Annie (2014)
The Soundtrack
This version is nice. It's not great, but I sort of liked it. The familiar songs and the new ones were OK, but how do I complain without sounding like a racist? I simply can't because anything I say about this would make me sound like one.
I love Quevenzhane Wallis. She is a natural. It's not the issue here. Little Orphan Annie was a red head and all the nationalities that played Little Orphan Annie on stage were "recognized" because of the red hair wig the actors wore.
Of course, it would have been silly if they put a red hair wig on top of Quevenzhane because she was about ten or eleven years old. If she were a teenager, that would be another story altogether. They just gave her mop-like tresses, similar to the black and white drawings of Annie's hair before her comic strip became technicolor. Still...
See.
Anything I would say would make me sound like a racist. FYI. I am brown-skinned(I have a perpetual tan), so I don't have the gall or the right to look down on people of any color.
My concerns about remakes and reboots are as follows:
1)People are running out of ideas;
2)the ones updating the script are veering away from the original thought(like a character is totally different from the original depiction of that character);
3)you hardly recognize the story anymore;
4) and loads and loads of other stuff.
I don't hate remakes. There are times when I watch the different versions of LOVE AFFAIR (including An Affair to Remember) on the same evening. I also do that with THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (which actually includes You've Got Mail). It's nice to see how a story adapts to the current time and environment so when The Karate Kid became the Kung Fu Kid, I still watched it. After all, they claimed it wasn't a remake, but an update.
When I watched ENDLESS LOVE, I agreed with the author that it was mangled beyond recognition, but I enjoyed it by imagining that it's a totally different story.
Hmmm...
I remember the screenwriting workshops given by Hollywood and Local professionals that I attended when they talked about formulas/formulae for horror movies, love stories, family centered stories, stories fit for the whole family, mystery thrillers and many, many others. There are certain elements that are the same, but the twists are different. One of them even justified that it's not because people lack ideas and imagination, but some situations and stories are simply TIMELESS.
Since people abuse the term loosely based, why do we have to say that it's a remake or a reboot? If we're scared of being accused of plagiarism, then why don't we just write a similar, but almost totally different story, give it another title like what most of the good writers do, then just say it's 'loosely based' on so and so?
Steve Martin's remakes and stories that are 'loosely based' on classic stories are much, much better. Even if it is modernized, the stories are still very, very recognizable. Even if you're not the type who reads the opening credits you could still say, "Oh, this story is like Silas Marner..."
In this movie's case, the only things that are recognizable are some of the names, sans Daddy Warbucks.
Toward the middle of the film I just told myself to think of it as a totally different movie. I treated it as a TV movie or a Hallmark special then tried to quash the images of the red-headed Annie out of my mind.
I was a little successful so I sort of enjoyed the film. Well, scratch sort of out. I enjoyed the film.
Directed by
| Will Gluck | ||
Writing Credits
| Will Gluck | ... | (screenplay) and |
| Aline Brosh McKenna | ... | (screenplay) |
| Thomas Meehan | ... | (stage play book) |
| Harold Gray | ... | (comic strip "Little Orphan Annie") |
