Dear Hollywood,
Reboots, reimagining’s and rehashes are totally lame.
Hollywood remakes take a tried and tested recipe; attempt to vamp it up with sexier ingredients yet somehow it always ends up bland and wanting without the spice of the original.
I view the approach of your upcoming Spider-Man film, The Amazing Spider-Man, with total apathy even if it does star the Boy and Girl Next Door dream team of Garfield and Stone.
Last year taught us that risk taking in filmmaking produces the most critically successful results, not laboured horror remakes or English language versions of Swedish vampire films with slightly altered titles that make the film sound like a direct request rather then an instruction.
Although the braver films are not quite up there with the box office breaking haul of Transformers or Harry Potter yet, many of these films will go onto long term DVD word of mouth success, and most make money back from their relatively small budgets.
I mean who would have thought the biggest movie of 2011/12 would be a black and white silent film shot in the ratio of yesteryear or the most touching, a documentary about a racing car driver stitched together from old found footage?
Not the people who told David Fincher that an English language remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was a good idea.
I thought Fincher was a man who took risks with his work, producing slick cinema gold from unlikely premises, not a man who remakes foreign language films so soon after they have come out and does nothing drastically different or interesting with them. It’s like I never knew him at all.
Despite the success of foreign language films such as Amelie or Pan’s Labyrinth, English language films are more likely to be seen by English language audiences.
My quarrel is this; when an interesting auteur such as Fincher takes on such a task should we not expect a different angle on it? If you are remaking a two year old film and you are an outstanding director should you not make it, well, better?
I can understand the need for a remake if the foreign language film in question is dated in technology or plot and rehashing it means an interesting story can be retold to a different generation but with shots from cranes and surround sound and CGI and fifty car pile ups and explosions that have all the power of the fires of Hades, and they add in a touching scene that really nails those characters in a way the original never did, but that didn’t happen here.
Originality being skipped over in favour of so-so remakes is a waste of time and talent, especially when they keep providing such increasingly diminishing box office returns. Fright Night and Conan the Barbarian flopped drastically, as did Arthur, Footloose and Straw Dogs.
I know The Amazing Spider-Man will make a load of money and might even be good, but personally it’s the braver films that have stayed with me over the past five years.
The chances that were taken on impractical visions from directors whose passion for their craft was balanced out or aided by their complete insanity. I am grateful that there are some pockets of your hills left for these unhinged visionaries, roaming free with metaphorical images spilling from their no budget pockets.
Some of these directors/writers/producers take the Guillermo del Toro approach of “One for me, One for them,” in order to make the films closest to their hearts, and Del Toro normally manages to make the ones for “Them” (You, Hollywood) superior to standard action fare, but even he failed when he stuck his oar into the remaking world with Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark.
One of my favorite films is the 2006 Tarsem Singh piece The Fall.
I have bored friends with drunken enthusiasm for it, fought with ex-boyfriends for eating food too loudly over it and generally gone on about it for the past six years. In short, I freaking love that film because it’s different and it’s beautiful and it’s there.
The majority of the film was financed by Singh, as he wanted total control over the piece, and although its profile was boosted by Spike Jonze and David Fincher lending their names to it, it didn’t prove much of a hit. I know it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, in the same way Irreversible isn’t or The Tree of Life or Shame, but it’s important these projects are being made and seen and supported because they take chances and every so often become someone’s favorite thing in the world.
Renowned film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times said of The Fall, “You might want to see it for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it,” and that’s the point.
Singh went back to directing videos and more commercially successful films, the most recent being The Immortals, which I heard was awful.
His next film is Mirror, Mirror, a rehashing of the Snow White story, which will be in competition with Snow White and the Huntsman, another rehashing of the Grimm Fairy tale.
C’mon Hollywood before you become that boring person in the bar who keeps telling the same story to an increasingly restless audience. No one likes that guy.
