Let's talk about something Hollywood has been doing since the beginning of movies, something that alternately inspires elation or dread in viewers, something that attracts directors as disparate as Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma and Brett Ratner.
Let's talk about remakes.
Most people I know don't like them, so why are they so prevalent? The answer is relatively simple: Remakes are Hollywood's way of taking the easy way out. They're the cinematic equivalent of microwaving a TV dinner because you're too lazy to cook an actual meal. After all, why should studios take the time to come up with something original or even find a book or play to adapt when they've got older movies that they can just remake? There's just one teeny-tiny detail that tends to get left out: actually making a good movie.
Remakes fall into different categories. Some are new versions of what are generally considered to be classic movies (King Kong
Psycho). Others come from films with a cult following (Gone in 60 Seconds Dawn of the Dead). Still others take an older film's premise ' be it a classic or cult movie ' and update it for today's world (Alfie The Manchurian Candidate).
The ones that have the toughest go of it are remakes of classics. For die-hard fans of the original, a remake is usually nothing short of sacrilege. After all, why bother to remake a movie when it was done well the first time? For these remakes, people's expectations are so high that it's nearly impossible for the new film to top the original.
Remakes have to walk a line between originality and fidelity. There is the risk of making the movie so different from the original that everything that was great about the idea is lost. Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes is an example of this kind of remake. The acclaimed Edward Scissorhands director took a great concept and turned it into a boring, silly mess that is so bad that I've found it hard to go to new Burton films ever since.
On the other hand, there's certainly such a thing as being too faithful. Take Gus Van Sant's Psycho
which is as unnecessary as remakes get. Instead of putting his own stamp on the work, Van Sant chose to basically re-shoot the original in color with new actors.
Sometimes filmmakers get this balance right. Jonathan Demme, in my opinion, has done it twice, with The Truth About Charlie (a remake of the Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn vehicle Charade) and his remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Charlie
while radically different than Charade
still ends up working as a delirious French new wave tribute. And while I don't think many would say that Demme's take on Manchurian is better than John Frankenheimer's, it is still a very suspenseful, paranoid thriller that stands on its own two feet.
To me, striking this balance is very, very hard and is rarely done with success. Therefore, I think that remakes should be reserved for movies that had a good premise, but, for whatever reason ' technological limitations, miscasting, bad director, etcetera ' didn't work. The worse the movie, the better the remake can potentially be; after all, there's nowhere to go but up.
Of course, in a perfect world, Hollywood wouldn't bother with remakes at all and would instead focus its energies solely on original material.
Unfortunately, that seems about as likely as Jessica Simpson winning an Oscar.
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Ben Saylor
