The trailer for something they’re calling Annie starring Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz looks as lousy as it is terrible.
The race change for Daddy Warbucks (now named “Will Stacks” because there are only white people with the surname “Warbucks”) and Annie possibly requires the update to modern-day New York, but the depression-era setting was critical to the original stage production. If you change setting and character (and a race change is a character change — the experiences of a white orphan and a white millionaire from the 1933 is drastic enough from that of a black orphan and black millionaire from 2014 as to essentially make them different people), you’re no longer adapting the original story but rather producing something that is merely “inspired by.”
Aside from being far more faithful to the source material, the 1982 film featured Carol Burnett, Anne Reinking, Tim Curry, and Bernadette Peters, and the best you can give me 30 years later is Cameron Diaz and stale George Clooney and Facebook jokes? Really? It’s like no one told Diaz that she’s playing Miss Hannigan in an actual movie rather than a late-night TV show sketch.
serhasacomplaint 