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The Monday Morning Question: What the heck with the remakes already?
Monday, September 15, 2008
It seems American cinema is having a bit of trouble coming up with new ideas lately. Not everyone, mind you -- thank the gods for Joel and Ethan Coen's cold, impersonal, yet humane filmmaking -- but enough. Any movie that makes more than a couple bucks profit gets hammered into a trilogy whether the subject matter can really carry a premise for three films or not; 70-year-old films are being "reimagined" out of desperation to film something, anything, and shove it into the theaters for the fall semester crowd.
What do you think of all this? Good, bad? Does it just appear that there are a lot of remakes because we're missing the really good, original films?
And while I'm at it, I have a bit of an offshoot question: What the heck with Gus Van Sant's remake of "Psycho"?
Here's all I got on the subject, and bear in mind it's not exactly a fully-formed thought. Hitchcock's aesthetic seems to remain somewhat constant throughout his career, but on several occasions veers straight into camp territory. If not reined in, it doesn't work well in most black and white films -- I'm thinking primarily of "Spellbound" -- but in moderate quantities it's quite effective. There are moments of kitschy, over-the-top behavior in plenty of Hitch's black and white films, including "Strangers on a Train", "Rebecca" and, of course, "Psycho". What else could you call the severely shadowed and angled shots of Norman while Marion has her
nighttime snack?
In color film, however, Hitch's propensity to present emotion in heavily stylized, exaggerated form works much better. Think "To Catch a Thief" or "Marnie", or Kim Novak's entire performance in "Vertigo." I don't know why this is and I don't know enough about Hitchcock to thoroughly explain what I mean. It's the old "I know it when I see it" defense, but it's all I got.
With all that, my best guess is that Van Sant was trying to superimpose Hitchcock's campy color aesthetic over a more controlled and subdued black and white Hitch film. Maybe he wanted to know what the sometimes garish palette of "Vertigo" would look like in a film we had only seen in shades of grey.
Maybe not. I'd welcome any explanation, frankly, especially of Van Sant's decision to use a brief clip of a cow in the rain and a snippet of the Nine Inch Nails video for "Closer" in William H. Macy's death sequence.
So, that's my blather for the week. What's yours?
Posted by Stacia at 2:30 AM 14 comments
Labels: the monday morning question
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14 comments:
As far as I can tell, the current situation with the remakes is nothing more than a dying industry grasping at straws. Although this is the point where someone will jump in and point out that the idea of remakes are as old as cinema itself, I'd point out that studios at least used to remake "hot" properties with the newest stars of the moment.
In a sense, Hollywood as turned into what Broadway became in the 90s-its own museum. Rather than try out anything new or interesting (with rare exceptions), the industry prefers to bring out remakes (or, in Broadway terms, "revivals") of its glitziest, most glamorous hits from its golden age to give audiences a glimpse of what used to be.
I so totally agree with you. Nothing makes me twitch more than remakes. I have written a few rants on the subject and it always pisses me off when they remake or "re-imagine" a classic flick.
There are rumors making the rounds that another Ghostbusters movie is in the works. I have heard two: rumors. The first is that the original cast is returing and the second is that Judd Apatow will be doing a remake of the original with some of his fraternity brothers (Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, et al.). Either way, what is the point? It has been 20 years since the last Ghostbusters, and we saw how well that length between sequels worked out for Indiana Jones. And if it is a remake, what is the point? I guess, you can pull off a "re-imagining", like Bond and Batman, but is that necessary with a comedy?
Like you said, Hollywood is running out of ideas. I used to joke that they were going to make a "Gilligan's Island" movie, now it doesn't seem that far-fetched...
By the way, who would you cast in a G.I. movie? That is the question of the day at my blog ;)
Old movies are best chopped up and rearranged by Quentin Tarantino and then called "an homage." I can only think of one remake that was better than the original: Beatty's update on "Here Comes Mister Jordan," and that's 30-years old.
The guys who greenlight movies are also, like Tarantino, men with no reading skills, whose ideas are from old movies, comic books and television. That's why we get such epics as "The Flintstones," "Daredevil," "Starsky and Hutch," and "The Dukes of Hazzard." Originality is to be feared at today's studios, remakes and sequels are shoved into the industry's maw because -- hey! --
it worked once! Let's do lunch.
Chris, you bring up a point I forgot to include: TV shows being turned into films. That particular idea seems even more odious to me than the remakes of classic films. Last summer I noticed of the 12 films at our cinema, 10 were either remakes, sequels, or based on TV shows.
Some movie ideas lend themselves well enough to a series, such as James Bond. Anything with a singular character and a few secondary characters would work, just have them in a series of adventures. TV shows, however, don't generally have the strong single character that make movie trilogies -- and face it, everything's a trilogy nowadays -- work. Even The X-Files, which you'd think on the surface would make a decent movie, just doesn't translate to cinema.
Hollywood has given up and handed everything cinematic over to television.
Movie Whore, I do get very discouraged when all I see are remakes. Some movies work out fine when remade, but "The Women"? The idea was relatively creaky back in 1939. Seriously, we're so desperate for film ideas that the 70-year-old gimmick of an all woman cast is going to get reused? Pitiful.
20th C, I hope those are just rumors. Everyone involved in "Ghostbusters" is still alive. And the less said about Judd Apatow the better.
Matt, you're right, movies have always been remade. When talkies began a lot of silents were remade for sound, and remakes in the 50s and 60s were often as much about an improvement in technology over the original as it was about reusing the same story. Nowadays no such care goes into remakes. It's as though the current culture is so insecure, so scared, in so much need of a cultural security blanket that it can't handle anything except the regurgitated memories of their childhood.
Yes, it's the race to irrelevency - comic book or graphic novel films neck and neck with by-the-numbers- remakes - the loser? Film going audiences. Imagine if a "Third Man", or "Magnificent Ambersons" or "Citizen Kane" was being looked at as a new production today - the mind boggles. Even the Cohen Bros. franchise, brilliant as they can be, has some re-make qualities about their films, albeit as sterling examples of what's better than not - they do some imaginative adaptations, that's for sure. I'm notorious in my family for mentioning how many films are re-makes, usually with some sort of eye-impinging FX, of earlier, mostly better works, and even the new stuff is hardly new. We are ruled by the snigger, not the WOW!
Stacia, your point that "It's as though the current culture is so insecure, so scared, in so much need of a cultural security blanket that it can't handle anything except the regurgitated memories of their childhood" is the best description of the situation I have read yet. It really sums up perfectly the mindset that is going through the Hollywood film industry right now. I have a hard time considering many of the remakes we see as "real" filmmaking. I tend to think of them more as fan tributes by very enthusiastic movie buffs, rather than as real works of art. There's more honesty in one 30-second YouTube video than in a whole year's worth of Hollywood releases.
I like everything!
Even the Coen Brothers have had joined in the remake craze in the form of The Ladykillers.
Remakes are unimaginative but sometimes they do work e.g. The Maltese Falcon but I am not helping modern Hollywood's case by naming a film almost as old as The Women, am I?
This is my first time commenting - this is a great blog with eclectic reviews and great screencaps.
Matt, that's a terrific compliment, thank you!
I agree with your comment that the Coen Bros can be quite brilliant, Vanwall, and I love their films, but I think it's sad that we can count the number of really great American filmmakers on one hand. There's likely to be some great films we just don't hear about, but there's probably not many of them. Maybe I'm bitter.
Hi Hazel, and welcome! My memory is fuzzy but I think the first remake of the 1931 version of "The Maltese Falcon" was done because the 1931 version was too "pre-code" to re-release in 1936. The 1936 version, "Satan Met a Lady", allegedly stinks. I saw it on TCM years ago and recall thinking it wasn't that bad, but it must have been boring because I don't remember much about it.
I wonder when "remake" became a thinly veiled stigma? In the old days a popular story would be filmed two or three times with seemingly little question. I suspect having movies on video may have something to do with it. In the old days a movie was largely dead and buried after the run was finished. When a new version came out viewers couldn't race to their bookshelves to refresh their memories on how the old one was So Much Better.
This is a test- I'm wondering why my photo image didn't show up.
Hmm, are you trying to post an image with an HTML tag? I just tried adding an image to this comment and it told me the HTML tag wasn't allowed. That stinks, I didn't know comments were text only. Feh.
I do think that having access to older movies has changed things, but I think it's because people now realize that remakes weren't always necessary. Back in the day they were done to update a film from silent to sound, from pre-code to something that complied with the Hayes code, or from black and white to color.
If we had a rash of remakes of war or scifi films that used updated technology, that would be similar. Instead we're getting a rash of remakes, reimaginings and sequels that have no real reason behind their production.
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