08.12.04
Hollywood gears up to roll out a fall full of remakes
BY JASON ANDERSON
For a place overrun with gas-guzzling SUVs, Hollywood is admirably eco-minded when it comes to recycling. Studio release schedules are dominated by sequels, tricked-up old TV shows, comic-book and literary adaptations, historical dramas and Biblical epics. The few summer hits derived from original screenplays, like Collateral, have fared poorly in comparison to the sequels for Shrek and Spider-Man. For most movie-goers, it's unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.
The idea of remaking films is particularly tempting to producers eager to develop material that has been -- as Blockbuster calls its secondhand titles for sale -- "previously enjoyed." The tactic allows the new product to capitalize on the previous model's name recognition. It's also a way to avoid the difficulties in adapting material that may have worked fine in another medium -- e.g., a Saturday Night Live sketch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel -- to fit the parameters of a feature film. This year, the philosophy of "hey, it worked once already" has yielded remakes of Dawn of the Dead, The Stepford Wives, Around the World in 80 Days and The Manchurian Candidate. Each inspired geeky debates over what went missing (Dawn of the Dead's social commentary) and what was added (The Manchurian Candidate's anti-corporate agenda). And whatever the merits of the remakes, it's ironic to note that three of the originals were adaptations of novels and the fourth, Dawn of the Dead, was itself a sequel.
Coming this fall is another wave of retrofitted properties, many of them Americanized versions of foreign-
language hits. As the summer movie selection dwindles down to Anacondas and a new Benji movie, it's a fine time to investigate the originals on video. Why not savour them before they've been remodelled and -- if the Hollywood remakes of La Femme Nikitaand The Vanishing set any kind of precedent -- fouled up entirely? Plus, your friends love it when you tell them spoilers.
NINE QUEENS (2000)
THE ORIGINAL: The feature debut by Argentina's Fabian Bielinsky is the most cunning piece of cinematic misdirection since The Spanish Prisoner. Opportunity knocks for two Buenos Aires con men -- veteran Marcos (Ricardo Darin) and newbie Juan (Gaston Pauls) -- when a fellow swindler offers them the chance to sell a forged set of rare stamps. The double crosses come fast and hard as Marcos and Juan try to keep the not-so-perfect plan from unravelling.
THE REMAKE: Criminal, out Sept. 24. The action moves from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles. John C. Reilly is the vet and Diego Luna is the protegé. Director Gregory Jacobs was a longtime assistant director to Steven Soderbergh, who co-wrote the script with Jacobs and co-produced the film with George Clooney. Will this solid pedigree yield another Out of Sight or a Welcome to Collinwood?
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: The original's flat visual style betrays its modest budget. Chris Menges -- who shot The Good Thief, Neil Jordan's fine remake of Bob le flambeur -- is bound to gussy it up.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: There'll be little room for Nine Queens' sly subtext about Argentina's economic woes.
TAXI (1998)
THE ORIGINAL: A blockbuster in France, this car-chase pic may be as boneheaded as any Hollywood actioner but the vehicular stunts are far wilder (and realer) than anything in The Fast and the Furious. This buddy comedy pairs an unusually skilled cabbie with a clumsy cop, but the real star is a kitted-out Peugeot, which comes in handy when the Marseilles police force tries to take down a bunch of Mercedes-loving German bank robbers.
THE REMAKE: Taxi, out Oct. 8. The cabbie gets a change in sex and race in order to accommodate the ever-popular Queen Latifah. A Bringing Down the House-like education in realness awaits Jimmy Fallon as the cop.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: No more French hip-hop. Plus, the banter can't be any worse in English -- can it?
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: Say goodbye to the scene in which a car smashes into a boulangerie; Hollywood prefers to demolish patisseries.
SHALL WE DANCE? (1996)
THE ORIGINAL: In Masayuki Suo's charming Japanese hit, a depressed accountant (Koji Yakusho, a regular in the sinister movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa) finds new inspiration after he enrolls in a dancing school. The social stigma surrounding ballroom dancing in Japan is one reason why he conceals the pursuit from his family. The other is his attraction to his teacher.
THE REMAKE: Shall We Dance?, out Oct. 15. Richard Gere now plays the harried accountant and Jennifer Lopez is the teacher. The resumé of director Peter Chelsom (Serendipity, Town & Country) inspires less confidence than his birthplace, Blackpool. As we learned from the original and from Strictly Ballroom, the English resort town is the international mecca of ballroom dancing, which is exactly why the movie is set in Chicago.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: Not much.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: The disappearance of a reason for the accountant's shame. According to the Japanese version's prologue, "The idea that a husband and wife should embrace and dance in front of others is beyond embarrassing." The abundance of Girls Gone Wild videos proves Yanks aren't embarrassed about anything.
JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2003)
THE ORIGINAL: This Japanese horror movie does for real estate what Ringu did for videotapes. In Takashi Shimizu's film (itself adapted from a TV series), supernatural nastiness befalls anyone who comes into contact with a house that was the site of a violent crime. Don't get too attached to the living characters -- the real protagonists are the angry spirits, a.k.a. Creepy Cat Boy, Crawling Spider Lady and the Black Blob Thing. You will not be happy to see them.
THE REMAKE: The Grudge, out Oct. 22. Producer Sam Raimi wisely enlisted Takashi Shimizu to direct. The setting also remains in Japan, now the home of an American heroine played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. The possibility of seeing Gellar in a smart horror pic is tantalizing to her Buffy fan base.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: Though the original's incoherent narrative actually works in its favour, it would be nice to have a character who isn't dispatched immediately.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: Pervy viewers will be disappointed with the scarcity of Japanese schoolgirls, though Gellar's shower sequence seems like fair compensation.
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I thought it was interesting article, yet somehow they ommitted Exorcist remake to be released soon!
Hollywood gears up to roll out a fall full of remakes
BY JASON ANDERSON
For a place overrun with gas-guzzling SUVs, Hollywood is admirably eco-minded when it comes to recycling. Studio release schedules are dominated by sequels, tricked-up old TV shows, comic-book and literary adaptations, historical dramas and Biblical epics. The few summer hits derived from original screenplays, like Collateral, have fared poorly in comparison to the sequels for Shrek and Spider-Man. For most movie-goers, it's unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.
The idea of remaking films is particularly tempting to producers eager to develop material that has been -- as Blockbuster calls its secondhand titles for sale -- "previously enjoyed." The tactic allows the new product to capitalize on the previous model's name recognition. It's also a way to avoid the difficulties in adapting material that may have worked fine in another medium -- e.g., a Saturday Night Live sketch, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel -- to fit the parameters of a feature film. This year, the philosophy of "hey, it worked once already" has yielded remakes of Dawn of the Dead, The Stepford Wives, Around the World in 80 Days and The Manchurian Candidate. Each inspired geeky debates over what went missing (Dawn of the Dead's social commentary) and what was added (The Manchurian Candidate's anti-corporate agenda). And whatever the merits of the remakes, it's ironic to note that three of the originals were adaptations of novels and the fourth, Dawn of the Dead, was itself a sequel.
Coming this fall is another wave of retrofitted properties, many of them Americanized versions of foreign-
language hits. As the summer movie selection dwindles down to Anacondas and a new Benji movie, it's a fine time to investigate the originals on video. Why not savour them before they've been remodelled and -- if the Hollywood remakes of La Femme Nikitaand The Vanishing set any kind of precedent -- fouled up entirely? Plus, your friends love it when you tell them spoilers.
NINE QUEENS (2000)
THE ORIGINAL: The feature debut by Argentina's Fabian Bielinsky is the most cunning piece of cinematic misdirection since The Spanish Prisoner. Opportunity knocks for two Buenos Aires con men -- veteran Marcos (Ricardo Darin) and newbie Juan (Gaston Pauls) -- when a fellow swindler offers them the chance to sell a forged set of rare stamps. The double crosses come fast and hard as Marcos and Juan try to keep the not-so-perfect plan from unravelling.
THE REMAKE: Criminal, out Sept. 24. The action moves from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles. John C. Reilly is the vet and Diego Luna is the protegé. Director Gregory Jacobs was a longtime assistant director to Steven Soderbergh, who co-wrote the script with Jacobs and co-produced the film with George Clooney. Will this solid pedigree yield another Out of Sight or a Welcome to Collinwood?
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: The original's flat visual style betrays its modest budget. Chris Menges -- who shot The Good Thief, Neil Jordan's fine remake of Bob le flambeur -- is bound to gussy it up.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: There'll be little room for Nine Queens' sly subtext about Argentina's economic woes.
TAXI (1998)
THE ORIGINAL: A blockbuster in France, this car-chase pic may be as boneheaded as any Hollywood actioner but the vehicular stunts are far wilder (and realer) than anything in The Fast and the Furious. This buddy comedy pairs an unusually skilled cabbie with a clumsy cop, but the real star is a kitted-out Peugeot, which comes in handy when the Marseilles police force tries to take down a bunch of Mercedes-loving German bank robbers.
THE REMAKE: Taxi, out Oct. 8. The cabbie gets a change in sex and race in order to accommodate the ever-popular Queen Latifah. A Bringing Down the House-like education in realness awaits Jimmy Fallon as the cop.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: No more French hip-hop. Plus, the banter can't be any worse in English -- can it?
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: Say goodbye to the scene in which a car smashes into a boulangerie; Hollywood prefers to demolish patisseries.
SHALL WE DANCE? (1996)
THE ORIGINAL: In Masayuki Suo's charming Japanese hit, a depressed accountant (Koji Yakusho, a regular in the sinister movies of Kiyoshi Kurosawa) finds new inspiration after he enrolls in a dancing school. The social stigma surrounding ballroom dancing in Japan is one reason why he conceals the pursuit from his family. The other is his attraction to his teacher.
THE REMAKE: Shall We Dance?, out Oct. 15. Richard Gere now plays the harried accountant and Jennifer Lopez is the teacher. The resumé of director Peter Chelsom (Serendipity, Town & Country) inspires less confidence than his birthplace, Blackpool. As we learned from the original and from Strictly Ballroom, the English resort town is the international mecca of ballroom dancing, which is exactly why the movie is set in Chicago.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: Not much.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: The disappearance of a reason for the accountant's shame. According to the Japanese version's prologue, "The idea that a husband and wife should embrace and dance in front of others is beyond embarrassing." The abundance of Girls Gone Wild videos proves Yanks aren't embarrassed about anything.
JU-ON: THE GRUDGE (2003)
THE ORIGINAL: This Japanese horror movie does for real estate what Ringu did for videotapes. In Takashi Shimizu's film (itself adapted from a TV series), supernatural nastiness befalls anyone who comes into contact with a house that was the site of a violent crime. Don't get too attached to the living characters -- the real protagonists are the angry spirits, a.k.a. Creepy Cat Boy, Crawling Spider Lady and the Black Blob Thing. You will not be happy to see them.
THE REMAKE: The Grudge, out Oct. 22. Producer Sam Raimi wisely enlisted Takashi Shimizu to direct. The setting also remains in Japan, now the home of an American heroine played by Sarah Michelle Gellar. The possibility of seeing Gellar in a smart horror pic is tantalizing to her Buffy fan base.
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT: Though the original's incoherent narrative actually works in its favour, it would be nice to have a character who isn't dispatched immediately.
ADVERSE EFFECT OF AMERICANIZATION: Pervy viewers will be disappointed with the scarcity of Japanese schoolgirls, though Gellar's shower sequence seems like fair compensation.
Link
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I thought it was interesting article, yet somehow they ommitted Exorcist remake to be released soon!
