The Jazz Singer (1980)

The Jazz Singer is a 1980 American drama film and a remake of the 1927 classic The Jazz Singer, released by EMI Films. It starred Neil Diamond, Laurence Olivier and Lucie Arnaz, and was directed by Richard Fleischer and produced by Jerry Leider.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) The movie's title isn't even accurate. Jess doesn't perform jazz music, but rather rock music, as Neil Diamond does in real life.
 * 2) Jess is a completely unlikeable protagonist who behaves like a jerk to his friends, family and colleagues, abandons his wife for another woman, and then abandons her (while she's pregnant, too!) late in the movie, albeit it's implied they reconcile at the end.
 * 3) Bad acting from both Neil Diamond, who is very flat and wooden, and Laurence Olivier, whose performance is like some weird caricature of a Jewish cantor.
 * 4) The plot of Jess being estranged from his father is extremely cliched, which is unsurprising considering it's pretty much lifted from the earlier 1927 film, with no concessions to the 53 years that had passed.
 * 5) Rivka's character suddenly changes completely halfway through the movie. At first, she's very supportive of Jess, but as soon as he becomes successful, she suddenly becomes a resentful killjoy, just so that the movie can break them up and start having him dating Molly instead.
 * 6) * What's more, the break-up with Rivka comes way too late in the movie for the audience to have any reason to root for Jess and Molly's relationship to work. It almost feels like the movie's building up to having Jess realize that he's made a mistake and reconcile with Rivka, until Molly reveals that she's pregnant.
 * 7) It prominently features blackface like the original movie did - even though the practice had already been deemed racist by the time 1980 rolled around.
 * 8) Incredibly rushed and unsatisfactory ending. Jess's reconciling with his father and Molly feels like it happens just because it's the end of the movie and that's what's supposed to happen.
 * 9) It completely ruins the charm of the original 1927 classic by nearly removing what made the old 20's film so important to cinema history, by making it full voiced with sound as oppose to half of it being silent and the other half being fully voiced with synced sound, and having the Jazz music be replaced with Rock music, which is just unnecessarily modernizing the film to be more accepting of the 80s, which is just horrible and disrespectful to the legacy of Alan Crossland and his work.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) Lucie Arnaz gives a good performance, and Laurence Olivier's acting is at least entertainingly bad.
 * 2) The soundtrack is good. While Neil Diamond's acting might not be particularly good, his musical talents are on full display.
 * 3) They at least throw in enough changes to the original 1927 movie's plot (most notably Cantor Rabinovich surviving this time around) to avoid it being a complete retread.

Reception
Unlike the original, the film received mostly negative reviews. Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times awarded it one star out of four, saying that the remake "has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list". Another negative review came from Janet Maslin of The New York Times who stated "Mr. Diamond, looking glum and seldom making eye contact with anyone, isn't enough of a focus for the outmoded story". Time Out London called the appearance of Neil Diamond "the most cautious soft-rock superstar movie debut you'll ever get to see". The only top critic to give a positive review of the film (according to Rotten Tomatoes) was Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader. He wrote that "Richard Fleischer's direction is appropriately close-in and small, and Diamond himself, while no actor, proves to be a commandingly intense, brooding presence". The film is listed in Golden Raspberry Award founder John J. B. Wilson's book The Official Razzie Movie Guide as one of "The 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made".

Diamond was nominated for both a Golden Globe Award and a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actor for the same role in this movie, winning the latter. The only other time an actor was nominated for both awards for the same performance was Pia Zadora, who uniquely won both in 1981.