Back in Bowl

Now that films such as DAWN OF THE DEAD and ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 have gotten their unimpressive remakes, we have crossed the threshold into concious memory towards the films that I either remember opening or in some cases actually saw first run. ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING are coming and now today it's been announced that we're getting...ALL OF ME. With Queen Latifah. Which makes me wonder if Steve Martin refused to make a BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE sequel and this is somehow Latifah's revenge on him.

Directed by Carl Reiner in his fourth and final teaming with Steve Martin, ALL OF ME has actually been kind of forgotten in recent years. This is somewhat ironic, as the film was at the time considered a minor comeback for Martin after such box-office failures as THE LONELY GUY and Reiner's own THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS, films which are probably better known than ALL OF ME is.

I'm just tired of remakes. More and more they seem to take what was interesting and unique about the film they're based on and toss them out the nearest window. Yes, they don't burn the negatives of the originals but there once was a time when THE WICKER MAN was a classy British cult item that Christopher Lee referred to as the best film he had ever been in...now it's a crummy Nicolas Cage vehicle that has been the object of justifiable derision and video mash-ups on YouTube. And the memory of the original gets trashed. Just as the memory of a Steve Martin-Carl Reiner teamup is about to get trashed for a Queen Latifah vehicle.

There are original scripts out there. Some of them are probably even pretty good. I'd like to see more of them get made.