Bells & Whistles & Zombies

[onyxlynx]

I am on record in several places as giving movie remakes the hairy eyeball. Whenever I hear that some beloved but less than 15-years-old movie is being remade, I reach for my revolver weep for the lack of creative mojo that privileges remakes and sequels over new stories, or at least narratives with the serial numbers filed off and repainted.

The current worst offender in this regard is the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man, which is coming out in 2012, a mere 10 years after Spider-Man (yes, I know it's called a "re-boot" rather than a remake and it uses a different villain, but retelling the origin story? Please), for no apparent reason other than to rake in loose cash from people who can't deal with Netflix or the local video store.

That said, there are (1) good reasons to remake a movie and (2) remakes/reboots that don't stink.

1. "Good" reasons to remake a film include:
   • "Doing it right." The Maltese Falcon we all know and love? Had been made twice before. The classic version sticks pretty close to the book.
   • Telling the story free of censorship issues. Yes, I know that hidden subtext makes a work more interesting, but it's not really necessary anymore.
   • Taking a movie problematic for various social issues and scripting it so that it, um, isn't. (This doesn't actually happen too often.)
   • A couple of generations have passed since the last version. This requires that:
     • The film in question is not ICONIC. There is no acceptable reason to remake certain movies.
     • The source material for the film in question retains enough interest on its own. ("Jaaaaaane...!")
     • The film in question has already been remade and possibly parodied as well, but not recently. Captain Blood might be remade. The Three Musketeers has been in continuous remake since 1903.
     • The earlier version is a silent but has some relevance.
     I don't by this mean either "but funny costumes to the young" or "no recognizable names."
2. Having mentioned The Three Musketeers: I don't think I've ever seen a bad version (I haven't seen the current one only because it hasn't opened yet).  (Just because the modern sensibility is heavy-handedness does not mean that the occasional light touch doesn't happen.)
   • A Fistful of Dollars.
   • Batman Begins/The Dark Knight.
   • The current Jane Eyre, oddly enough.
   • The 1995 Pride and Prejudice. (There's been one since. If they must film English literature, couldn't someone untangle Wuthering Heights? Depressing though it is?)
   • The Thing. Which seems to be un-ruin-able.

As usual, feel free to add your own items to either list, or dispute mine.  I'm not proud.  

Comments

[laughingrat]

Fistful of Dollars is interesting, cos it was more of a straight-up copyright thing than a "Gosh, let's respectfully remake this classic from for'n part, wot I have found so influential in my own life and filmmaking." Which, I mean, I know you know, but I find it kind of fascinating. I like both of them, saw Leone's stuff first, although now am a huge fan of Yojimbo possibly more so than its remake. ;)

EDIT: That said, speaking of near-in-time Kurosawa remakes, what do you think about The Magnificent Seven?

[onyxlynx]

I saw it first, back in the '60s. I could hum the theme and everything.

I saw Seven Samurai sometime in the last 20 years.

I think I'd need to see them together.

[laughingrat]

I think I saw both remakes first, come to think of it. I personally think Seven Samurai is superior (more humanistic, less swagger) but of course, that's strictly a YMMV thing. One thing I like about the Leone stuff is how this theft remake (seriously, didn't Kurosawa take him to court or something) spawned a trilogy of its own that went in such a different, darker, stranger direction than Kurosawa wound up going with the parody follow-up.

Do you have opinions about the remake(s) of King Kong, incidentally? Or Dracula? Or are follow-ups of the Dracula tale really remakes, or just separate works pulling from the same source material? Hmm.

[ar]

At the moment, I'm feeling pretty ~*~whatever~*~ about remakes--I'm trying not to use my damngive on "they're doing a remake of X, what bastards," because it seems hypocritical of me when I love cover songs so much. In my ideal world, remakes would be fairly common, but they'd be interesting because they'd always do something new with the original film(s). Maybe they wouldn't always succeed, but their failures would be ambitious.

I really, really like ambitious failures. Sometimes I think I like them more than ambitious successes. I'm probably way too much of a My Year of Flops fangirl. (Also, if you haven't read the column, omgitissogood. While I don't always agree with Nathan Rabin, I mostly do think he comes at the movies from such a place of good faith and such a willingness to find the salvageable in what are sometimes wildly ridiculed films that I can't help but be excited for each column.) (Actually, I think all of the AVClub's film columns are great, but let's be honest, I

Other thoughts:

• Categorizing Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, or Batman Begins as remakes seems a little deceptive to me, because ultimately, they're not remaking films, they're adapting other properties that never started out in the medium of film. (You can make the argument that films based on certain classic novels do tend to remake each other in the way plotlines are condensed &cet., but that's another topic for another day, and it doesn't change the fact that they're drawing from books ultimately.) Batman Begins isn't a remake of Batman and Robin or Batman: The Movie, or any of the Saturday-morning cartoons Batman appeared in.

The Maltese Falcon, I feel borderline on. :/ I think that in cases like Falcon, especially because so little time elapsed between the three films, it's less a good remake and more an indication that remakes can be good.

• There's actually been more than one Pride and Prejudice since the miniseries, IIRC, but it was another miniseries-format one. But since the one from the 90s was also a miniseries, I think it ought to count. Maybe I'm misermembering, because--honestly, I've never watched any film adaptation of the book, and at this point, I never want to watch the Colin Firth one, because I'm so sick of hearing about it.

• I would argue that there's no bad version of Little Women, either, but the 70s miniseries starring Susan Dey, Eve Plumb, and William Shatner is...special. But on the other hand, I find it really interesting--it deviates from the way the story usually gets brought to the screen in several interesting ways--so I can stand behind a "there's no bad version" here, though again, I wouldn't consider them remakes by any stretch. (I feel like "there's no bad version" might need to be a question by itself, remakes aside.) I think all of them are valuable for their various takes on a story that would be far, far better suited in format for a Game of Thrones-style (except much lighter in tone) weekly TV series.

• I lied up above--I'm actually incredibly bitter that they're making a remake of The Thin Man*, but that's mostly because I'm so fucking sick of seeing Johnny Depp. When I get annoyed by remakes, it's primarily because A) I don't like the actors or B) The remake doesn't seem like it's pushing the material where I'd like it to. I'm in favour of remakes, I'm thinking as I write this all out, but I demand that remakes own the fact that they're remakes and do something interesting and worthwhile with themselves. Even if the remake is a failure, if it at least tries to do something new, I have more respect for it; even if Guess Who was a terrible, terrible failure (I am guessing), it did at least try to do something new with the material. (How one feels about the material in either film is a moot point for me here; the point is that they at least made some effort to make the remake have a point beyond "this worked once.") I was also intrigued by the remake of Death at a Funeral, though I never saw it.

*The Thin Man doesn't fall into the same category for me as Pride & Prejudice, because the series became so damned entrenched in the world of film, if that makes sense? The movie series has a character all its own, imo, by virtue of the fact that it's a series based on a single novel.

There are times when I think it's possible to remake a film based on a well-known novel, I should mention, but I think those times are confined to when it's very, very obvious that the remake is being drawn from the movie. That time the Muppets did a Wizard of Oz movie, for instance, or the musical Wicked god i hate wicked, are very, very clearly based on the 1939 film as opposed to the silent films or the book.

• I'm annoyed by The Amazing Spider-Man, too, but primarily because the tone seems so needlessly heavy. I hate the fact that Hollywood can't seem to make movies that have a light touch without being ironic; John Carter of Mars looks like it might suffer the same issue, based on the trailer, when I think it would be nice if it had a lighter, more let's-all-have-an-adventure! kind of tone.

• I'm trying to think of remakes I'd be interested in, and I'm mostly thinking of adaptations I'd like to see done right, which is, again, a subject for another post. Maybe I'll put that one up in a few days...though the film that currently bears my ire is not actually a classic film and thus wouldn't fit the theme of the community. ^^;;

• Little Shop of Horrors is a great remake and a great remake story after all, because each version is different.

• Then there are remakes that severely eclipse the original. I defy someone to tell me they don't think of Judy when they hear A Star is Born. Others in that category, classicness all being relative: Little Shop of Horrors, Father of the Bride, The Fly, the 30s version of Showboat, Scarface.

• You know what else is a great remake? High Society. The story might not change much, but I can't argue with anyone who wants to turn The Philadelphia Story into a musical.

• The Magnificent Seven is also a great remake, as far as I'm concerned. I really love the idea of adapting stories for completely new settings; it's why I was so hoping that Let Me In would be good, because you can't get much further from the snow-blanketed world of Sweden at night than the American Southwest. The possibility for making interesting changes to fit the character of the setting was really, really there, but from what I've heard, it didn't turn out as interesting as I would've liked. From what I understand, The Departed also falls into this category, but I haven't seen it or the film it draws inspiration from. Also, The Birdcage.

• I want to count Airplane!, too, if only because the fact that they took so much dialogue from one film in it is really impressive to me.

• Other thoughts, though I don't know if I'm coherent enough to figure them out, lol.

[franzeska]

The Thin Man doesn't fall into the same category for me as Pride & Prejudice, because the series became so damned entrenched in the world of film, if that makes sense? The movie series has a character all its own, imo, by virtue of the fact that it's a series based on a single novel.

I do love the book, so I'd love to see a "remake" that just did the book as it actually is. The movie series, on the other hand, is ridiculously iconic and has precious little to do with the book. I'm not inherently opposed to remaking that, but as yet another cookie cutter Depp vehicle, it's going to be a complete travesty. I'd much rather see remakes with unknowns, frankly.

I wish they'd redo Charlie Chan or some of the other egregious yellowface movies (or redo again in the case of Chan). Plenty of these were actually pretty good; all they really require is removal of some of the worst of the fortune cookie dialogue and Asian actors for the leads (since the non-leads were often Asian already). I'd particularly love to see them done as historical pieces set in their original time periods. (Though, good god, they could do without the horribly racist black comic relief parts.)

[onyxlynx]

Charlie Chan (in the book I read) was far less a caricature than in the movies.

Between the racial stereotyping and the racial stereotyping, I have not been able to watch a Charlie Chan movie in a really long time.

[franzeska]

I've heard that, though I've never read the books. It's just such a pity because some of the really excellent Asian actors from that era are in those movies too, so yellowface manages to rob them of roles/audience two different ways on top of everything else that's awful about it. I haven't seen most of the Charlie Chan movies since I was little... I'm dreading what they'll look like now.

[myschyf]

Oh yeah. I am *so* tired of reboots. I think the Hulk movies were the most ridiculous...weren't they like...two or three years apart?

And even if the first movie in a proposed series tanks, that's no excuse to redo it. Your chance to make a good movie was with the first one. Repeating the story will not lure me into the theatre. *Continuing* it might.

*Edit* While I'm at it, I'd like a moratorium of at least twenty years on Jane Eyre. It seems to be remade every other year. And while I think it's one of the great books, there *are* other stories that haven't even been made once. Perhaps one of *them* could fill the Jane Eyre slot.

[franzeska]

I'd love to see a really overwrought adaptation of Lady Audley's Secret that actually follows the plot of the book. (There was a tv adaptation a few years ago, and while I like several of the actors a lot, they were all pretty awful in it, and everything that was interesting in the original was "modernized" in a rather unsatisfying way.)