Who Killed “Sleuth”?
Time Magazine, 12 October 2007 By Richard Corliss On consecutive weeks back in December 1972, the Palomar production company and 20th Century-Fox teamed to release two films: “Sleuth” and “The Heartbreak Kid”. Now, on consecutive weekends in October 2007, come remakes of those movies. As it happens, the original “Sleuth” and “Heartbreak” were smart and funny and took a fairly brutal view of their main characters. The remakes, though honoring the basic plots of their predecessors, are dumb, witless and humiliating to all parties. I guess I could spin this coincidence into a mournful essay on the devolution of movie culture over the past 35 years: how moviemakers have jettisoned subtlety in their attempts to appeal to a teen audience, how shades of gray have been coarsened to simple blacks and whites, how everything then was better than anything now, etc. etc. That alterkocker argument might be made to apply to the Farrelly brothers’ dumb-down of the Neil Simon-Elaine May “Heartbreak Kid
