The Second (Third? Fourth?) Time Around.

Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson in "The Big Year."

Three new movies open wide tomorrow, and I’m using the term “new” loosely. The Big Year, a male-midlife-crisis yarn directed by David Frankel (now best known for The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me, but for me he’ll always be the guy who made Miami Rhapsody), stars Owen Wilson, Jack Black and, sadly, Steve Martin. Why “sadly”? Because Martin, once a kind of gold standard for movie comedy, now saves his intellectual A-game for his books and his plays and his art collection and his website, while seemingly picking his film roles based on their ability to make his fans wince. I mean, two Pink Panther remakes. Two Cheaper by the Dozen remakes. Sigh.

I want The Big Year — a movie about competitive birdwatching, a pastime that seemed more pure before the big endorsement money came in and tainted it — to be good. Early reviews have not been kind.

And speaking of remakes: two seminal ’80s films are being revisited this week. People are very upset about this. They should let it go.

First, a little heresy: the original Footloose was not all that good. Sure, Kevin Bacon. But also Lori Singer, one of the least exciting “stars” of the 1980s. And while the whole the-old-folks-won’t-let-us-dance plot was good for generating some generational friction, it always seemed to me like a straw-man construct: too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Ironically, our socially polarized country today makes a new look at a town outlawing music and dancing potentially interesting. We’ll see.

And then there’s The Thing, ostensibly a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 cult classic but, reportedly, a functional remake. (The film takes place at the Norwegian camp in the Arctic Circle referenced by the Americans at the beginning of Carpenter’s movie; but really, a shape-shifting alien picking off one member of your team at a time is still a shape-shifting alien picking off one member of your team at a time, regardless of whether your name is Mac or Sven.) Fans of the original are all over the Internets, complaining that Hollywood is once again raping their childhood.

The thing is (see what I did there?), Carpenter’s Thing was a remake too — of The Thing From Another World, a sturdy 1951 thriller that has fans of its own. (Disclaimer: I liked both films.) It seems a bit churlish to rail on about the desecration of a great 30-year-old movie that did its own desecrating of another 30-year-old movie.

There are many good reasons to yell at Hollywood filmmakers these days, but complaining about their love of doing things over again is a pretty old song. Older than this song, even:

Small World Dept.: Footloose also starred Sarah Jessica Parker, who would later star in Miami Rhapsody, the directorial debut of The Big Year Director David Frankel. (She was also in L.A. Story with Steve Martin, back when Steve Martin movies were something to get excited about.) And Dianne Wiest, who played Lori Singer’s mom in Footloose (and Steve Martin’s sister in Parenthood, come to think of it), appears in The Big Year in the role of … Jack Black’s mom. Was Dianne Wiest born a mom? Discuss.