Tag: remake

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Mean Girls (2024)

Directors – Samantha Jayne, Arturo Perez Jr. – 2024 – US – Cert. 12a – 112m

**

A reimagining as a musical of the eponymous, 2004 US High School movie in which the new girl finds herself up against a girl clique – out in UK cinemas on Friday, Wednesday, January 17th

Raised and homeschooled on the open plains of Kenya, 16-year-old Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) is in for a shock when her mum suddenly decides the family is moving back to the US. The shock comes specifically in terms of High School, which she swiftly discovers to be a hostile world of exclusive cliques.

Two outsiders Janis (Auli’i Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey) take it upon themselves to explain who’s who and against their advice, she falls in with the Plastics: Regina George (Reneé Rapp), Gretchen (Bebe Wood), and Karen (Avantika), a group of three rich, bitchy and style-obsessed girls who regard themselves as superior to everyone else.

Cady swiftly puts a foot wrong by falling head over heels for Regina’s boyfriend Aaron Samuels (Christopher Briney), and the narrative swiftly develops into a conflict between her and the other three Plastics, particularly Regina. It’s a musical, too: cue song and dance numbers.… Read the rest

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Peter Von Kant
(Peter Von Kant)

Director – François Ozon – 2022 – France – Cert. 15 – 85m

***1/2

A re-imagining of R.W. Fassbinder’s all-female-cast The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant, with the three central gay characters switched from female to male – plays in cinemas from Friday, 30th December

Köln, 1972. Peter von Kant (Denis Ménochet) is a successful film director who resides in his apartment with his personal assistant Karl (Stefan Crepon). He is visited by his old friend, the singer Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani), whose blown up picture adorns one of his walls. She introduces him to young man of Arab extraction and actor wannabe Amir Ben Salem (Khalil Gharbia) with who Peter becomes besotted and who subsequently moves in with him.

Their passionate relationship is, however, doomed, with Amir suddenly leaving some months later on the pretext of visiting his wife when she unexpectedly phones him from a nearby city. After Aamir has left him, Peter becomes an emotional wreck. On his birthday, he waits on the phone, hanging up in seconds when he realises the caller isn’t Amir. He vents his emotional distress on his three birthday visitors: his mother Rosemarie (Hanna Schygulla), his boarding school student daughter Gabrielle (Aminthe Audiard) and Sidonie.… Read the rest

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Living

Director – Oliver Hermanus – 2022 – UK – Cert. 12a – 102m

*****

Diagnosed with stomach cancer and given only months to live, a bureaucrat searches for something – anything – to give purpose to his hitherto meaningless life in this remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 4th following its screenings in the BFI London Film Festival 2022, while Ikiru is on BFI Player subscription

For anyone who has had the privilege of seeing Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952) it is a very strange thing to watch this remake of it. On the one hand, it is exactly the same film. It has the same plot. On the other, it is completely different. Both are set in the 1950s, the original in Japan and the new one in London.

At this point, I have to say that this remake sounded to me (until I’d seen it) like a very bad idea. Cinema is littered with great films that have been remade as shadows of their former selves. Generally speaking, most ideas like this are better left well alone. To make matters worse, this is a case of an established novelist writing a screenplay: producers love this because they see a bestselling author as having a reliable track record but, in fact, the skills required for writing a novel and a movie are very different indeed.… Read the rest