Is Nothing Sacred

[che2000]

I recently, and much to my shock/surprise/ disgust, saw the trailer for the remake of Straw Dogs and my first thought was 'Is nothing sacred anymore?'.

Even from the few minutes I saw of this movie I know that it is going to be baaaad - pretty people being nasty to each other, with all of Peckinpah's moral ambiguity and (yes, use the word) genius stripped out of it to make it another rape/ revenge piece of worthless cinema.

There even appears to be a car chase in there somewhere!

I despair, I really do.

[John M. Whalen]

Well, in case you didn't know, Tony Scott reportedly has plans to remake The Wild Bunch. And it just might be updated rather than set in the early 1900s. And his brother Ridley is thinking of remaking Blade Runner!! Have filmmakers lost whatever spark once existed that can think of a new idea?

[che2000]

I think the idea of a Wild Bunch remake has been kicking around for quite some time and (thankfully) has so far failed to happen. Yep, read about the plans for sequel/prequel/reboot of Blade Runner.... terrible idea.

Although I appreciate that Hollywood has never been a hotbed of originality, and the (as Homer Simpson once said) Alighty Ollar has always ruled the roost, things do actually seem worse these days with more and more bad movies making their way onto the screen, or maybe I'm just gettin old. Of late I've revisited (retreated back to) a lot of the movies I loved when I was younger - lots of Hammer Films. Vincent Price movies, Spaghetti westerns and (always) Peckinpah.

I just want to see a good, vaguely original, film every now and again - is that so much to ask?

[John M. Whalen]

Speaking of Peckinpah and Spaghetti westerns. Here's something you might enjoy reading.

http://www.spaghetti-western.net/ind..._Nobody_Review

[Jaqhama]

A modern day remake of the Wild Bunch has already been done...see Nick Nolte in Extreme Prejudice.

[John M. Whalen]

This is true. John Milius wrote and directed Extreme Prejudice. But as a friend of mine said, it lacked Peckinpah's intensity. Now here's something interesting. According to an article in The Guardian, a writer named DAvid Ayer had written an updated Wild Bunch script several years ago. The description of it sounds amazingly like Extreme Prejudice, including drug cartels and a CIA agent. But Scott has turned to Brian Helgeland who wrote Man on Fire. So to put this in perspective, Milius rips off Peckinpah and makes Extreme Prejudice, Ayer rips off Milius and his script doesn't get made, and now Helgeland has the chance to rip off Peckinpah, Milius, and Ayer. What next? Wild Bunch, the Musical?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/...d-bunch-remake

[che2000]

I think the problem with a lot of remakes is that they rather miss the point of what makes the original great. With the Wild Bunch is isn't the balletic viiolence but rather the understanding that Peckinpah brought to the story of men who had lived beyond their time, combined wth some rather superb casting - William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, the great Ben Johnson, the brilliant Warren Oates, Robert Ryan, Dub Taylor, LQ Jones. Edmond O'Brien and the fabulous Strother Martin - men with 'lived in' faces who practically smelled of horses and gunoil (and other things in the case of Jones and Martin).

Oten, it's forgotten that these screen inhabitants are what make the film as much as script and direction and that they bring a certain amount of 'baggage' with them (Holden being a case in point - a matinee idol who, like Pike Bishop, had his best years behind him). Would, for example, Ride the High Country aka Guns in the Afternoon (bad title that) have worked as well without the presence of Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea?

Similarly the recent remake of The Wicker Man that took the basic plot but missed the point that sometimes it's just great fun to watch British actors making a bit of a tit of themselves for the paycheck. (see almost any late 1960's or early 1970's Hammer movie for vindication of this).

Mind you, not all remakes suck: 2004's Dawn of the Dead was great and the recent British remake of Wild Target was spot on (mostlly because of the casting, since it was more or less a shot-for-shot of the French original).

With something like Straw Dogs, part of the shock comes from 'that's Dustin Hoffman hitting a bloke with a bear trap while playing bagpipe music far too loudly on the stereo' and again it's part of the baggage that certain actors can bring to a role (in my opinion) just putting some pretty boy actor in the role and expecting it to have the same impact is courting disaster.

[Jaqhama]

To sum it up, you're right, they just don't 'get it'. End of story.

What amazes me is that there's a million great novels out there that they could use as the basis for movies, yet they don't. Why? Don't want to pay the author for the option rights or what?

I'd like to see something like Wilbur Smith's Eagle in the Sky made into a movie, certainly his superb action/adventure story Eye of the Tiger. I re-read EoT every couple of years and it's always a great yarn, not diminished by previous readings.

[che2000]

I think it was Robert Aldrich who pointed out that bad books make better films that good ones (he was in reference to Kiss Me Deadly which is a standard Mike Hammer potboiler on the page but something strange and wonderful on screen). It's partly to do with producers not wanting to take risks - I'm not sure what the average cost of a movie is these days but I'm certain that the average summer blockbuster must cost a hell of a lot, especially when you take marketing costs and the like into consideration - so the rule has always been to play it safe.

Safe, unfortunately, ususally means things with a brand recognition, hence remakes and sequels and, on occasion, the adaptation of a best seller, it also means rom-com after rom com and the kind of watered down horror and sf that makes genre fans grind their teeth in frustration.