. . . and today I'm not even talking about politics. Rather, it's the only possible explanation for why Shall We Dance?, starring Richard Gere (gack) and Jennifer Lopez (double gack), will be coming out in theaters soon, while the original Shall We Dance?, the charming, understated, and very funny 1996 Japanese film whose script was cannabalized to make this Gere-Lopez-Susan Sarandon egopic, is no longer available on video.
If your neighborhood video rental store still has cassettes, and they happen to have a copy of the original Shall We Dance?, rent it! This movie is one of the few reasons why we still own a VCR.
With luck, any success enjoyed by the current film will get Miramax to pull the original version out of its dusty back-catalog vaults and reissue it on DVD.
(Yes, there's also a 1937 Fred Astaire film called Shall We Dance, but that doesn't have anything to do with either of these modern films. The majority of Fred Astaire's catalog isn't out on DVD either, but that's a crime-wrapped-inside-a-mystery for another day ...)
Posted by Kevin at September 28, 2004 05:57 PM