The Onion AV Club recently posted an interesting article about Hollywood movie remakes and it brings up a lot of great examples of movies that are technically remakes of previous movies but hold very little connection, if any. Check it out: How’d it get burned?: 22 film remakes dramatically different from the originals
I have always been very much against Hollywood remakes of foreign films. Just the notion that American audiences need to have a film remade or else they will reject it is both insulting and at the same time shamefully true. Hollywood films are made to generate a profit for the large multi-national corporations that distribute and finance them. If they can do that by making quality movies, great! If they can do that by making crap movies, great! They don’t care. So in a desperate search for something that will appeal to a mass audience, often the search for source material goes to films from Europe or Asia that have already achieved some success overseas. Just add a zero to the end of the budget, slide in Sandra Bullock or Meg Ryan, add the guy who directed Austin Powers, and tool the story around so it’s not so… “foreign” and you’ve got yourself some brand new American cheese, ready to go to the 57 Theater Ciniplex alongside Big Norbit’s Momma’s Family Reunion With The Transformers. Awesome!
One of the worst remakes I can think of that has always bothered me is the horrible film City Of Angels. This movie makes the AV Club list and not surprisingly it’s stars Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage make several appearances on the list in other films as well. City Of Angels is a Hollywood remake of the classic 1987 Wim Wenders film Wings Of Desire. I love Wings Of Desire. I saw it on the big screen thanks to our local “art film” theater (a benefit of living in a big city) and have seen it several times since. It’s black and white, there are long philosophical monologues in German, and it’s filled with beautifully framed shots of Berlin and the people who bring it to life. This is NOT a movie for the Spiderman loving american movie masses.
Yet someone had the bright idea that this story had to be brought to America and retold in a cutesy, Meg Ryan, romantic drama kind of way. Nicholas Cage plays an angel and is so stiff and cold, it’s a wonder he has enough movement to even speak. Meg Ryan is the woman he loves from afar and then becomes human for and she is her typical annoying and sappy self, with lots of scenes of these two pining away at eachother straight out of a bad Hallmark card. All the subtlety, all of the delicate observations, all the life-affirming beauty of the original is just gutted and melted down to nothing. Why? Why take a perfectly good movie and put all this effort into making a terribly weak copy? Well the movie bombed at the box office so I’m guessing no one has a good answer for that one.
Not all remakes are foreign films remade for American audiences. Often the cannibalistic Hollywood system will hunt down something it’s already done and try and beat that dead horse to get some more money out of it by “updating it” for contemporary audiences. What’s next? Gone With The Wind set in Iraq with Nicholas Cage as a wealthy arms dealer trying to hold his family together as Iraq gets ripped apart in Civil War? I’ll bet you 10 bucks someone has already pitched it.
Check out How’d it get burned?: 22 film remakes dramatically different from the originals from the Onion AV Club. There are actually a couple on the list that improve on the original. And there are a few that are good on their own with really only a tiny connection to what they are supposed to be based on.
