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Malevolent
2018 ***1/2 It's 1986 for some reason, and a team of paranormal investigators are making a big name for themselves all over Scotland. ...
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I’m sure none of you except for JPX knows that I’m a bit of a germ-a-phobic. It’s annoying, but manageable. Though, since I met JPX and list...
24 comments:
It looks good but I still don't get why they remade it.
In order to make money.
What he said.
What happened to doing it for art :)
(Taking you seriously despite the smile emoticon)
It's all art, and it's all commerce. That's the gig, same as in the time of the Medicis.
Ron Moore watched the old 1978 Battlestar Galactica prologue (in preparation for writing a sequel, which he didn't want to do, but which was a paycheck) and was overcome with the desire to remake it. He wasn't alone, and I'm really glad he did remake it, because the result was one of the best things I've ever seen. I've frequently watched old stuff that has filled me with the desire to remake it (like, for example, Double Indemnity, which was basically remade as Body Heat). It's a common artistic impulse. When David Fincher was given the opportunity to make Alien 3 as his first movie, and all his friends scoffed at what seemed like a bullshit project, he said, "It could be cool. Don't you think it could be cool?" He was right, and what he did was, in fact, cool...and started him on his amazing career.
Your specific question was about why "they" remade it, which, from the filmmakers' standpoint, was probably some combination of creative urges and embracing of opportunities like I'm describing. For the studio, it was an opportunity to make some money, but then, it's always about an opportunity to make some money no matter what movie or book or painting or building or cartoon or symphony or album or single you're talking about. Little, Brown didn't publish Catcher in the Rye "for art" -- they did it to make a buck. EMI didn't put out "Sergeant Pepper" "for art" either. No work of popular art exists without somebody making an investment against profits. Commerce and art are as entwined as veins and arteries, and that's been the case for all of human history. How's that for a grandiose (but true!) answer?
What about you Jordan? Do you write your books to make money?
Again, it's a composite question like I said above. I would write books anyway, but getting an opportunity to do it professionally and reach an audience is obviously much better and more fulfilling. Getting paid to do it is more about freeing up time that would be spent waiting tables, making websites etc; it's like a societal value judgment, rendered financially. "This person's art is worthwhile enough to the rest of us that we'll subsidize him so that he can make more." I also occasionally record musical compositions but I would never expect anyone to pay for them because they don't satisfy that criterion; they're not worthwhile to anyone else. Obviously I'd love to be Stephen King or Michael Crighton and be installing swimming pools, but so would anyone doing anything with a potential high reward. But in the end I want people to read my books, because it feels good, and otherwise there's no real point...and the only way to make that happen is to sell them. Everything I said above, stands: the book I'm co-writing now exists because my friend got a good idea, and because Random House sees a market. It's just like any human endeavor; the desires and goals and obligations and payoffs are all intertwined.
I mean, Norman Mailer wrote Tough Guys Don't Dance because he had four ex-wives and massive alimony payments; he was quite up-front about it. There was no illusion about what his goal was. But it's still a Norman Mailer novel, and that's its value no matter "why" he did it. Some people think it's one of his greatest books.
I just think that "Art vs. commerce" arguments are ultimately as useless and misleading as "High- vs. low-culture" arguments. They're weak, post-facto descriptive categories that don't actually exist anywhere real. It's all the same stuff, and it's all the same stuff.
"The only way to make that happen is to sell them," I wrote above. Not strictly true. I could put a book up on my website as a free download. But I'd rather have Random House spending thousands printing and advertising it and distributing it to bookstores nationwide. Wouldn't you?
Jordan when you're right, you're right! Though there is something to be said about compromising your artistic vision to make money and ultimately the art suffers for it. Edges get dulled. Things become more boring. I recently listened to a great audiobook about the making of the Velvet Underground and Nico album. Even though Andy Warhol didn’t know the first thing about producing records, his name alone kept the band in a bubble, protecting them from being influenced by the current trends. The album barely sold at the time but without that one record there would be no Nirvana, Pixies, Sonic Youth or Radiohead. The world would be shittier. Not sure what my point was… I think I just like to talk about the Velvets.
Re: Nightmare on Elm St remake, I'm not opposed to it. The original is about as scary as the Lion King.so it shouldn’t be hard to turn it into something more substantial. They remade Texas Chainsaw at least 4 times before getting it right with TCM: The Beginning. The preview makes it look… acceptable. Fingers crossed.
The problem I have with all this remaking for money is that it seems many original ideas are squashed before they're given a chance to be developed because the producers don't want to take the risk. Think of the past, so many good films or shows came from taking those risks. Playing it safe just provides us with the same crap over and over.
I agree that there are many films that cry for a remake for reasons that have been stated here many times before. I also don't disagree with the reasoning you put forth regarding your own writing, of course you'd like your book to sell. Let me ask you this though. If you were approached by someone who wanted to make a film of your book and they wanted to change things to make the movie more "palatable" to a wider audience. Change scenes that you felt would compromise the entire plot, would you do it for the cash?
Also JSP, the original Nightmare was scary as hell when it came out. We had never seen someone bulging through a wall or crawling across the ceiling. Just the premise of a dude who could get you in your dreams was frightening at the time. Not so much now.
i think it's becoming less common for works of horror to be declawed before being presented to american audiences. if anything we're a lot more bloodthirsty than we ever were. we want the miserable bloody, no hope ending (see TCM-B, Se7en). and when the hero does get out alive, we want to see that dude go through the worst shit ever to get there (see Hostel, the Descent, any of the Saw movies).
what needs to be protected is the sense that the story should be, above all other things, special. this is true whether it's a remake or an original, but i think if we're talking about remakes, what we want are assurances that the film(re)makers are (a) qualified and (b) respectful of their source material.
rob zombie's halloween was a successful remake because he met both of these criteria. same could be said for zack snyder's dawn.
you could say the same thing about alexandre aja who did the hills have eyes. doubly so because the remake was like a billion times better than the OG. same with ocean's 11.
in this case, i just don't think michael bay has the chops to make a good nightmare flick. i watch the preview and just think to myself, "why is everyone so pretty?"
take dumb shia laboeuf out of the equation and you could say this about just about any other michael bay movie. i don't trust *him* with a remake, because i don't think he gets what makes a good movie good.
as for crappy remakes crowding out courageous originals, would it be any better if it were crappy originals crowding out courageous originals?
on a positive note, facemelted freddy looks f-ing great.
Well put 50P you're so right about the good remakes vs the crappy ones. I know there is a place for remakes. The horror remakes actually don't bother me as much as some others unless they replace really good actors with crap like they did with the Omen's main characters.
I agree with everything 50 said, but I want to add something else (a concept that's on my mind since I'm watching a pretty good bootleg screener dupe of this year's Star Trek):
Times change, and movies change. In many ways, they (the movies, not the times) improve. It's a developing art, just like the other arts, and each generation has its own realities and its own breakthroughs.
Which is why the great movie stories keep coming back, the way that each generation has its own Shakespeare plays or Verdi operas. Daniel Craig is "our" James Bond, and he fits the times the way that Roger Moore fit the 'Seventies or Sean Connery fit to the 'Sixties.
J. J. Abrams' Star Trek is a great example of this, because, not only is it a totally contemporary movie, but it makes you realize just how far the art form has progressed since the sixties; how much more advanced science fiction cinema has become.
Last year's Brideshead Revisited was another great example, because it went back over territory covered by the excellent 1981 miniseries, but it used film techniques that simply weren't available in the '80s, which brought something to the story that wasn't possible before.
Batman, same remarks. It's not disrespectful of the originals; it's the opposite of disrespectful. It's saying, "We like this thing so much that we want to make our own version of it." It's not a cheap cash-in (or, not just a cheap cash-in; see above comments). These stories endure, and each generation can discover them again.
Obviously a remake of Casablanca or Citizen Kane or The Godfather or The Lost Weekend would be idiotic, because that's something else: those really aren't "timeless" in the same way; they're tied magnificently into their moment in history and can't be dislodged. Citizen Kane is flatly impossible unless it's 1941.
I'm not sure where the dividing line is, but I think Nightmare on Elm Street (and even Yellow Submarine) fall into the category of "go ahead!" when it comes to remakes. But I'd hate to be deprived of Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto as Kirk and Spock just because it's all been done before.
Also, the "kids today" have much more interest in the old stuff than I ever would have believed, and these new versions of things (Trek, Bond etc.) always spur increases in rentals and sales of the old versions.
Really, all I need to say is Battlestar Galactica.
i'm curious about your opinion of the remake of manchurian candidate.
most of the built-in central tenets of the plot are "timeless" -- paranoia of outside governments, paranoia of our own government, paranoia about loss of freedom. these fears will go nowhere so long as there are governments, a yearning for freedom, and a world without promises.
you could take all of these elements and boost the particulars into the modern day and the internal mechanisms of the movie would work fine.
but there's the context of the red scare -- the movie came out in 62 and the book in 59 (same year as starship troopers, by anti-commie robert heinlein -- also psycho, goldfinger and the naked lunch came out that year (the books); irrelevant, but awesome).
there were, of course, attempts to recontextualize the new story -- ww2 becomes the first gulf war is the biggest one to come to mind. (strangely, the chinese communist theme was dropped completely.)
That's a really interesting example. There are a couple of really good features to the new movie (including Washington's performance, Jeffrey Wright's performance, and the flashback sequences) and a couple of really bad features too (Meryl Streep's ridiculous acting; the fucked-up screenplay pacing; the business with the agent whom he meets on the train) but the main problem was a central, thematic, 100% political one.
During the Cold War, the omnipresent paranoia about the "red scare" was heavily encouraged by the American status-quo and the American establishment. It was hardly a fringe position; it was the bedrock of McCarthyism, conservatism, the arms build-up etc. etc. It was (dare I say) the same kind of strategically-exploited pablum as today's "support the troops" bumper-stickers. In other words, it was an accepted establishment position. So to make a movie about how "the reds" are actually going so far as to use an ingenious espionage plot to take over the United States government is more like a Reagan-era Red Dawn fantasy than anything having to do with the reality of those times.
But, today, the world is quite different, and the authors of the new Candidate chose to shift their story around and make a multinational corporation into the villain. Now, speaking as a die-hard liberal, I find this new scheme infinitely more plausible and frightening...but that doesn't mean that it represents any kind of widespread public fear. With the exception of "terrorism" (and, in some circles today, our new "Muslim" president) there's not much that makes American's frightened, even when they should be frightened (mainly because the same cultural forces who worked overtime to make "the Reds" so frightening 50 years ago now do everything they can to make us trust the corporate/military/industrial complex). So when you make a big company into a villain in a movie, and suggest that big companies (like Blackwater) are behind everything, the audience either doesn't quite grasp what you're saying or thinks you're making it up.
(In David Gerrold's book about writing scripts for the original Star Trek series, he writes about how the original "Tribbles" script was about a greedy corporation; he was told in no uncertain terms that "On American television, 'big business' is never the villain" and he had to re-write the script to make Klingons responsible for what had happened...turning a parable about industrialization it into another veiled 'Red Scare' story.)
So, setting aside Michael Moore's new movie, it's very difficult to get Hollywood success with a story about big faceless corporations and what they're actually doing on the global scale (even if it's probably the most pressing of topics right now). The public is being urged not to look in that direction; we're supposed to be frightened of "terrorism" (and that's what James Bond and Batman are each fighting now). And that's why the new Manchurian Candidate failed to click. Unfortunately, it was sending on a frequency that most people just don't receive.
The only (really amazing) example to this trend I can think of? The Fugitive, which somehow succeeded brilliantly at precisely what I'm saying can't be done. The original series was some small-scaled criminal plot, but the movie was about Clarkson MacGregor, a big evil corporation that killed Kimble's wife to protect their new drug from the scrutiny of the FDA. Another example (on a level of satire) is RoboCop, and two others (come to think of it) are District 9 and the original Alien. But in general, outside the realm of fantasy/sci fi, it's really hard to find movies with big companies as the villain. That's a particular dark force that does not want attention drawn to it...and generally gets what it wants. (Okay, The Insider, Erin Brockovitch, The Constant Gardener,,,but it's still unusual damn it!)
I meant to say "Halliburton" up there, not "Blackwater." If you follow the fake news stories running through Manchurian Candidate, a picture of the Manchurian Corp. emerges that makes them more like Halliburton than like anyone else. But Halliburton works very hard to keep itself out of the public eye and away from all scrutiny; most Americans don't even know who they are, even though they basically owned and operated the Iraqi invasion (thanks to their former CEO being our de-facto President, Palpatine-style).
In the 'Seventies, right after Watergate, there was a brief window where Americans were genuinely scared of big American "establishment" institutions which they could not trust, and consequently there were movies like The Parallax View (about the evil Parallax Corporation) and The China Syndrome. But Reagan's election wiped that slate totally clean and brought us the era of Top Gun and Out of Africa; the toy soldier/Banana Republic world.
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