Remake. Just hearing the word is enough to turn the stomach of any discerning film watcher. It wasn’t always like that, but at some point in the last fifteen or so years, Hollywood decided that actually trying to have an original thought wasn’t really worth it anymore. Thus began it’s effort to regurgitate trite and borderline disgusting cash grabs as quick as producers could cut checks and pretend they actually do any work.
Even now that public sentiment has begun to turn against these horrible things, they still churn them out. Not a month goes by without a remake being announced that sends the internet into a blind rage. In 2012, it is estimated that nearly 60% of all movies released are remakes, sequels, or adapted from other material while only 40% are original ideas. Perhaps it’s because the studios want to free up time they would be using trying to be creative so they can put it into making up stuff about internet piracy to whine about. Or maybe it is because the general public has less taste than a glass of water and continues to put money in their pockets to watch garbage.
Whatever the reasons, we can all agree that there are movies that should never, ever, ever be touched. Whether they are off limits for personal taste or because they are legitimate classics, there are just some films that we assume even the money hungry hacks in Hollywood would have to think twice about.
The problem is Hollywood doesn’t give a shit, and there are very few movies that are actually off limits to their grubby wine stained fingers. To them, there are only two kinds of movies. The kind that haven’t been remade yet, and ?the kind that only a bunch of idiots with no original ideas who market their films to the lowest common denominator would have the gall to remake – so we can expect an announcement about McG being attached to them in a few years.
Rocky Horror Picture Show
Rocky Horror is one of the biggest, and most surprising, cult hits in the history of forever. Who would have thought a relatively tepidly received rock opera from the 70s about a mad scientist transvestite would still be packing midnight showings more than 30 years later? This is both the reason it should never be remade and the reason it will be. Being such a cult hit, it is almost impossible for the people in the industry today to capture that lightning in the bottle. I mean, just think of how absolutely fucking terrible the Glee version was. But since it already has a large following and a huge marketshare or whatever buzzword the assholes in suits use now, getting a remake starring some awful teen pop star is almost a certainty.
Audition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plGvEhVOnYc
Depending on who you ask, Takeshi Miike is either the weirdest or most versatile director alive today. He has had his hand in somewhere between 200 and a quintillion movies, and has worked in every genre from mind bending horror to kid’s movies. Audition is probably his finest work, and is one of the most legitimately tense and terrifying movies in existence. In fact, when Bravo did it’s argument causing ?100 Scariest Movie Moments? show, Audition was the only Japanese film to crack the top 20.
Studios are probably salivating at the idea of watering this down, cutting an hour from it, and beating the viewer over the head with explanations. Hell, Miike already has an inside track with Hollywood anyway. One Missed Call was a movie he made to parody the derivative Japanese horror movies that were constantly being remade in America. It then got remade in America.
Blade Runner
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP4WvJaMfj8
Loosely based on ?Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?? by Phillip K. Dick, a guy who has seen most of his work shoved into a movie screen at this point, Blade Runner is still considered one of the best cyberpunk movies ever made. Everything from the direction of Ridley Scott to the acting of Harrison Ford made this movie work perfectly, which is even more impressive when you realize the version of the film that most people have seen is drastically different from the superior version of the film that the director wanted you to see.
Scott’s full version restores scenes that make the movie’s amazingly subtle exploration of themes, like what it means to be alive or the importance ? and fallibility ? of memories, more important. I don’t even want to begin to think about how awful someone like Joel Schumacher would handle that. Then again, they tried as hard as they could to fuck this movie up the first time around and failed, so maybe Blade Runner would survive.
Anything with Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger
Okay, okay, I get that this isn’t just one entry, but you really need to think about what Stallone and Arnold were like as action stars. They were the 1980s incarnate, slurring their way through roles with the delicacy of someone trying to put a glass coffee table together with a hammer. Stallone showed his acting chops in Rocky, and Arnold showed his acting chops in pretending to be a republican governor in California, but neither of these guys were multidimensional acting threats. At the time though, it completely and utterly worked.
There will never be another Stallone or Schwarzenegger though, and in the modern movie world there isn’t really room for guys like that. Jason Statham is close, sure, but it isn’t the same and we all know that. These guys made the movies they were in, more than any other actors at the time. Remaking their movies for a modern audience is the most futile way to spend your time outside of explaining climate change to someone in a NASCAR shirt, and will probably make you doubt humanity just as much.
Isn’t that right, Colin Farrell?
Jaws
JAWS (2014) directed by Michael Bay
MOVIE BEGINS
Long shot of boat already sinking. The people on the boat are panicking, attempting to use the bilge pump or whatever it is called so the boat doesn’t sink. CGI Richard Dreyfuss yells “the boat is sinking” to make sure everybody watching realizes the boat is sinking. Cut to a close up shot of Brody.
BRODY
Oh my god! It’s the shark!
SCENE
Quick cut to the ocean. Show the shark immediately, keep the camera on it for an hour and a half. Anytime he bites something it explodes.
ROLL CREDITS
CASH CHECK
DO BLOW
Tony McMillen says
Nice top pic.