Which brings us to the whole topic of "Remakes". Why remake a movie? In an interview with the great Frank Capra I once saw, he was asked "What does Hollywood need today?". His reply: "The same thing it always needs: good ideas." Getting a good idea in film making as in anything else in life is the hard part. Everything else comes easy. So doing a remake is a way of making a movie without having to do the hard part: get a fresh idea. Let's face it the vast majority of remakes stink. The only reason a director does a remake is because he has the ego to think he can do the story better than the origial director. Most are mistaken. Here's my votes for the short list of remakes better than the original:My wife thinks the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much is better than the original. That's because she likes Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart. Heck, who doesn't?I like the remake of The Parent Trap better than the original. Why? Well, first let's look at the problems with the original. Mostly the miscasting of Hayley Mills She was fourteen, about three years too old for the part. One twin was supposed to be from California and the other from Boston. But both had British accents. All in all, it didn't work. Now in the remake Lindsay Lohan is the right age, about eleven. One twin is from California, the other from London. She does a credible job of the accents. The special effects were vastly improved from the original. The score was vastly superior to the original. The location shots in California and London were great.I also thought the remake of Sabrina better than the original. Why? First Julia Ormond did a vastly superior duckling-to-swan transformation than Audrey Hepburn did. Hers was: "Audrey Hepburn with a ponytail" to "Audrey Hepburn without a ponytail". Whoopee. Also the original's "Paris" scenes were positively laughable. The remake did great location shots. As to leading men, both Humphrey Bogart and Harrison Ford appeared too old for the part to me, so it's a toss-up. But in the remake the character of David Larabee was actually three-dimensional and had a redemptive ending. Not so the original.On the down side of remakes, it reminds me of someone looking at a copy of a great painting. Their comment was "It has everything that the original has, except of course, the originality." So it is with remakes.