Don’t Play It Again, Sam!!!

My email was inundated with people sending this WSJ article.

For almost as long as there have been movies, there have been sequels. “The Godfather,” “Star Wars,” “The Lord of the Rings,” the Twilight series — if there’s anything Hollywood likes more than a blockbuster, it’s the follow-up to one. Perhaps it’s the dearth of original ideas or the desire among studios to cash in on a proven winner one more time (or two or three more times). So I can’t say I was particularly surprised to learn, earlier this month, that there’s talk of a sequel to that most storied of Hollywood productions, “Casablanca,” which turned 70 on Thanksgiving Day.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!!! It gets worse:

Despite several earlier attempts that ultimately got the ax, the new sequel is actually an old one, written sometime in the late 1980s by Howard Koch, who shared the original film’s 1943 Oscar for Best Screenplay with Philip and Julius Epstein. The script, “Return to Casablanca,” chronicles the afterlives of the four principal characters. After making it safely to America, Ilsa Lund (originally played by Ingrid Bergman) and Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) attempt in vain to reconnect with resistance fighters Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Captain Renault (Claude Rains) in North Africa. The script’s main conceit is that Ilsa has a son from her relationship with Blaine and the boy grows up to be like his father, politically and otherwise.

So, what? We’re in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade territory and can look forward to dialogue like this:

Rick: Junior?
Rick Junior: Yes, sir.
Rick: It is you, Junior.
Rick Junior: Don’t call me that. Please.

I swear, having seen some really fine movies lately, I was just about to pen a post lauding Hollywood for blessing us with a cinematic resurgence in 2012. Now this!

Perhaps I’m just being a stick-in-the-mud, a fuddy duddy, an old fart. Perhaps it makes all the cents sense in the world to do Casablanca II: Revenge of the Fallen.

Nah. No good reason.

UPDATE: Shaula Evans found this: 10 crazy attempts to continue the Casablanca story.

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