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Hi kids, Tim Hulsizer here. A few of us (myself, Mark Nelson, and our guest commentator RickTrottier to be exact) attended a screening of director Gore Verbinski's new film The Ring this week. Afterwards, basking in the glow of this surprisingly entertaining American remake of the terrific Japanese version, we had a quick chat. Driving back home alone, I had ample time to construct some salient points about the film and about the American cinematic obsession with the remake. By the time I arrived at my abode, I had of course forgotten the most brilliant epiphanies of the return trip, but I was able to slobber my way through the following email to the Film Basement gang before collapsing into slumber:

So we saw the Ring, and we all liked it...but a little voice keeps nagging me: "No matter how much you think they did a good job with the source material, you still need to deduct a star from your review because it's a remake, not an original." I mean, should we reward Hollywood for choosing good remakes, or damn them for remaking something at all? It's hard, DAMN hard for me to judge this issue because I'm such a fan of Carpenter's remake of The Thing, among others.

The latest news in the saga of remakes is the new issue of Entertainment Weekly which says Tom Cruise will produce an upcoming remake of another enjoyable Asian horror movie The Eye. The article goes on to say that (in essence) "now that Asia has caught up in terms of production values, we shall deign to rip off their ideas like we have Europe." It's frustrating me, all this remake / franchise / adaptation stuff. I don't even know how to approach it. Kill the messenger (i.e. the directors and crew)? Or hate the studios that bankroll the rehashes and non-ideas? Should it even matter if a film is a remake?

The next day Matt Goltz responded in kind:

I'm actually torn on the remake idea, too. For me it goes back to Besson's La Femme Nikita and John Badham's Point of No Return. The rip-off... Ahem, I mean "remake"... had more money, an established action director, some well-known actors and a major studio behind it. Yet, which one is more remembered fondly by time? The original, of course. On the other hand there's Gus Van Zant's Psycho remake, which -- while unnecessary and unable to hold a candle to the original -- had some intriguing directorial choices and performances, like seeing a favorite stage play put on by a different theater company.

I think it's how it's done. Remaking a film while the original is still fresh in the mind is obviously a mistake, like with Nikita and Point. So is not bringing a lot of new ideas to the party, as was the case with Open Your Eyes and Vanilla Sky (Crowe copped an actor and duplicated camera shots liberally for his remake). Some films seem to be remade simply because special effects are better and cheaper than ever before, though throwing money at an aging idea doesn't always make it better, and in the case of the remakes of Burton's Planet of the Apes, Emmerich's Godzilla and McTiernan's ill-advised remake of Rollerball, the results can be pretty disastrous. (And this after McTiernan did such good work remaking The Thomas Crown Affair.) I guess it all depends on timing, talent and fresh ideas -- pretty much like any movie.

Carpenter's The Thing is more paranoid and claustrophobic, making it more terrifying. Ocean's Eleven is fun simply because it's more contemporarily smooth and less "ring-a-ding-dingy" than the beloved Rat Pack classic. Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds succeeds because it's far more slapsticky and therefore of different intent than the original. Then again, The Ring and Chris Nolan's Insomnia work because they change just enough to make things new, yet they stay so close to the original outlines and themes that I hasten to call them remakes at all. Maybe "reimaginings" if they work or "rip-offs" if they don't would be more apt.

I'm sure some studios justify this new remake-mania by saying films like Nikita, The Ring, and Steven Soderbergh's upcoming Solaris are remade because mass audiences don't see foreign films, which may be true for "Joe Six Pack" and his trailer full of WWF fans. But since the advent of home video, since Blockbuster Videos opened in every third town and since IFC and the Sundance Channel began, many people are more foreign-film savvy than ever. And just how many of these remakes are actually studios simply trying to get easy money by recycling their catalog titles is anyone's guess.

I nodded at the screen, lost in thought. Matt had made some great points, and the big ball was rolling around in my head, chasing the little Indy out of the Temple of Complacency. I pondered again the reasons films get remade. Financial considerations are foremost with the big studios, and this comes as no surprise. The Ring grossed large numbers in Asia, which never fails to turn heads in LA-LA Land. But there are other reasons as well. You often hear producers boasting of how they "love the original Swedish version" of a certain film, and they've remade it out of a love for the movie in question. I heard that about The Vanishing and Open Your Eyes. Much of that is a big fat lie to cover up the dollar signs in the producers' eyes, but I'd like to believe them whenever my cynicism allows it. I believe in art, and to some extent I believe there are artists trying to add a bit of it to their Hollywood careers. That doesn't mean I'll ever forgive morally bankrupt remakes like Flubber or Mighty Joe Young, but we expect that kind of fiscal wallet-groping from an outfit like Disney. Our friend and guest commentator Rick adds:

Praise the directors if they do a good job producing an artful presentation. Compliment the acting crew if they act well. Crucify the brass for their power, money and resident evil in all things. Ignore the writers for their lack of talent and creativity. Encourage young, hungry writers to forward their goods so that remakes are relegated to where they belong, an occasional reminder of an old movie that we like. That is my warped opinion on the subject.

Truer words never spake, my friend. Mark, ever the voice of reason is this tempestuous new millennium buzzed in with this answer to the Remake Question::

If it ain't broke, re-make it.

I think something many of us re-make haters (count me in, because for the most part, contemporary re-makes are really a waste of everyone's time) forget is that re-make-a-mania is not really a new phenomenon with the US studios. Every decade has had its share, going back to......well, as far back as I can see.

(If you want to have a little fun, check out The IMDB and see how many versions of Hound Of the Baskervilles, Three Musketeers, Phantom Of the Opera, or The Front Page you find. The re-make game isn't new, just more apparent to we who have been raised in the cine-savvy VCR and TCM era. In earlier decades, you didn't have endless TV airings of older films and vast video libraries to make you aware of what had already been----films came, went, and were largely forgotten until the magic box came into people's homes.)

Initially, the re-makes were updates of silent films, once the sound era came in. Ben-Hur was a re-make (one might argue, with little difficulty, that this is a case of a re-make all but erasing the memory of the original in the public's mind). Hitchcock's The Lodger (1927) was re-made just a few years after its initial release (first in 1932, and twice again after that, in 1944 and 1994) to take advantage of the added element of sound.

Then, when color was the new must-have spectacle, you had re-makes of older films to utilize all that Technicolor would allow, like Showboat (1951, which had been made TWICE before in the previous 20 years in B&W). An Affair To Remember (1957) was a remake of the earlier black-and-white Love Affair (1939, and was in turn re-made again in 1994 as Love Affair with Warren Beatty). Heck, even Hitchcock re-made his own The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 with color and a bigger budget, elements that were unavailable to him for the 1934 UK original.

I think it was the 60's that first saw the studios scooping up foreign films for US versions, most notably the films of Akira Kurasawa. Yokimbo (1961) became A Fistful Of Dollars (1964....though that was technically an Italian production, it starred US actor Clint Eastwood, and found huge success here......the story would ultimately be re-made in the US with elements from both films as Last Man Standing in 1996), The Seven Samurai (1954) becoming The Magnificent Seven (1960.....and later The Seven Magnificent Gladiators in 1983) and Rashomon (1950) becoming the western-set The Outrage (1964).

My feeling is that most often the original film outshines the re-make in the long run. I think Planet Of the Apes (2001) will ultimately be out-rented and out-remembered by the superior original, as will the recent Gone In Sixty Seconds and Get Carter re-hashes.

It's funny how many high-profile re-makes have already been marginalzed in memory (if not forgotten altogether) in favor of the original films on which they were based. Yeah, Dino DeLaurentiis re-did King Kong in 1976, but which one is regarded as the classic? Ditto on Tobe Hooper's 1986 Invaders From Mars, and the 1988 version of The Blob ...and the recent Godzilla and The Haunting re-makes are desperately trying to be forgotten by anyone who paid to see them.

To be fair though, the DePalma's 1983 Scarface (an updating of the 1932 film) and the 1978 version of Invasion Of the Body Snatchers hold their own against the originals, as they completely update the the themes of the source material, bringing contemporary attitudes (and contemporary sex and violence) into the mix. The color (blasphemy!) re-do of Night Of the Living Dead also has its fans; not only does it update the setting and gore, but it also goes the extra step of pulling the rug out from under fans of the original--several of the 1968 film's biggest scares are thrown off-kilter in the re-make, bringing surprises to both those who've seen the original and who are completely new to the story. Heck, even Reservoir Dogs (1992) is basically a re-make of the 1987 Chow Yun-Fat film City On Fire, and far outshines the original in many minds.

I think the key to a successful remake, at least in the eyes of the moviegoing public, is to re-make something people have forgotten, or never heard of in the first place. Try something like Attack Of the 50-Foot Woman (even if it is for cable), and it evaporates into the mists of time (and the 'USED' bin at the video store). Update and re-do a semi-obscure 50's Glenn Ford film called Ransom!, this time with Mel Gibson, and nobody's the wiser.

So perhaps my own answer, after all, is to not judge a film by whether it's a remake; I should instead judge each film on its own merits as an achievement in cinematic expression. This type of cold, analytical criticism prevents one from sounding dismissive in a review of an agile genre picture like Verbinski's The Ring. Besides, if an "original" idea is represented by tripe along the lines of Clockstoppers and Valentine, then a well-directed, smartly written remake of an older film is likely to provoke more discussion anyway.

Adaptations of books, adaptations of older films...this is just a matter of semantics. Few people fault The Godfather for being based on Mario Puzo's novel, so why be upset that a new movie stems from an earlier one? If remakes have been around since the early days of cinema, the real question here isn't about the newness of the storyline, it's about the thematic construction of the piece, and the overall merit of the finished film. Mark pointed out this week that The Ring was a book and a TV movie in Japan before it ever saw the inside of a movie theater. That in no way diminishes my love for the Japanese theatrical feature, and I'm now firmly convinced that the new version here is quite a good film indeed. My opinion, like so many movies I've seen, has officially been re-made.

If you have a topic you'd like to see our crew discuss in a future roundtable session, please Tell Us and we'll do our best to accommodate. Thanks for reading. Now get back into that theater before you miss the new remake of The Garbage Pail Kids Movie.

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