I can’t tell you how thrilled I was that THE HEARTBREAK KID tanked at the boxoffice. Talk about a remake that never should have been remade. The original 1972 version starring Charles Grodin, written by Neil Simon, and directed by Elaine May was a comic masterpiece. But in the hands of the Farrelly Brothers, all nuance, social commentary, elegance, and ethnicity was thrown out in favor of their special brand of gross out, low road, scatter shot humor. I can imagine the other remakes the Farrelly Brothers have in development.
GUNGA DIN – Ben Stiller stars as Gunga Din, no longer a regimental bhisti, now a retard. He blows the horn to alert the soldiers of danger but since his mouth is full of old socks (the audience should scream at that gag) he has to blow the horn out of his ass. A HUGE improvement over George Steven’s little B-movie.
CITIZEN KANE – Ben Stiller in a fat suit stars as Michael Jackson Cane, a newspaper tycoon who builds Hearst Castle for all the paper boys who deliver the morning edition. When Stiller farts in the pool it causes a tsunami. Destined to be the version film historians will remember.
THE MIRACLE WORKER – Ben Stiller as Helen Keller, who now must save her home when the sewer backs up filling it with three feet of excrement. HILARIOUS scene where she mistakes floating turds for various household items or food products. Academy Award time for sure!
ERIN BROCKOVICH -- Ben Stiller in drag stars as Erin. In taking only slight liberties with this true life story, Erin drinks the toxic water herself and grows a penis. And every time she gets mad it becomes erect. The courtroom scene where she pokes the court reporter’s eye out is pure comic gold.
And finally…
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN – Ben Stiller, on vacation at a beach at Normandy is in for a shock when the D-Day Invasion hits. His pratfalls over dead bodies, and ducking just in time for bullets to hit unsuspecting soldiers will cause such laugher you won’t hear his funny rant on French hospitality.
Rent the original HEARTBREAK KID. You’ll be glad you did.
33 comments :
Unfortunately you cannot rent it unless you find an old VHS. It is out of print, like these films...
school for scoundrels (with Terry-Thomas, not the lame 2006 one)
il sorpasso
the daytrippers
the group
J.T. (Robert M. Young)
cuisine et dependances
muddy river
forbidden 1932
under the volcano
marche à l'ombre
le pere noel est une ordure
true west
Quo Vadis 1951
If I were King
arsene lupin 2004
midnight 1938
bluebeard's eighth wife 1939
the hit
edge of darkness 1943
johnny guitar
the railway children 1970
enter laughing
ishtar
a foreign affair 1948
situation hopeless but not serious
red desert
shopworn 1932
the green man
easy living 1937
I've seen good stuff from Ben Stiller occasionally. Jerry Stiller was God awful. They also toned down the Jewish humor and the Miranda character was less apealing then the Lila character.
PS: If you need Elaine May, you can get A New Leaf at http://www.thesmallscreen.org/comedy.html
(as well as other OOP goodies).
not 100% kosher but they send it and it works fine.
RAGING BULL - Ben Stiller stars as Jake LaMotta. He breaks the fouth wall and rants for 95 minutes while Christine Taylor sits in the background quietly crying.
ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN - Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn star as Woodward and Bernstein. The White House isn't talking, and Stiller and Vaughn won't stop. Taking the role of Deep Throat to heights Hal Holbrook never imagined is Andy Dick in an Oscar-worthy performance. Don't miss the final ten minutes!
KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS - Following in the footsteps of Alec Guiness, Ben Stiller plays eight roles in this comedy masterpiece. Watch as he fails to disappear into eight separate personalities, instead playing them all as out-of-control rage freaks. You'll laugh at the antics as Stiller tries to kill Stiller in this blockbuster coming Summer 2008!
The Defiant Ones - Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy as the two prisoners, one white, one black who escape chain=ned together. Only this time is laughs all the way. With Jim Carrey as thwe Sheriff.
Among the many projects the Farrelly Brothers have been kicking around is Walter The Farting Dog, a children's book based on the adventures of a perpetually gas-passing canine. My only question is how they will get Stiller to fit in the dog suit.
Also in development at various times; a remake of the "The Three Stooges" and a feel good movie for the whole family "I Want To F*ck Your Sister".
(I'm not making this up)
I'm sure a remake of "His Girl Friday" with Stiller in the role of Hildy AND Ralph Bellamy can't be far behind.
Howard Hawks eat your heart out.
ISHTAR is out of print? Well then, the news isn't all bad. Not all of Elaine May's movies were masterpieces.
@theo "Père Noël est une ordure" is out on DVD, you just have to bring yourself to put down your freedom fries and buy it direct from those terror-supporting fags. Try this link for example:
http://www.amazon.fr/Père-Noël-ordure-Édition-simple/dp/B00008A8RY/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/403-6454344-5642813?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1191921943&sr=8-1
Though that is one film that I would love to see the Farrellys remake. Their version would probably be more suitable for your granny than the original.
They couldn't make Ishtar any more unwatchable either.
But the one "remake" that really frightened me was reading last year that Andrew Lloyd Webber's next project was to be a musical version of "The Master and Margerita" Thankfully he seems to have put that idea to one side for now.
I'm thinking a remake of Bergman's The Seventh Seal where a flatulent Death faces off with a medieval knight who gets a set of chess pieces stuck in his rectum.
Plus the Swedish countryside being engulfed in a flood of semen when the local sperm bank ruptures.
Too subtle?
Brett Favre cameos! That's what all these projects need.
On the Waterfront - As a boxer-turned-dockworker, Stiller pratfalls his way with silly antics through the illegal doings of the union while trying to win over the girl whose brother he accidentally farted on. The hilarious final scene has Stiller's wacky pigeons shitting all over the corrupt union leader.
I imagine the Farellys would like to remake a movie featuring animals, so...
BRINGING UP BABY
Ben Stiller plays a palaeontologist who falls for Julia Stiles, but accidentally gives her pet leopard a dose of LSD. After chewing through the neck of a brontosaurus skeleton, offending his boss (played by David Schwimmer, natch), the leopard takes her leg off at the knee and rams her tibia up Ben's groin. All is well when the leopard discovers his artistic talents (Jackson Pollock with extra spots), allowing Ben to buy Julia a new leg. Hilarity ensues.
LASSIE
Lassie has been mistaken for a female all these years, but is found out when he sires a litter of prize-winning Collies. Ben Stiller, Lassie's owner, takes Lassie on a wild ride across America to discover his true pedigree, both of them sowing a lot of wild oats along the way. That is, the dog gets all the action (in slo-mo), while Ben tries to nail the owners, to varying degrees of failure. Eventually, he meets his match in a prize winner and her owner, and they go head-to-head and paw-to-paw at the Mayflower dog show, where Fred Willard still commentates while high on the green stuff. Hilarity ensues.
Any David Lean material. As an astoundingly film ignorant friend said to me while watching Lawrence of Arabia (when he learned Lean also directed Zhivago), "It's so slow and boring - they should remake both of 'em."
Think of all the hijinks opportunities blowing up the trains or dieing while crossing the desert. Drinking pee, peeing pants, farts from eating too many scorpions. Oh, gosh, it's making my sides hurt!
www.theskinofmyteeth.com
David
Dirty Dancing:
Ben Stiller stars as Johnny Castle, who stumbles across a job as a dancing instructor in a holiday camp in a newspaper ad and, because he is totally broke, manages to get rid of all the professional dancers in the audition via lacing the free soda in the waiting room with laxatives. Imagine his sheer glee when the whole competition runs to the adjacent bathrooms while Johnny gets the job with the dancing moves he learned ten years ago in highschool from his first cousin (male) trying to impress his butt-ugly girlfriend at the junior prom.
Poor Johnny then has to deal with about two dozen randy teenage girls who all think that he can make them a woman, especially young hot Frances 'Baby' Houseman (Lindsay Lohan).
Johnny saves the day by secretly getting dancing lessons, again from his male cousin who he flies in from Trashcan, New Jersey. Johnny also shows his true sensitive side by faking a leg cramp during the night before the final dance session, when little Frances tries to lose her virginity on him right on the band podium next to the holiday camp's main dancefloor.
In the final scene we see Larry (the cousin) and Johnny arm in arm, waving goodbye to the Houseman family driving away, with a bunch of new, hot, randy teenage girls arriving in a schoolbus.
I haven't seen the remake and I don't plan to. But for the life of me, I have no idea why people keep calling the original a classic.
I thought it was just flat-out boring. Grodin was annoying at best, loathsome at worst. The movie seemed to be striving for a point but never found it. It seemed to me like one of those movies that at the time seems to be a take-no-prisoners commentary upon society, but becomes increasingly irrelevant, trivial, and phony as the years pass.
All I can say is that during the scene where
(oh, SPOILERS, I suppose)
Grodin is in Eddie Albert's study and smugly declining offers to be bought out of his engagement, it was the first point in the film where I was genuinely excited to see what comes next. I thought there was a good chance that Albert would beat Grodin as no man has even been beaten before, and at this stage in the narrative, this above all was what I wanted to happen to that character.
I do wish it were easily available on DVD so I could see it again. Every time someone I respect claims that it's one of the greatest comedies (hell, the greatest movies) of all time, I want to see it again and try to figure out if I'm missing something.
But as-is, in my own logbook it remains as an insignificant waste of time.
While I'm not a huge fan of the Farrelly Brothers, I have enjoyed a couple of their movies. I haven't seen, and probably wont end up seeing, the Heartbreak Kid. Their humour is definitely not on the subtle side, but I do like that their films tend to be actually heartfelt, in their own twisted way. And Ben Stiller has been in only two of their movies. He's not exactly a staple. Ben Stiller can be hit and miss, I find.
Ben Stiller stars as Rhett Butler. In Gone With The Wind Today, Ben drives south to meet the parents in a pre-antebellum comedy of errors. Scarlett (Johanssen) takes a curtain call and literally turns it into a dress as she drives to an overcrowded jail for rent money. The evil carpetbaggers are played by politicians of no significant value.
Queen Latifah is Mammy, David Spade plays Ashley and Lindsay Lohan co-stars as Belle Watling, the feisty redhead with a heart of gold.
-hollywood blond
The Cable Guy- Ben Stiller is a hapless actor/writer who's stalked by his cable guy who wants to be his friend and get him in a meeting with Judd Apatow.
I wouldn't mind Stiller in a remake of SPR, if it means he get shot to death just like Tom Hanks.
Theo, "Johnny Guitar"'s on DVD. So's "In A Lonely Place". Both are sitting on my shelf right now.
--SD
theo, great call on "Il Sorpasso" (aka "The Easy Life"). I was quite lucky to find a VHS for rent about a decade ago. Several on your list have shown up on Turner Classic Movies, including Capra's excellent "Forbidden," which I managed to record to DVD last time it aired, and Leisen's "Midnight" (which is actually 1938, assuming it's the Claudette Colbert vehicle). A few years ago, I saw a great print of "Midnight" on a perfect double bill with "The Awful Truth" at the New Beverly in L.A.
As for the Farrellys, I'm a fan of "Mary" and "Stuck on You," and thought "Shallow Hal" couldn't quite deliver on its promising premise. The others I've seen have their moments, but remaking "The Heartbreak Kid" sounded like a no-win decision from day one. Curiosity will probably get the best of me when it comes to DVD or cable.
I actually have
Pere Noel (Fr version)
School for Scoundrels (UK)
and
In A Lonely Place (US, not on list...)
and lots of DVDs I ordered in french straight from those salauds francais. (and norwegian dvds ordered in norwegian fra de forpulte hestekuker der oppe.)
Just a comment on US market.
I'll shut up now.
Except to say that Ben Stiller could accidentally remake one of his own good movies like Flirting with Disaster, and then fire the development girl who didn't notice it was one of his own, and someone could film his tirade and put it on YouTube.
The Pecan Pie rant alone was enough to make the first Heartbreak Kid a classic. Plus, since I had never had pecan pie before seeing the movie, I decided to try some, and it's quite a tasty item. No wonder Lenny was so upset.
Funny review
on "News as Gossip"
I was seeing the previews for weeks and kept wondering why the Farrellys made a remake of that Neil Simon screenplay that starred Richard Dreyfuss. All the while I was thinking this was The Goodbye Girl. Now I can't stop imagining Marsha Mason as a loud-mouthed nymphomaniac.
I'm with Andy. When I saw The Heartbreak Kid (the original) I thought it was dull as dishwater. I was much younger then, so I'd be willing to give it another shot. The only Ben Stiller movies I remember seeing are Dodgeball and Meet the Fokkers. I found them amusing diversions.
Ken:
You're the perfect example of why the movie stiffed: someone pulled in by the title, expecting to see a remake of a Neil Simon script and ambushed by a film Howard Stern would be proud of. You feel like you've been lied to.
That and the fact that it's two and a half hours long, consistent with too many other bloated products out there from artistes who are never told no. Bad enough for almost any movie but unforgivable for a comedy
imdb has Heartbreak Kid (remake, of course) at 115 minutes. Maybe it only feels like 150.
Haven't seen the original in a good while, but remember it as brilliant. Compared to Dodgeball, it's Citizen Kane (or insert your own personal greatest-film-ever).
jbryant:
I stand corrected. I was thinking of another bloated non-comedy I saw the same week that was 2 1/2 hours.
HEARTBREAK KID was still too long at just short of two hours--and I say that as someone who really liked it
THE GODFATHER
Ben Stiller stars as Michael Cornholeon, a veteran of the Iraq war who's having wacky flashbacks to the latrine explosion that covered him in crap and almost ended his life.
His father, Don Wenow R. Gayaparal Cornholeon is played by Jack Black as a shouting, spastic guy who likes to throw his hands out in front of him as he talks. Don Wenow is the head of one of the five organized crime families in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Don Wenow wants his son to grow up outside of the family, but when the Don gets a severe case of the squirts from some Ex-Lax that Don Bigweenie's henchman slipped into his gravy, Michael seeks to get revenge.
You'll laugh as the Don makes sure a powerful Hollywood exec's horse never breeds again by putting a different part of the animal's anatomy in bed with him.
You'll roll in the aisles as Michael's girlfriend Connie Lingus (played by Katherine Heigl) marries him and gives birth to a retarded double size manchild, played by Verne Troyer.
And you'll bust a stitch when Rainy Cornholeon (played by Will Ferrel) is gunned down at a toll booth for using the carpool lane without any additonal riders after being betrayed by underboss Testicleo (played by Abe Vigoda).
I claim no credit for the above post
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID -- Ben Stiller and Rosie O'Donnell star in this remake of the 1969 classic. We watch as the comic cowboy duo causes havoc during their rampage of robbing every bank throughout the Wild West, while confusion reigns whenever someone calls out "Butch!" and they both answer. In addition, Rosie finally gets her revenge on one of her loudest critics when, in a casting coup, Donald Trump does a cameo as Woodcock, the security guard on the train who gets blown up twice -- the second time actually mussing up his hair... Most memorable line in the film:
Butch (take your pick as to which one you're thinking of): You didn't see Hasselbeck out there, did you?
Sundance: No.
Butch: Good. For a moment I thought we were in trouble.
This comment belongs in the "obvious" section, but money's so tight, and producers are educated by what they find on the racks of the video store (so to speak), remakes are all that sell.
I admire "New Line" because even if their films aren't always the best, at least they try some original ideas.
My favorite are these hilarious comedies:)
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