They keep springing up like old friends from the distant past: Get Carter, Traffic, The Ladykillers and, now, The Italian Job. Except they're not our friends. They're like those pods in the basement in Invasion of the Bodysnatchers: evil, soulless versions of people we think we know and love.
They are all (or in The Ladykillers' case, will be) American remakes of well-known British originals, of films or TV dramas that earned sterling reputations or heavy receipts or rave reviews in their country of origin. Thereafter, they're left to languish in culty obscurity, often for decades, until some 23-year-old in a Hollywood studio spots their retread potential and alerts Legal Affairs to snag the remake rights.
The process that then ensues, involving the usual squadrons of hacks and shaky-handed script-surgeons, is analogous to removing the spine from a kipper, throwing the meat away, then building a whole new fish around the bones. A stupid and pointless procedure indeed, especially when one examines the mutant results for firmness of flesh, freshness, odor and edibility.
PHOTO COURTESY OF BVI
Certain questions inevitably arise. Firstly, what is so wrong with US movie-making that its practitioners feel compelled to plunder the cinematic heritages of other countries for new -- or, pardon me, old -- plots and stories? Is it because they have so thoroughly strip-mined their own cinematic and televisual culture that they must now start on ours? Certainly, if you've sunk to the level of remaking TV shows like Scooby-Doo and McHale's Navy you are millimeters from the bottom of the barrel and it's time to seek fresh fields to defoliate.
But given the generally dismal quality of most new British films, what will there be for the Americans to remake in 20 years' time? Maybe Baby? Greenfingers? What deformities of deformities will they be shooting back at us by then? Trapped between the immovable, sclerotic Hollywood behemoths and the leveling anarchy of European co-production financing arrangements, which way can British cinema jump if it wants to remain viable instead of functioning as Hollywood's Airstrip One?
Peter Collinson's original Italian Job, released in 1969, managed to be so unreconstructedly English -- or so unreconstructibly London -- that it sank its own chances at the American box office. US viewers of my acquaintance need moment-by-moment explanations to comprehend it. And that doesn't make them stupid or insular; quite the contrary, it's a pretty stupid and insular movie in the first place. And Job One was simultaneously so fiercely Euroskeptic, albeit avant la lettre, that today it feels like a blueprint for 20 subsequent years of football hooliganism, pissing in foreign fountains and all those things that prompt the French to call us les fuckoffs.
The Italian Job is not American. It's not European. It's English, for good or ill, and Little English at that. For me, these are the things -- the cultural environment, the social surroundings -- that make Collinson's movie so fascinating to watch, and that partly redeem it. Certainly it's not the lame, dated jokes, the lazy writing, the slack narrative pacing, the boring matiness of the male ensemble or the overall emptiness of the film. I can't cut it any breaks today just because it knocked me out as a 10-year-old watching it on BBC2. But its many faults make it an ideal candidate for the remake treatment, the rule being, of course: only remake crap, because remaking Citizen Kane is just asking for trouble.
So we get the remake, 33 years later and, oooh, about 33 percent better than the original. F Gary Gray and his rewrite goons have shifted heaven and earth to maintain an appositely Italian connection -- a 20-minute opening heist set in Venice -- before relocating their completely new story to Los Angeles, proud home of the 15km traffic-snarl. Caine's Charlie Croker becomes Mark Wahlberg's Charlie Croker II, while Noel Coward's coercive and inflexible Mr. Bridger becomes Donald Sutherland's benign and fatherly John Bridger. The Mini Coopers they hold on to; everything else they flush down the pan.
Like I said, the kipper and the bones. Except this time it almost succeeds, possibly because slick, meretricious stories work better if they're gussied up by pros, instead of being dreamed up by erratic guys like Caine and Collinson over brandies.
Precisely the reverse was true of Get Carter (2001). Hollywood took a great British film and, with consummate alchemical skill, transformed solid gold into mushy dogshit. The only good thing it did for world cinema was to kill off Sylvester Stallone's career. Steven Soderbergh's remake of the Channel 4 series Traffik was an altogether more substantial and intelligent achievement (at least, on first viewing), perhaps because Soderbergh plays clever little games with his source material, much as he did with The Limey. That latter movie, which was not a remake but a compendium of types and scenarios from 1960s British gangster classics, Soderbergh described as Point Blank and Get Carter, remade in the style of Alain Resnais.
Indeed, it's difficult to think of a British film-maker of the same age whose grasp and understanding of British cinema history exceeds Soderbergh's. We ought to worry about that.
Soon enough we will be faced with Joel and Ethan Coen's remake of Alexander Mackendrick's Ealing classic The Ladykillers, which will make for quite the conflict of loyalties when I nervously take my place in the cinema. Although the Coens will undoubtedly make something highly original, I can't help but feel a certain lowering of the spirit as they enter this particular game, no matter how brilliant they are.
What will an American version of an Ealing comedy look like? And will we dare to gaze upon it? Of course we will. We all trooped off to see Sleepy Hollow and From Hell, which were basically inflated remakes of Hammer Studios pictures. Can we be far from the American remake of Carry On Up the Khyber or Confessions of a Driving Instructor?
The alleged special relationship between British cinema and Hollywood is a lot like the alleged special relationship between Downing Street and the White House. It doesn't exist. At least not in any way that favors us, the junior
partner.
Unfortunately, Hollywood has changed enormously since the glory days of the 1960s, when British films (made often, as we tend to forget, with US money) were able to storm the US box office regularly. Back then, studios were reeling from incompetent, geriatric management, bitter takeover battles that dropped them into the hands of rapacious multinationals interested only in the bottom line, and creative near-impotence. They were glad of the chance to distribute and profit from the films sent their way.
With the now thoroughly corporatized studios churning out heavily test-marketed, lookalike movies every weekend, American cinema for the most part is as insipid as fast food and as depressing as mass tourism. Homogenization has proceeded apace ever since Jaws and Star Wars and the monochrome platitudes of Ronald Reagan.
Test-screening audiences are treated like corporate shareholders who must be appeased first, last and always, meaning movies are altered to suit the whims of housewives, students and truants. The rating system dictates that most movies must fit within the confines of the PG or PG-13 rating (lose a third of your take if you snag an R-rating).
All these things, along with the perennial problems of creative bankruptcy, executive timorousness, and plain old rotten filmmaking, have led us to this summer, which offered US audiences a dumbass action movie and a laugh-lite comedy each weekend, and precious little else to leaven a starchy diet. All energy is expended on that first weekend, after which the audience either finds out how bad the movie is and stays away in droves, or misses a great movie that can't be adapted to a throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to marketing.
Globalization and the primacy of American exports mean that, whether or not these movies succeed domestically, they are then force-fed to the world market, clogging two or more screens per Ukrainian, British or Greek multiplex, cancelling out space and appetite for domestic products.
And the films that we make, if we wish them to succeed in the American market or to net a US TV sale, must adhere as closely to all these narrow parameters as possible, thus feeding the decay, internationalizing it, making it the standard. You send us your crap; we'll slavishly imitate it and sling our homemade or subtitled crap back at you.
So it's their fault, but it's also ours. If British cinema is reduced to a library of old movies -- from which the invaders wish to steal only the premise, the best jokes or just the title - -- then we are as much to blame as they are. We have permitted our movie industry to become a supplicant to a gargantuan and scarcely human corporate movie culture that sees us as carrion to be picked over.
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