Saturday, March 10, 2007

Saturday night's all right, right?

Title's because of when this is being done. Okay, so Anne Hathaway's going to go from playing Jane Austen to playing Agent 99. This is great in a way, especially if you're Brandon, but even with great sounding casting (Steve Carell, Alan Arkin and... er, The Rock as well) the idea of a Get Smart movie is loaded with potential for going wrong wrong wrong. Not as much as this, I admit (and whose great idea was that, I'd like to know?), but really.

What's bothered me most about the likes of Bewitched and Starsky and Hutch (apart from their not being very good, especially Bewitched) was that the makers never felt they could trust the basic material - the former became an impossibly overclever mess (would it have hurt Nora Ephron to just do it properly instead of turning it into a cackhanded tribute?), and the latter fell victim to the pre-and-post-Life On Mars need to send up everything from the 1970s (I didn't mind it so much with the Charlie's Angels movies for some reason, maybe because I never cared for that particular show when I was a boy). The Brady Bunch Movie and its sequel are one thing because it kept the basic template of the show but moved everything else forward. Plus they were both damned funny.

Similarly, The Fugitive never tried to screw around with its source, and look how well that turned out. Even George of the Jungle managed to not suck (unlike just about every other liveaction movie from a cartoon). But Get Smart... the odds are just too against it. Still, high odds beat no odds.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Actually, the Brady Bunch movies are good, but give me the Brdy Brides and the television movies that picked up the show years later.

I'll take those any day.

Cindylover1969 said...

I guess somebody has to; I hear they're not too good myself, but it's your privilege.