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Are Movies Remakeable?
here is part of an interesting article i read about this topic ---
Consider this list of remakes often involving considerable talent: "Psycho" (1960/1998), Gus Van Sant takes an imaginative whack with this shot-by-shot remake; "Godzilla" (1954/1998), yawn, a bust; "The Mummy" (1932/2000), poor Brendan Fraser -- he means so well; "Shaft" (1971/2000), John Singelton makes a pleasing attempt; "Planet of the Apes" (1968/2001), Tim Burton churns out a laughable remake of a laughable movie; "Ocean's 11," an easy-on-the-eyes remake of the rat pack movie -- the rat pack themselves remade "Gunga Din" (1939) before remaking movies was popular. The list goes on, but try to think of a movie that needed to and has been remade with any degree of adroitly.
Theater is a form more suited to the remake. With words as its medium, theater is written to be reproduced. But film's medium is not fluid and malleable words, but images that leave a lasting, stand-alone impression independent of context.
Words: mind. Images: emotion. This is especially true for Hollywood. A Hollywood movie provokes us, through use of images, to feel good (see "Hoosiers") or to cry (see "Beaches," I'm told). Think about it this way: When someone kicks ass or gets the girl, you know how to feel, regardless of what happened previously. But when Lear exclaims to Cordelia:
No, no, no, no! Come, lets away to prison;
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies…
we process the imagery in its context to figure out what a beautifully tragic figure Lear has become. This isn't the stuff of pyrotechnic wizardry or the catalyst for a good Hollywood cry.
Perhaps film is the artistic form least-suited to the remake. Garage bands for decades have performed cover songs as homage. Hip-hop music borrows freely from previously recorded sounds and traditions. In my personal favorite riff on the remake, Jorge Luis Borges pens, "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." In this tale, the writer endeavors to rewrite "Don Quixote" and succeeds by rewriting the novel word by word -- in its entirety. That's good stuff.
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