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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Movie Listings
The Film File
This has been the season of remake hell, and it isn't over yet. There is nothing disreputable in the notion of producers rooting through used material, and one could, indeed, find cogent reasons for arguing that the history of cinema has been the aesthetic equivalent of refried beans. Nevertheless, I smell more desperation than inspiration in the latest scrabble for ready-made plots, much of it powered by simple demographics; somebody, somewhere, must have done the math and worked out that "Big"--the Tom Hanks kid-swells-to-adult comedy--was all of sixteen years old, that a whole swath of teen-agers had never seen it, and that now was therefore the time to fob them off with "Thirteen Going On Thirty," a product of surpassing moldiness. "Fifty First Dates" made a hash of ideas first mooted by "Groundhog Day," and now comes "Wicker Park," which you have to applaud for sheer folly. This doesn't just reprise another film. It reprises a French film.
The original was "L'Appartement," which came out in 1996, an epoch so remote that you could mention France in a political speech and not even guarantee a laugh. Anyway, something about that movie led the director Paul McGuigan or the writer Brandon Boyce to think, Boy, this is just crying out for Josh Hartnett and a snowy Chicago. Hartnett plays Matthew, once a photographer (as instanced by his holding a Leica in the opening credits), now an advertising executive with an adoring fiancee. Matthew...
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