Film blogMoviesThe Death at a Funeral remake should have died an early death
If Hollywood must persist in gutting pre-existing movies for new projects, why not be really radical? How about a musical Avatar, for instance?Hollywood's chronic creativity drought will be familiar to readers of these pages. An imperfect storm of youthful inexperience in the executive ranks, collective animus toward that which dares to be different, and risk-averse corporate ownership has all but swallowed up the original idea in Tinseltown. And there are few sorrier manifestations of this dearth of ideas than the remake.
Producers have taken a stab at pre-existing movies for decades and there have been successes – Scarface, The Thing and The Maltese Falcon, to name a few. But let's be under no illusion that by and large the remake business is a cynical money-making exercise.
It's not quite so bad when an acclaimed foreign language movie such as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Let the Right One In gets the once-over, even though at first the news tends to elicit a groan. It's a real shame that few moviegoers are prepared to peer over their pillars of popcorn to read subtitles and sample another culture, so more power to those who would seek to transfer them to a broader audience. Besides, we'll always have the original.
But my patience invariably dissolves when someone assembles an English language remake of an English language original. And when the original opened less than three years ago, this smacks of laziness. Case in point: Death at a Funeral. The Chris Rock comedy opens on around 3,000 screens in the US this weekend, revisiting Frank Oz's blah 2007 movie about a shambolic family burial. Sony's genre label Screen Gems knows that Rock and the largely African-American cast could score with the corresponding demographic that missed out on the little-seen (in the US) original. Presumably this explains why they greenlit the remake in late 2008, barely 12 months after the first movie went on release in the US and the UK.
I haven't seen the movie yet. I'm told it even has Peter Dinklage reprising his role as a dwarf who mysteriously turns up at the funeral – his character is said to be the same one as the original model. What's the point of any of this?
It's futile but nonetheless diverting to imagine that, if Hollywood's movers and shakers must persist with revisiting older movies, perhaps they might take that evolutionary step and truly radicalise the core ingredients of pre-existing movies. It might be fun for a (short) while; doomed, impossible to sustain the weight of its ambition, but fun. A stop-motion, musical rendering of Avatar, say, or a sci-fi retelling of Mary Poppins, or an ultra-violent anime take on Finding Nemo. But whatever happens, some movies must remain strictly off limits. It would be inconceivable to alter Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, Memento, or Apocalypse Now … but that's what we said about all the others in the past.
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