Annie Dear: Remakes really aren’t worth making – well, most of the time

They say “you can’t go home again,” which I think goes hand in hand with “the grass is always greener.”

We do tend to want something unattainable either moving forward or wishing backward, and it takes a special person to admit that they’re deliriously content with what they have right now this minute.

I speak not, however, of the economics or the emotions of wanting something better, or yearning that the good old days were the good nowadays. I am in fact referring to remakes.

As my darling husband, Sir, often opines “how can you have a James Bond who isn’t Sean Connery” and other sage-like mutterings, and I think it’s a perfect example of not being able to go home again.

You have to make your current home the one you want to be in. No use pining for the porch swing of your youth if you haven’t got a porch in your current third-floor apartment, now is there? If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.

Just as in Hollywood, you can’t make a current “Dr. No” do anything but pale by comparison to the original because, well frankly, it’s just not right, it’s undoable. It’s not yours to mess around with. Raquel Welch in a hide bikini does not replicate herself. Sean Connery is unclonable.

How can you remake The Three Stooges without the original Curly? The “nyuk, nyuk, nyuk” just doesn’t ring true at all. You cannot have “Alfie” without Michael Caine and you must have rocks in your head to have “The Pink Panther” with anyone other than Peter Sellers as Clousseau – as much as we all love Steve Martin, Clousseau he ain’t.

According to Sir, “The Thomas Crown Affair” has to star Steve McQueen or it isn’t worthy of air time. Now as much as I adored Steve McQueen back in the day of having posters metaphorically on the wall and going to sleep dreaming that I would one day be Mrs. Steve McQueen, I do think Pierce Brosnan did a passable job. I think he and Roger Moore made pretty spiffy James Bonds, but I’m not at all sure about Daniel Craig. I mean James just has to play baccarat and drink his martini shaken, not stirred. How can he play Texas Hold ’Em, and casually state that he doesn’t care how his martini comes? It’s just not cricket.

I do see what Sir means, but then again – George Clooney in “Ocean’s Eleven,” Don Johnson in “Born Yesterday” and the “Long Hot Summer.” Well, move over Frank Sinatra, William Holden and Paul Newman is all I can say. Well, that and “be still my beating heart,” that is.

I am in fact going to see a type of remake this week – “Rain,” the show on at Starlight, with four boys playing Beatles songs. My darling daughter, Madam, saw it in New York and adored it, and so will drag me mentally kicking and screaming to it. Apart from the fact it’s a week night, it’s in the open air and is likely to be about 412 degrees, you just can’t out-Beatle the Beatles. I do hold out some hope though, because although my daughter obviously wasn’t around in the ’60s and ’70s, she was around me and my CD player long enough to appreciate the group, and our own harmonized version of “Help” is something pretty darn special, even if I do say so myself.  

She now, in fact, has all of the Beatles recordings herself.

Right now, however, I must confess I am wallowing in a tiny bit of bah-humbugness, and I hope I’m proved wildly wrong. Knowing me, I will indeed adore the whole thing and resurrect all my CDs and will have a little nostalgia-fest for a couple of weeks and enjoy every minute of it.  

I am very much looking forward to one specific remake though. A new movie of “Les Miserables” – or Les Miz as it’s known nowadays – or indeed “The Glums” as it’s known in Australia, is due out later this year, starring our own Aussie wonderboys, Hugh Jackman and Russell Crowe – although Russell is indeed a Kiwi, but let’s not spoil the story for the facts.

I can’t remember how many times I have seen the stage version of this wonderful musical, but I know I wasn’t thrilled to bits with the original movie based on it, so I am hoping (the grass being hopefully greener, of course) that this new one will prove to be the bee’s knees.

I am quite prepared to arm myself with a crateful of Kleenex in order to sing along and have a damned fine sob at the same time.  

Sir will no doubt scoff and bah-humbug himself, his having slept through the stage version, only vaguely stirring when the cannon went off not eight rows in front of him. I guess show tunes are just not his bag, and that’s fine. I won’t drag him kicking and screaming to anything.

Just so long as I can get the remote – and the tissues – when I need it.