Rent and Decide #1

Everything old is new again. After a few months of hiatus, I’m back! Hopefully the followers are still out there….still thinking, still challenging, still posting. As for me, the future holds more film reviews, more dvd art, more introspections, more essential questions, must see movies, movie company art -- in general, just overall more fun with Hollywood (plus a few new categories – “monkey” movies, dvd menu art, movies I wish I’d written, and like this post, something called “Rent and Decide.”) And keeping in line with the title of this post, here’s one for you. A few years back a movie with Queen Latifah came out called the Last Holiday. This week on DVD, another Last Holiday arrives. What’s the connection, you ask? Well, let’s see.

Here’s the summary for Queen Latifah’s movie: It's advice to follow for shy New Orleans cookware salesclerk Georgia Byrd (Oscar® nominee Queen Latifah) when she's led to believe that she has less than a month to live. It's time to give her life a serious makeover, so Georgia jets off on a dream vacation to live like there's no tomorrow! Enjoy hearty laughs and rollicking comedic misadventures when Georgia shakes up a glamorous European resort spa while enthusiastically embracing a new look...new moves...and a new attitude! LL Cool J is the handsome suitor back home who's not about to let Georgia slip away. Timothy Hutton, Gerard Depardieu, Alicia Witt and Giancarlo Esposito also star in this comedy hit that makes the good times last forever.

Don’t you just love “hearty laughs and rollicking comedic misadventures?” Anyway, here’s the summary for Alec Guiness’ Last Holiday: Told by his doctor that he has no more than a few months to live, drab British workingman George Bird (Alec Guinness) decides to spend his savings on lodging at a seaside resort. Once there, however, he finds his identity caught between upstairs and downstairs, the guests and the "help." A droll social commentary as well as an unpredictable dark comedy about life, death, and luck, Last Holiday is one of Guinness's finest moments.

Ah. Another example of Hollywood updating a classic for a contemporary audience. Of course, all the while not bothering to mention that this movie’s already been made (unless of course you look carefully at the credits. Writers Jeffrey Price & Peter S. Seaman are credited with the screenplay, with a nod to the original J.B. Priestley script. So, it takes two guys to “rewrite” something already written. Maybe we need a credit for “rewriters.”) Take out the substance of the original, the insight, and literary nature, and you end up with a relatively forgetful Hollywood outing, because obviously contemporary audiences don’t want all of that literary-ness and thinking stuff after all,right...

So what is the genesis of such projects? Is it somewhere deep in the dark recesses of the Hollywood creative director offices, where an astute decision is made to resurrect a financially solid property and give it new life? Or a choice to go with something a Hollywood executive can see, as opposed to something (new) which they a) have to read and b) understand? (Which some, maybe most, can’t do.)

Or is it because some Hollywood writer who has become lazy walks in and pitches a movie they’ve seen a long time ago, and it’d be a hell of a lot easier to rewrite that than create something spanking brand new?

Well, no matter. But in the watching is the answer. Which is better? Rent, and you decide.