Blog: Redux

The world needs better lighting.

We could also do with high fidelity sound and digitally enhanced colour. While we’re at it, can I order some jump cuts, Dutch angles and a red velvet curtain primed to descend when life gets too tricky? I could do with more montages when there’s hard work to do and more chance meetings with beautiful strangers who become instantly enthralled and seductive when I start blithering insecurely about spoons or milkshakes or catching ghosts.

I need a pithy and withering comeback for someone who barges past me in the queue at Tesco. Something to make them reconsider their life choices and reduce them to a burbling heap of angry tears. Then they transform into a mind altering cuttlefish of doom that I have to wrestle to the ground and behead with a spatula from the home wares section.

One thing’s for sure; if life were on film (the crazy, imagined, goblin fighting, ninja cat-scrap, dynamite version. Not the sofa jockey, haircut, tepid tea, bum picking version – i.e. reality) then I’m pretty sure it couldn’t be any less well received than Hollywood’s current output, which seems to be about as popular as a pie made of arses.

Looking through the movie blog bile duct (the internet), the anger and despondency seem to be divided into 5 categories of hatred. I like to call them;

The 5 Categories of Hatred *BOM, BOM, BOM*

(BOMs added for dramatic effect. Any relation to any BOMs living or dead is purely coincidental)

TV spin offs.

The Sweeny, The 3 Stooges, Miami Vice, even The Muppet’s Oscar baiting toe-tappery doesn’t cover up the fact that it’s pretty lazy. Chucking money at instantly recognisable no-brainers so they can expand their width from tellybox to bigtellybox doesn’t take a huge leap of faith does it? Come on Hollywood, if you had any guts you’d try the same with Rainbow or the Clangers or the weather. Surely Antiques Roadshow: Annihilation, is a summer hit waiting to happen?

Foreign Language minus Foreign Language.

Everyone likes homogenising, so REC becomes Quarantine, Let the Right one In becomes Let Me In and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo… stays exactly the bloody same, but with crap script and acting. Quite right too. All that wacky noise from foreign mouths and bizarre symbols no-one really understands is just a way for dusky looking otherplacers to try to be smug. Let’s get Justin Timberlake and Orlando Bloom in and remake Triumph of the Will.

Comic book adaptations.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all love whining about this shizzle, whilst slapping our tenners down on the counter of the Odeon popcorn hut; “I think Hollywood is a machine, designed to exploit established pop culture lamb chops, because it’s too lazy to season and prepare the filet mignon of tough and troubling, blah, blah, bumcakes, let off, wee, poo, cocknoise.”

Sequels, reboots and the seemingly bloody endless stream of vampire movies.

Speaks for itself…

Remakes

Nothing espouses more Soylent Green infested, guttural bile from the mouths of filmgoers than a straight up, merchandise hag, ‘buy yourself a ticket and I’ll tickle your balls’ remake. The potential harm remakes can inflict on an audience is most evident in the horror genre. At a creative peak during the 80s, poorly backed directors exploited the shock value created by handwringing censors and religious zeal, to grab attention, scream their guts up and satirise the age.

Fearlessly moist, fingers aloft and buttocks clenched, Sam Raimi, George Romero and Peter Jackson forged reputations. Now endlessly re-jiggled, classic zeitgeist gorefests have been boiled down and Hollywoodefecated until they retain the shock value of a rude and amusingly shaped carrot.

The remake backlash is strong and the arguments are endlessly trotted out as an example of the decline of the film industry. Still, I don’t remember anyone getting on at the RSC about their constant remakes of bloody Hamlet, or the ‘Richard’ trilogy that keeps popping up (I didn’t see the first one, but the sequels were ace). Come on Stratford, isn’t it about time you got a new flavour?

Well, no. No it isn’t. I’ve never been sure why remakes are immediately derided before even having been watched. Sadly, the wages and the potential profits involved mean there’s a deep suspicion it’s only trotted out for the benefit of people with deep pockets which weighs heavily on the back of directors, who in turn seem reluctant to try anything more radical than concoct a misty eyed episode of ‘I love 1982’ and be sure to name check all the ‘classic moments’ from the original.

The fact that most remakes are indeed cack doesn’t help, but simply being a remake doesn’t instantly equate to a bad film. It’s very hip to sit around in café bars, examining your vintage iPad collection and emitting high pitched squeals of derision about the lack of Hollywood creativity. It’s even easier to forget True Grit, The Fly and A Little Princess and only remember the turd stained undercarriage of Psycho, Planet of the Apes and The Wicker Man (“Not the bees!!!”).

Still, I don’t ever remember any directors or actors dropping much ‘new and exciting’ out of their collective bum hole in the recent past. If Seth Rogen, Christopher Nolan, Will Ferrell or George Clooney pitched a Victorian period drama about a terminally ill squirrel living in a wood made of car parts fighting a giant talking squid, the studios would probably see where they went with it, offer them a $100million budget, then dismiss it as a vanity project if it all went tits to the sky and bombed like Kevin Costner on a U-Boat.

The studios can only develop what’s out there, folks. Yes, we know they’re morons, but until the people who own the thinking caps start trying harder, rebelling against the studios or abandoning the gravy train, the whinging will go on for a long time to come. It’s not all bad. Go watch Submarine.

Lotsoflove xx