As bad as most remakes are and as much a simple pursuit of money as they are, there is something about them that lends itself to watching a remake just to see what in the hell happen, and what was different.
Granted, I haven't seen some more recent fairs like Amityville Horror and Texas Chainsaw Massacre because of the simple fact of not caring, but
Psycho I revisited about a year or so ago when I was going through a Gus Van Sant kick of watching all of his old films. Yes it's a shot for shot remake and a very interesting experiment that I enjoyed a great deal more than on my initial viewing in 1998.
All that aside, I have the aspiration that if I were ever given the opportunity to remake a film I would do it with a certain film, but it would'nt necessarily be a remake. More of a new interpretation of an older film. The older film being a jumping off point.
Ever since I saw Elia Kazan's
A Face in the Crowd about seven years ago, I've always wanted to do something in the spirit of it and even borrowing some elements of the film. To do a really short synopsis, it's about the rise of a small town yokel played brilliantly by Andy Griffith, to a country TV star. But the man is really not as innocent as he seems and really is a monster. It's a wonderful study of celebrity and fame. What made the film so great for me was the way Kazan used Griffith playing against his type and precieved celebrity at the time of the Andy Griffith show and being the nice sheriff of Mayberry. Here Griffith is an asshole and excells at it. (Think the dark side of Mayberry)
Immediately while watching the film for the first time I thought it would be great to do something in this type of vein, but take someone like Tom Hanks or Kevin Costner and have him play against his/her precieved type. Most actors tend to do this from time to time as we've seen Tom Cruise go from sensitive man in
Jerry McGuire to a mysoginist asshole in Paul Thomas Anderson's
Magnolia.
It doesn't seem like there have been many films like
A Face in the Crowd in a whole long time and I really like the ideas it plays with regarding the audience perception of the actors/actresses.
With reality television saturating the culture there needs to be some good satire pieces about the frivilous nature of it all. There was that film
Series 7 a few years back that did this with the contestants hunting each other down and murdering each other, but we need something more than that now.
I've kind of digressed from my point of remakes. But yeah, they seem to be motivated more often than not by purely greed and nothing more. The studio takes a sure fire dollar for dollar investment that will produce X-amount of return in sales.
wash. rinse and repeat.
Also,
A Face in the Crowd just came out about a month ago on DVD. I urge everyone to check it out. I should probably have made a seperate thread about the film. Maybe later.
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