Seen these guys lately?
They, uh… they look even worse.
Clearly you’re not a Troma fan.
I keed, I keed. But seriously, from someone in the business, are there no limits to the remakes? What about a remake of a famous writer/director? 20 years from now, should some new director remake Rushmore or Raising Arizona? (or Annie Hall?)
If we need to take this to a different thread (as it could get interesting), I’m in, but…
Isn’t this the sort of comment that Chait was referring, in which a forest for the trees stance can detract from overall intent to end, in this instance, misogyny?
Now, picking a ‘fight’ with Teapot may not be my best idea in years, but I’ve been hoping a thread would arise on BoingBoing regarding that back and forth between Chait, Hodgman, Jezebel et al.
ETA: clarity
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Didn’t @beschizza share the Gawker piece?
I think Teapot has been over this earlier in the thread but so long as things stay civil, have fun. We can always split this off to a new thread as well, if you guys like.
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EDIT: I’ll add this, because it was doing the rounds earlier today and is somewhat (a bit) relevant.
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Why not? Personally, I don’t find any of those three particular movies to be perfect and unimprovable, but I get your larger point that they’re emblematic calling-cards for the (wince) auteurs (p’tooie!) involved.
One might safely and comfortably call the Mona Lisa a masterpiece. Does that mean that no painter should ever again have attempted to paint a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo ever again, in her life or afterward? Should there only have been one definitive Madonna and Child? Should Jimi Hendrix have simply left All Along The Watchtower the hell alone?
A good story deserves to be re-told, and sometimes reinterpreted for a new generation. Unfortunately, Gus Van Sant did not thoroughly understand this mandate when he remade Psycho, and that movie suffers from its imperfectly slavish imitation of Hitchcock. Remaking it perfectly would have been at least kinda interesting, even if creatively vacant. But remaking it legitimately, with a revised script and some new thought given to direction, cinematography, and (urrgghh) mise en scene (heave!) would have been bolder, riskier, and more interesting, even if it failed to outdo Hitchcock, which Van Sant simply and lazily and (I think) cravenly resigned himself to doing.
Nothing is so sacred or perfect that it can’t or shouldn’t be improved or tweaked or revised or updated, especially not movies. I doubt there’d be much point or interest in remaking Citizen Kane if only because the risks are too great, the potential upside too minimal, the story too dated, the twists too familiar, and the ground too well broken by now. But it could be done, and it could be done well. In the end, it’s only a movie. And at its core, a movie is just a story told on a screen rather than round the campfire.
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That’s the thing, that’s what we human beings did until the modern era right? We told and retold stories in order to better understand the world and ourselves and our relationships to one another, shifting context in ways that made sense to us. There is a great documentary about just this phenomenon, Whose Song is This? The filmmaker sitting with her friends realizes that they all know the same song, but claim it originated with their own ethnic group (all from the Balkans). So, she sets off across the recently war torn Balkans to find the origin (there is like a minute of award listing and the like, the preview starts after that):
But the modern system of copyright that so informs our cultural production demands originality and atomization, and this sort of denial that we are influenced by the world around us in anything other than a very cursory way. I think our culture expects artistic genius instead of the creation of a shared experience through culture, which allows for reinterpretation more freely.
That being said, far too many remakes kind of suck, sadly. Of course some of that is probably me remembering things nostalgically and fondly…
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Very well said, and with more thought put into it than I ever did! Thanks… that is a very useful and insightful angle.
Yeah, probably true to a certain extent, just as for years Return of the Jedi was my favorite movie, simply because I saw it when I was most susceptible to its charms, and not sophisticated enough to recognize its myriad weaknesses. But it’s true, most remakes simply aren’t any good. I imagine that’s also partly due to the fact that most movies simply aren’t very good, and when you’re remaking (or making a sequel or prequel to) a movie that’s successful enough to warrant interest in a remake or sequel, you already have a fairly high bar to clear… and there’s no guarantee that you, the filmmaker, are going to do as well as the maker of the first attempt did. And if you’re the original filmmaker doing a sequel (like Coppola did with The Godfather Part II) or a remake (like Hitchcock did with The Man Who Knew Too Much) you can’t be sure if you’ll be able to capture that lightning in a bottle the second time.
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My issue with this remake is a script issue with the original that just doesn’t work now. Who’s the bad guy who turns off the grid? Walter Peck. Who’s he work for? The EPA. So the Regan era “regulations are bad” subtext isn’t really going to fly here, they’ve got to restructure the whole third act.
So write a different movie about smart people doing a startup that sounds preposterous and nobody believes can work and run with that. Ghostbusters works because the characters are charming as all hell (and Annie Potts) and they’re having a great time, not specifically because they’re exterminating ghosts. Bill Murray could have been running a goddamned cheese shop as Venkman and it would be amazing.
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Johnny Depp? Shia LaBeouf? Holly Hunter? Sigourney Weaver?
NOT ScarJo.
How about from Pixar, and it could be the next Cars movie?
Or directed by Werner Herzog.
Kinski. Klaus Kinski as Tuco.
Okay, so he’s dead. But we have the technology. We can rebuild him.
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Nastassja?
Y’know who’d be good? Joaquim de Almeida. He’s Portuguese rather than Mexican, but he sure could look the part: sinister, menacing, but still quite funny when appropriate.
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Ron Perlman. Or Dominique Pinon.
Nah, I don’t want Perlman doing anything but voiceovering “War never changes” for Fallout 4. That is his highest priority, and you can tell him I said so. Make it happen.
As for L’Original, that sounds like incredibly weird casting. I can’t even picture it. Haven’t seen him since Alien Resurrection. What’s he look like these days?
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Speaking of Pinon, how about a cinéma du look version of either Ghostbusters or TGTBATU?
Actually, TGTBATU was pretty close to that languid flair already, wasn’t it.
I saw him in Micmacs, but nothing else lately. He looks much the same as he ever was, if not moreso.
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It would need some gloss applied to it to really qualify.
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If there’s something ripe
In your Frigidaire
Who you gonna call?
CHEESEMONGERS!
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I ain’t afraid of no toast.
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