Ladykillers remake

[DB7]

The Coen Bros remake starring Tom Hanks.
Stills gallery.

[Hackett]

I'm not a nasty person and I don't mean any harm or personal ill will to anyone connected with this remake. But am I the only person out here who will not mind if this film fails?.

[DB7]

It did used to annoy me. I was concerned they might have a detrimental slight on the originals charm but thus far the likes of Get Carter and The Italian Job have come and gone very quickly.

Hollywood has for years been ripping off classic European films (Spoorloos, one of my own faves was remade with Sandra ruddy Bullock) and all they've earned is more ridicule. (often for tacking on a silly 'feelgood' ending).

In this case it's the Coen Bros finally being consumed by the mainstream.

Question is, will Tom Hanks (in the Guinness role) get bumped off or will he survive? [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[Hackett]

If you phoned up Labrooks I bet they would not give you odds on him surviving. After all it is a Touchstone film. By the by is it my TV or in "GET CARTER" has Stallone stopped getting taller and started getting wider?.

[Villan]

NO.....NO.....NO.....NO.

[mysteriesofedgarwallace]

The original of Get Carter is one of my favourite films (why I'm here obviously!!)

The re-make was complete and utter drivel.

A remake of the Ladykillers? Is that all Hollywood can think of?

They must have run out of original ideas!

[deckard]

Oh dear, here we go again,a Hollywood remake with a big director,big actor(s'cuse the pun),loads of hype and it will be total dross.The trouble is because of the hype,lots of people will go to see it so the film will make money and Hollywood will do it again and again and.........is there any hope? frown

[DB7]

Ealing hands

The Coen brothers should have left The Ladykillers alone, says John Patterson in his roundup of new US movies

Monday March 29, 2004
The Guardian

Something worrisome is happening to the brothers Coen. The Ladykillers is their third sub-par project in six months, coming after Intolerable Cruelty, their worst movie since The Hudsucker Proxy, and the abrasively scatological Bad Santa, which they produced. I worried at the time of Intolerable Cruelty - which they merely rewrote - that once Ethan and Joel Coen let other creative hands into that hermetically sealed shared brain of theirs, the distinctive Coen-ness of their output might be compromised. The fact that The Ladykillers is a remake did nothing to assuage these fears, and for the first time I took my seat in a Coen brothers movie feeling more trepidation than ecstatic anticipation.
Like Alexander Mackendrick's 1955 original, this version puts five transcendently stupid crooks in the house of a little old lady who is doomed to die after she accidentally stumbles on their loot. Alec Guinness's gang leader, with his equine teeth and waxy pallor, is here replaced by Tom Hanks as Professor Goldthwaite Higginson Doyle, a southern stereotype in riverboat-gambler's finery and chin-whiskers. He insinuates his way into the house of Mississippi widow Marva Munson with elaborate politeness, posing as the leader of a string quintet: "Why, ma'am, we are practised in the delicate musics of the Cinquecento and the Ro-co-co," he purrs. He and his co-conspirators aim to tunnel through her root-cellar to the vault of a nearby gambling establishment, or, in the Prof's more highfalutin construction, "the super-secure repositories of the aforementioned lucre".

His team consists of a South Vietnamese general well versed in the tunnel-digging arts, a moronic football player, a butter-fingered explosives expert with Irritable Bowel Syndrome and a highly strung black kid named MacSam, who wears a baseball cap vouchsafing that "Jesus Is My Homeboy". Sadly, there will come a time in the film when you cannot wait for them all to die, so that you can finally go home.

Ranged against them is Marva, played by former Dallas schoolteacher Irma P Hall in a way that unfortunately recalls the black maid in Tom and Jerry cartoons. The Coens are prone to racial stereotyping in their movies, although, as some of my Jewish friends point out, it's usually people of the Coens' own ethnicity who get it in the neck (the John Turturro characters in Barton Fink and Miller's Crossing come to mind here). But in this film, both Marva and MacSam elicit awfully clammy and uncomfortable feelings.

The brothers seem to have alighted on the wrong Ealing comedy. Surely Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets, with its extreme literacy and utter heartlessness, would seem a more logical fit. Until they get back on form, one must settle for the meagre comforts on offer here: Sam Cooke and the Soul Stirrers singing Jesus, I'll Never Forget on the soundtrack, the soaring language of the Prof and the possibility that the movie may promote greater awareness of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

[DB7]

'The British are going to crucify us'

Tom Hanks and the Coen brothers have remade the Ealing classic, The Ladykillers. Is this sacrilege? Shawn Levy reports

Monday May 10, 2004
The Guardian

'I have never actually seen this particular Ealing movie." Tom Hanks is being honest, a trait for which those who run Hollywood and those who write about it have come to admire him. But maybe, in this context, it's a little too honest.

"That being said," he continues, "I'm certainly aware of it. I know it the same way I know the Carry On films - I've never seen any of those, either. But between reading old film catalogues and seeing AFI documentaries on TV, I'm aware of it. Alec Guinness and all that."

The film Hanks is comparing to the Carry On series is Alexander Mackendrick's Sunday-on-the-sofa standard of 1955, The Ladykillers, which has stood for half a century as a near-perfect blend of film noir cynicism, grotesque character-based comedy and high polish, complete with indelible performances by Peter Sellers, Katie Johnson, Herbert Lom, Danny Green and, yes, Alec Guinness. Hanks is discussing it for a reason: under the auspices of the writing-directing team of Ethan and Joel Coen, he has remade it. And, to give him some credit, he is aware of what he has got himself into.

"I know that when it comes time to talk to English papers they'll just crucify us for doing it," he says. "But ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's not like we were gonna remake Jaws. But nor is it Scaramouche. It's this other kind of thing." Is it? Perhaps.

The Coen-Hanks version of The Ladykillers follows the original surprisingly closely. A louche and perhaps quietly insane fellow, alleging himself to be a college professor on sabbatical (Hanks), hires a room from a daft but morally upright old woman as a cover for a robbery. He and his cohorts, operating under the guise of classical musicians, plan to tunnel from the landlady's house to a vault, empty it and then abscond. Despite the serial ineptitude of the robbers, the first half of the scheme goes off without a hitch. It is the absconding - specifically, getting away from the old gal, who catches on to her lodgers' true purposes - that proves troublesome.

The Coens' version is set not in a small 1950s London street but in a one-horse backwater town in contemporary Mississippi. The differences from Mackendrick's film are sufficient, in fact, that one of the players in the Coens' remake, comedian Marlon Wayans, who plays a member of the gang, was confused at his first exposure to the original. "I didn't know who I was," he recalls. "I was sittin' there watching the original thinkin', 'There ain't no black people in this! Who am I?'"

So the new Ladykillers is a remake and it's not - call it a variation on a theme. As it happens, both Hanks and the Coens have made remakes before, none so close as this to the original, and all three confess that the idea of doing it at all didn't exactly leap out and kiss them.

"In the abstract," says Joel Coen, "we never would have said, 'Let's remake The Ladykillers.'" Ethan continues his brother's thought: "We wrote it for Barry Sonnenfeld, who was going to direct." When Sonnenfeld (the Coens' former cinematographer, now a director in his own right) bowed out, the brothers stepped in. But there was a moment of indecision when they were forced to think about the casting.

"As we wrote it," Ethan says,"we didn't do our usual thing of thinking of actors who might do specific parts." And for some reason Hanks popped into their heads.

Hanks, too, initially had his doubts. "If someone had said to me, 'Listen, I'm sending you a script that's a remake of The Ladykillers that Disney is making,' there's just no way," he says. "I never would've got to reading it. But I was sent a Coen brothers script, and I leapt into that to see what it was like. It's wonderfully Coenesque, yet at the same time it had this very specific story, a caper, and as a selfish actor I said, 'Do they really want me?' And that was that."

Movies make strange bedfellows: although they are not sitting together in the same room, the three men participate in a verbal group hug as they talk about the film - even if they don't exactly use exactly the same terminology. Take the matter of the laugh. Hanks's character, the overeducated, seedily aristocratic southern gent GH Dorr, has a nervous, breathy laugh that emerges now and again like an embarrassed expletive of joy.

Hanks describes the origin of this strange gesture of mirth: "By the time we had done a speech five or six times, we were all bored. Professor Dorr realised he had stumbled upon a joke; he had made a witticism that had surprised even him, and he had delighted himself probably a little too much. I had this vision that he's a college professor of a very, very boring subject, and every now and again he would make these witticisms that he'd be the only one laughing at, up at the lectern. And it made Ethan laugh, so I just tried to make him laugh again and again over by the monitor."

The Coens, though, in the curious tag-team fashion in which they complete one anothers' thoughts, have a more technical explanation of Dorr's strange chortle. Joel says: "We called it 'the rat quiver laugh'. And the question was, How many times can you go to that well? How many times is too many for the rat quiver laugh? Ethan: "There's no formula, unfortunately." (Later on, a comment elicits a laugh from the brothers, and a wheezy, staccato, croupy rasp comes pulsing out of them both. You wonder if Hanks hasn't channelled the sound of his directors' laughter into his character's in so subtle a way that they themselves didn't recognise it.)

Then there's the dialogue - Dorr speaks in grandiloquent, rococo sentences stuffed with allusions and rhetorical flourishes. "The first time I read it," says Hanks, "I said, 'OK, this is very intimidating because this is just a shitload of stuff that you're gonna have to say.' But on further study I realised, 'This is beautiful because this is just a series of boxes of ideas and one does lead right into the next."

And the Coens? Joel: "Another person who speaks like that, who we mentioned to Tom, is William F Buckley." Ethan: "He doesn't have that regional thing, though." Joel: "But he has that command of complicated and yet precise locution." Ethan: "Each sentence is choreographed." Joel: "And a very impressive vocabulary." Ethan: "Yeah, the big words ... Tom could pull it all off."

Unlike Hanks, whose career has seen him bounce from lowbrow shenanigans to dark melodrama to historical epics to romantic comedy, the Coen brothers tend to stick to a noirish milieu in which traces of old movie genres adorn stories of criminals who aren't quite as clever as they believe themselves to be. As Joel puts it: "The criminals in our movies are, generally speaking, knuckleheads, so there is something amusing about them. You know what I mean? Their sins can sort of be looked at in an amusing way."

Just as there is a thematic similarity to the items in their oeuvre, the Coens rely on a consistent body of collaborators - cinematographer, composer, production designer and so on. It's been the same team, the two explain, for most of the 20 years since Blood Simple.

Joel: "Nothing's really changed. It's depressingly similar to the way we started." Ethan: "It's like going to work at the bank now. It's all a routine. 'Good morning, Marjorie.' And Marjorie opens your cash drawer and gets you a cup of coffee." He adds: "Somebody once asked us about [John] Turturro, if we developed a shorthand with him working together over the course of all these movies. And we said, 'It's beyond shorthand. We don't even talk to him!'"

[Gibbie]

It was a bad move!

I did not see the revised Get Carter, Italian Job or the Ladykiller's remake. And, I do not intend on seeing the next one.

The Hollywood moviemakers need to get original.

This is a good example of the ridiculous nature of multicultural revisionism that is rampant over here in our creative academies.

From first to last, the interview reveals all...'I have never actually seen this particular Ealing movie"... "We don't even talk to him!"

Gibbie

[MikeA]

[quote]Originally posted by DB7:
[QB]
"But ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's not like we were gonna remake Jaws. QUOTE]

Oh, well, that's all right then Tom.

[Banalorama]

Hundreds of films get remade all the time, but when they can't even be bothered to change the name - that really bothers me. It may actually be a really good film, but it will never match the original because it's character came from a period in time that will never be recreated. I could hope that this film will fail, but what would the point be, loads of total failure remakes have been and gone - this one failing won't stop them coming again.

[Bob M.]

Tom Hanks might be a big star, but he , or anyone else for that matter, will never live up to the Guinness role in Ladykillers. Professor Marcus is a joy to watch. The other gang members are spot on in a bumbling sort of way.
I remember one thing about Hollywood remakes of Brit classics,
WE DID IT FIRST!
WE DID IT BEST!
(sorry that's two.)

[Nettles]

Dear God, no.

Why can't they leave well alone?

[J Pearson]

I like Tom Hanks a lot - he is one of the best actors to come out the USA in recent times.... But I have to say that, without wishing to sound 'off', Americans cannot do comedy - especially 'Ealing' style comedies. Plus, Im kinda attached to the original 'cos my Father worked on it!

J.