Remake-O-Rama

Judging from my headline, this is about the current trend within the studio system of remaking movies. http://www.aintitcool.com/node/39314, http://chud.com/articles/articles/17273/1/REMAKERREAH-ARTHUR-THEY-LIVE-ROMANCING-THE-STONE/Page1.html, http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=51014, http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=51015, http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=51013.

Remakes aren't altogether bad. Without remakes we wouldn't have The Maltese Falcon. Or The Man Who Knew Too Much. Or Scarface. Or The Magnificent Seven. Or The Departed. Or John Carpenter's The Thing (itself being remade by Marc Abraham and Eric Newman of production company Strike Entertainment, who are also remaking Carpenter's They Live). These are good to great movies, all of them considered classics in one way or another and that improve greatly on the originals on which they're based (although Scarface is too nihilistic and amoral to really have any more depth than the campy Howard Hawks 1930 original...a point often missed by many of the people who seem to hold it in such high esteem but rarely understand its point: excess for its own sake is death, either physical or spiritual).
But lately a lot of the headlines on film sites are of studios remaking films, often classic films (Rashomon and The Seven Samurai , perhaps the two best films by Akira Kurosawa, are in the works for release in 2010 to 2012; the upcoming Keanu Reeves-starring remake to The Day The Earth Stood Still; the remake to RoboCop, a film just barely twenty years old), but mostly horror films that range from good (Dawn of the Dead) to shit (Halloween, The Hills Are Alive 1&2, ad infinitum). For every good The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, we have to endure twenty shitty to mediocre Japanese horror remakes (Ju-On, Ringu, Dark Water, etc. etc. etc.). And with the horror remakes continuing with Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, a sequel to Rob Zombie's panned Halloween remake (is it a remake to Halloween 2?), to a remake of The Crazies, a great, B-grade classic, and the third or fourth remake of The Birds by Hitchcock(!) I often wonder when this remake craze will end.
Is every movie coming out of the studios a remake? No. Not at all. But remakes are the movies that get greenlit the easiest, that get bankrolled, that get the biggest openings and promotions, as studio heads and producers understand that name recognition draws in crowds. It does. Big time, and with cross promotions such as rereleasing the classics on DVD or Blu-Ray, it is easy to capitalize on name recognition.
But is it neccessary (not that filmmaking in general is "neccessary")? I equate remaking a film to rewriting a book by another author. Same concept, same characters, same plot, same story (I am immediately reminded of a Simpsons episode wherein Principal Skinner proposes to write a "science fiction novel where dinosaurs are brought back to life on a futuristic amusement park through the wonders of cloning technology. I propose to call it 'Timmy And The Cloneasaurus'", and his subsequent berating by Apu, over a span of several minutes, of the very idea of doing such a thing: and that is the reaction I would have also), just rewritten by another author. I think that's cheating, a hack job, an egotisitical move that says, "You didn't do it right the first time, here's how you do your characters and story the right way". I don't think it's always grounded artistically to remake a movie, and seems like the kind of hack job I'd equate with Brett Ratner. But sometimes, again, magic happens when a director sees a different side to a story (case in point: The Departed, which is filmed with much more depth, nuance, and character development than the original Infernal Affairs): I'm still trying to wrap my head around Steven Spielberg and Will Smith remaking Oldboy (although, to be fair, they're basing it off the original manga, rather than the Korean adaptatation by Park Chan-Wook) http://chud.com/articles/articles/17097/1/ARGH-ASIAN-REMAKES-GONNA-HAPPEN/Page1.html, http://chud.com/articles/articles/17126/1/HERE039S-HOW-SMITH-amp-SPIELBERG-JUSTIFY-SOFTENING-OLDBOY/Page1.html.
But what different interpretation can be made by remaking Romancing The Stone? Or They Live? Or Red Dawn? These three, for example, are fun 80's flicks, silly and light, B-grade and preposterous. Today they'd be seeped in melodrama and "gritty realism" (and I can already see Red Dawn as being shot documentary style, handheld, etc.). How many different ways can you tell that story? And if you can tell the story a wildly different way, why not just keep the core of the plot and create an entirely new movie? Isn't that a novel idea? Earlier this year I worked on the upcoming remake to The Taking of Pehlam 1,2,3, a film I desperately want to find on tape or DVD, and reading up on the original premise (and cast...man, what a great cast), I couldn't help but wonder what could brought to the table this time out (aside from a car chase, apparently). And that seems to be a catch-22: I can't judge a remake on its own merits, I have to watch the original and compare it to the remake, and that alone (watching the remake) supports the very idea of remking movies. Even the curious filmgoers who know an original and are curious about a remake for the sake of comparison support remakes by the very act of comparing the two (movie tickets aren't cheap, people). The studios will continue to churn out remkaes so long as the numbers stay high on the first two opening weekends (why else would drivel such as Disaster Movie and every other unfunny "parody" by those two directors get financed?).
So again I find myself coming full circle: I'm sick of the remakes, but every once in a while there is a really really good remake. But those are few and far between. The classics being remade (and I use the term "classic" in a slightly loose sense: They Live is no more a classic than are Commando or Cobra) are classic because they can't conceivably be bettered, they're fun for what they are, or timeless in their message, or important as a look at the era in which they were made. They Live could be remade successfully and be "serious", as could Red Dawn. But I don't want those movies to be taken seriously. They're ridiculous. And that's what makes them memorable, for better or worse.
What is the point of this rant? I'm sick of remakes. I'm sick of remakes getting the easy funding and releases where genuinely films (The Wrestler, Slumdog Millionaire, Let The Right One In (itself in the works to get remade for NO REASON), Where The Wild Things Are, etc. etc. etc.) need to struggle for funding and/or promotions to be seen by the public (Hell, it wasn't even until the Toronto Film Festival that Aronofsky found a distributor for his latest film). It's safe to go with brand recognition. But it's artistically bankrupt (for the most part) to do so.
To be honest, I'd rather go see twenty more Die Hards or Rambos or Indiana Jonseseses before I get excited about another remake for anything. At least then I'd know what to expect. And who knows, a sequel might actually be better than expected (I'm not going to lie, this year's Rambo was a lot better than it had any right to be, and I had shitloads of fun watching a 62 year old Rambo exploding the shit out of an evil battalion of Burmese soldiers with a truck-mounted .50-calibre muchine gun).
Give me more of that. Leave Romancing the Stone and Arthur and those other movies alone. They were made already. They were already banked on before and made their money. Move on, evolve, and get those smaller gems funded already, please (or just give me about $5,000 and I'll make something just as good, I promise).



I'm going to go see Punisher: War Zone tomorrow. Expect a review of that over the weekend.

Also, I am nearing completion of the first cut of my newest short, Wake Up Call.

P.S. --- All is not lost in the realm of ridiculous movies:



And check out this short directed and edited by a good friend of mine:

Behind the Scenes of an Indie