Stop the insanity

As we mentioned earlier this week, it seems there’s been a real increase of movies dealing with more apocalyptic themes. Certainly a sign of post-millennial anxiety and recessionary fatigue. But now I’m afraid we’re seeing honest-to-gosh signs of an actual impending apocalypse – because now comes word that Hollywood has in mind to take Jennifer Garner and Jessica Biel and mount a “reimagining” of – sorry, I had to swallow – Laverne & Shirley. No, it ain’t April Fool’s, this harbinger of the End Times is seriously being considered.

So I think before the lava starts erupting out of manhole covers and skeletal Valkyries begin swooping down out of the clouds, we need to stop this nonsense in its tracks. ENOUGH WITH THE REMAKES AND REIMAGININGS!!!

Lately Hollywood’s bankruptcy of original ideas has become a complete epidemic.
Admittedly, sometimes a franchise reinvention can yield spectacular results, with last summers’ J.J. Abrams' Star Trek being an example of how to pull it off. But for every Star Trek, there’s an avalanche consisting of Dukes of Hazzard, Bewitched, Scooby Doo, The Avengers…and of course, Wild, Wild West. There’s something about seeing nostalgic old TV shows from another era blown up with $100 million budgets that’s surreal to contemplate. Do we for a minute think that the guys toiling away on The A-Team TV series thought that their breezy network action-fest would someday have to stand up to transmutation as a mega-budget summer tentpole starring Liam Neeson as Hannibal Smith?!?

The problem is, sometimes they work and make money – even if they’re not very good. Mission: Impossible, The Addams Family, Get Smart all did well enough to justify their budgets. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that Ronald D. Moore came up with his reinvention of Battlestar Galactica, one of the best entertainments in the last five years. And I love that The Magnificent Seven evolved out of Seven Samurai. But this remaking TV shows and movies business is Hollywood eventually swallowing its own tail. Sometimes that zeal to repackage a recognizable property for a new generation borders on necrophilia. 2010 is going to bring us remakes of Footloose, Red Dawn, and way too many others to list here – plus we continue to see spectacular foreign films get “Americanized,” with the brilliant Let the Right One In about to materialize as “Let me In,” because the Swedish title was just too complex and confusing.

Sure, Scorsese remade the Hong Kong Infernal Affairs as The Departed and it was super cool. But how far away are we from seeing Amanda Seyfried in a "reimagining" of Audition? Sorry, made that one up, but you see where this is all going.

Remakes of movies and old TV shows is by no means a new phenomenon. But remakes are coming that really ought to give us pause. Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes production company has been trying to remake Hitchcock’s The Birds in the same mold as they did with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hitcher and Amityville Horror.

Filming begins next month on a prequel to John Carpenter’s horror classic The Thing. Now The Thing is a freaking cult sacred cow. The rawness of it, the casting -- when the pistons are firing that good, you need to leave that baby alone. Anyone care to bet that all the effects will be CGI, rather than Rob Bottin’s legendary practical effects? And no, the irony of the fact that The Thing was itself a remake of a 1951 movie does not escape me...

But if we’ve learned anything from Avatar, people are hungry for something fresh and different. They are not hungry for leftovers. So stop treating us like a bunch of Schlemiels.

Or worse yet, a Schlemazel.