you see?
She was just fantastically beautiful and just adorable in that movie.
She said when she won, I think a BAFTA, she said, I'm not sure whether you're giving this to me for my acting or for my wig because she just looks so cute in that way.
I recently went back and watched the first episode of it, and it's kind of corny now.
It's Jane Austen as she is Hollywoodized in a way, where every, because Jane Austen is a really bitchy, tough, mean writer.
It's just kind of cleaned up.
It's all about the caps.
You know, it's all about the pretty hats, the bonnets that they wear and everything like this.
But the second one was written by my friend Deborah Mogok, and she was a very successful writer in England, and we got along really great.
And she was just a character.
And she writes this movie in a very tough way.
It's really about the money and about sex, but it's also about love.
And she captures everything in it.
My only problem with it is Kira Knightley, who is too pretty.
I think that Rosamond Pike plays the older sister.
But, you know, it was Kira Knightley.
Kira Knightley is a good actress, but somehow I didn't take to her in this.
But still, I think it's slightly better.
The Woman in Black.
Ghost stories are my jam.
I love ghost stories.
I love all ghost stories.
And the thing I love about ghost stories is the sense of something caught out of the corner of your eye.
I hate jump scares.
I hate gore.
I just love that eerie feeling that something is really wrong.
The woman in black is based on a novel by Susan Hill, which is wonderful.
She is a wonderful ghost story writer.
She's written a number.
I've read a lot of her ghost stories, and she's written a good one.
The Woman in Black 1989 is, I believe, a British version of the novel, and it's really good, and it really captures the novel.
The Woman in Black with Daniel Radcliffe, when it came out, it was reviewed like, oh, this is so subtle.
Will young people get it?
And when I saw it, I thought it was trash.
I thought it was just one jump scare after another.
That original one is really good.
And you know what else is really good is the play.
It's a two-person play.
And when I saw the play, which was a long, long-running play in Britain, it was scary.
And I remember at the break, it ended with a shock at the intermission.
And I remember standing up and the lady in back of me had her foot propped up on my seat and got caught in my seat and she screamed.
I almost went through the roof.
I was already so keyed up from watching it.
Great ghost story.
The book is great.
The play is great.
1989 version is quite good.
I think the 2012 one is trash.
All right, I'm going to stop there.
Really interesting one.
We'll do it again with some more films.
Really interesting to take a look at the remakes and see.
You know, there's an old play.
It's called Burn This, I think, where the guy says Hollywood ruins everything.
And if they don't ruin it, they remake it and ruin it a second time.
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