Tanya Batson-Savage, Freelance WriterAS TIME'S curtain closes over August 2005, it is beginning to feel like the summer that never was ... at least, as far as the box office is concerned. While the temperatures outdoors soared, in cinemas, the movies have been largely lukewarm. A striking number of remakes have been littering cinema screens like Hollywood's version of stale breadcrumbs that will ultimately lead it back to huge intakes.
Alas, that has hardly been true, because in the main, these remakes have been unimpressive. It seems that this year a group of industry personnel got together, scraped the bottom of the barrel, came up empty and then thought 'hey you remember that great story about ... ? Let's do that'.
So it is that this summer at the box office has been akin to summer television when everything on was a repeat, with stories both from the small and the big screen being popped into the microwave and sent off for another spin at the movies. Even so, these remakes can hint at a few sociological changes in our time. In many of these resurrections, the main characters have either changed sex or race. In truth, this year's remade batch of movies have stretched beyond the summer, reaching back further in the year with Guess Who?, the literal lightening up of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
As the year wore on, Herbie Fully Loaded (Lindsay Lohan), Bewitched (Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell), War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise), The Honeymooners (Mike Epps and Cedric the Entertainer) and The Longest Yard (Adam Sandler and Chris Rock) came to join it. Yet to hit local screens are The Bad News Bears (Billy Bob Thorton and Greg Kinear) and The Dukes of Hazzard (Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Jessica Simpson, Burt Reynolds, Willie Nelson).
Bewitched, The Honeymooners and The Dukes of Hazzard all had their inception in television. Of the lot, Bewitched does a double take of the remake, as it is a remake about a remake. War of the Worlds, based on the H.G. Wells novel, has spent time on both the big and small screens.
Though it comes close, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (starring Johnny Depp) can be excluded from the remake list, as it is far too different from the original and so closely linked to the book to be an official remake. Batman Begins also doesn't count, because well... it's Batman and superheroes are constantly remaking themselves, so it goes with the superhero territory.
MILK DRY
The slew of remakes follows the same money train as sequels. It is a product of the Hollywood mantra of 'why go original when someone has already come up with a good storyline that you can milk dry?' Remakes also have their place, allowing a new generation to play with an old idea and use it to reflect their own issues. So it was that the Manchurian Candidate was reworked to not merely reflect politics, but the Bush administration in particular.
In Herbie Fully Loaded, Herbie is driven by a girl. Of course this girl, Lindsay Lohan (Maggie Peyton), is the remake princess. Lohan has had a string of successful remakes with Disney. She played precocious twins in The Parent Trap, went adult in Freaky Friday and then pressed her pedal to the metal for Herbie. So, with girl power behind the wheel, the film almost deals with the issue of femininity and the NASCAR driving circuit. Yet Herbie Fully Loaded could not make the trip to feminism, as it runs out of gas before it could take itself too seriously.
Yet almost is never good enough and these remakes bring nothing new to the table despite the physical changes that have taken place, either along plot lines or with the characters who have crossed race and gender lines.
There have also been racial shifts in this remake binge. In the case of Guess Who?, it is a young white man who is being brought home to meet the upstanding black family. Further more, it treats the race issue as a joke, never really touching on the (reverse?) racism that Percy (Bernie Mac) offers Simon (Ashton Kusher). The change from serious drama to laughter does suggest, however, that maybe the public is not yet ready to laugh at the stupidity of racism, especially not when it is white on black.
Rather than a take on changes in racial relations, Guess Who? is more important as an indicator of the growing power of African Americans at the box office. The movie is among a growing number of essentially black comedies which are targeted at wider audience. Even Ice Cube, once another black stereotype stuck in the role of gangster, has become a part of that trend with Are We There Yet?, a family comedy currently becoming one of the year's top grossing comedies.
The Honeymooners, starring Mike Epps and Cedric the Entertainer, also falls into this group. Interestingly, in the original television series, featuring two white couples, the Kramdens were representative of the typical working class couple, as in most sitcoms of its era. There is no attempt to change this in the big screen rendition; the Kramdens have simply been reworked into a darker hue because with Barbershop under his belt Cedric the Entertainer now has enough clout to cross the racial divide.
Alas, the remakes that swatted the screen this year have been very shallow and so are more indicative of a change in popular tastes rather than the issues that concern the contemporary world. They were dusted off and in many cases given a spit shine, but they came with nothing new to offer.
They may as well have been served with recycled popcorn.
