It’s remake week here at Trash City, so as well as reviewing a few examples of the “genre”, figured I might as well put together a few philosophical notes on the topic. Remakes tend to come in for a lot of flak, but they are something of a double-edged sword. Some of my favorite films have been remakes, and you might be surprised to learn that highly-regarded movies as diverse as Dangerous Liaisons, The Maltese Falcon, Against All Odds, Fatal Attraction and A Fistful of Dollars, all fall into the category to some extent. It is a somewhat nebulous group: technically, every film version of Hamlet ever made is a “remake,” but we’ve got to draw the line somewhere – so if it’s in the public domain, it’s fair game.

That said, there do appear to be certain guidelines which influence the remakes that are successful, from those that are regarded as cinematic abominations. After the jump, here are some thoughts on these rules.

1. Remake movies where there is room for improvement.
The better the original, the less point there is in remaking it. Any remake is always going to be compared to the original, and the better this was, the more likely your version is going to be found wanting. No matter what you may think, you are not Martin Scorsese. You are not Steven Spielberg. And you are definitely not Albert Hitchcock, Gus Van Sant, please note. This is where remakes like The Blob can hardly fail, because the original was not exactly viewed with reverence. Same with Piranha 3-D. The lower the bar was initially set, the less chance of failure. I still reckon a Creeping Terror remake could kick ass, because, to quote John Huston:

“There is a willful, lemming-like persistence in remaking past successes time after time. They can’t make them as good as they are in our memories, but they go on doing them and each time it’s a disaster. Why don’t we remake some of our bad pictures – I’d love another shot at Roots of Heaven – and make them good?”

2. Bring something new to the party.
There’s no point in doing something that’s a slavish remake, otherwise, what’s the point? Sometimes, there is an aspect which was obviously missing from the original, for reasons that made sense at the time – in the original Cat People, the sexual tension had to be underplayed, even though it was obviously a major theme, because of the censorship climate. Paul Schrader took that aspect, turned it up to eleven and made it in your face. Same with David Cronenberg and the body-horror aspect of The Fly.

3. The times, they are a-changing…
It should be obligatory for every horror remake to include a scene in which a character waves a cellphone above his or her head, and mutters, “Dammit! No service!” To steal from another song, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be: so if you’re bringing your remake into the current day (as almost all do), you can’t pretend it’s still the seventies. People are now more connected than they were, and the ceaseless march of technology potentially affects not only horror movies but thrillers and even romantic comedies (You’ve Got Mail updated The Shop Around the Corner with email replacing letters). But some things just won’t translate. For some reason, this seems to affect movies based on remaking TV shows in particular: Wild Wild West, The Mod Squad and The Avengers all failed miserably to work in the present day, regardless of whether they retained the period setting or not.

4. Some things are sacred.
Even contemplating a remake of Casablanca should be grounds for flogging [unless, of course, you’re going to make it star Pamela Anderson and call it Barb Wire. In which case, go right ahead] As a general rule of thumb, if you want to remake movie X, you need first to have proven that you can make your own film as good as movie X. So, if Tim Burton wants to remake Planet of the Apes or Willy Wonka, that’s fine.  When Scott Derrickson wants to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still, and his track record extends no higher than The Exorcism of Emily Rose… Not so much. Just because you can remake a classic, doesn’t mean you should.

5. The world is shrinking.
Stop with the foreign remakes. Sergio Leone could get away with producing knock-offs of Kurosawa movies, because just about no-one outside of Japan had seen them. Nowadays, thanks to an unholy combination of the Bays [and I mean E- and The Pirate, not Michael], any half-decent movie is available anywhere in the world, usually within a few days of release. Some genres are particularly on the ball here: anime and horror, for example. Do not expect fans to be enthusiastic about your remake of a film they have already seen and either a) know and love, or b) don’t think is very good to begin with. Gore Verbinski’s The Ring has a lot to answer for in this area: namely, the line of inferior J-horror knock-offs foisted upon the American public.

6. Show some respect for the original.
It won’t help your cause to have the creator of the movie on which you’re basing your work, sniping from the sidelines. Witness the spat between Abel Ferrara and Werner Herzog over the latter’s “reimagining” of Bad Lieutenant. Ferrara said “I wish these people die in Hell. I hope they’re all in the same streetcar, and it blows up,” and Herzog – a man who had some epic battles with Klaus Kinski, of course – replied “Wonderful, yes! Let him fight…I have no idea who Abel Ferrara is.” That kind of thing is likely to alienate the people who most liked the original, and they could be your core audience.

7. Why are you remaking this?
The reason behind the remake is probably the crux of the matter. There are times when it’s obviously little more than sheer laziness: there’s no need to bother coming up with a new story, when there’s a script here which already proved (more or less) successful before? So is this because you think you have something new you can add? Because the original had a great plot, but the FX of the time weren’t up to the necessary level? Because the old story now has a new resonance? Or because it’s a job, given to you by a studio intent on raping its back-catalogue of titles for a quick buck?

Like anything else – adaptations, sequels, etc. – remakes are a tool, and as such can be used for good or evil cinematically. Into which category the results fall probably depends more on the talents of those involved in the project than anything else. But knowing this won’t stop me from calling in an air-strike on Hollywood, if the mooted remake of Blade Runner ever comes to pass.

“Hell is other people.” – Jean-Paul Sartre

With the deepest respect to Mr. Sartre, he is clearly mistaken. For the reality is – to misquote Euripides – that those whom the gods would destroy, they first make…move house. Sartre must have stayed in the same home all his life, for otherwise, his definition of hell would have involved Rubberware tubs, moving vans and an eternity spent trying to squeeze a quart into a pint-pot. Yes: for the first time since 2000, I’ve moved. I’d forgotten quite how awful an experience that is. And even though this one involved about a hundredth of the distance in the London-Phoenix one, I can see why it’s regarded as third most stressful life experience, behind the death of a spouse and… Oh, I dunno, maybe marginally behind abduction by a particularly-peeved Al Qaeda splinter faction.

It’s not until you try and move it all, that you realize just how much crap you have. I use that word after careful consideration, though perhaps the term ‘cruft‘ might be more appropriate, since we’re largely talking about things that you don’t necessarily want to keep – they just accumulate over the course of time. In my case, that’s approaching nine years; for Chris, it was fifteen or so. It was necessary to be brutal: take a look and say, “What are the odds of me using this in future?” In the case of things like, say, multiple boxes of PAL videotapes, the answer could only be “Er… Well… Oh, look! Wedding pictures!” Sadly, such diversionary tactics were not enormously successful, and there is a significant chunk of Phoenix landfill that is now 50 Hz.

It was amazing the stuff which surfaced, providing a history in objects and ephemera of my life. For example, my membership card for the Scala Cinema (below), and a poster for the Chow Yun-Fat festival that was the last event held there. [The card expired sometime in 1994, some time after the venue got sued by Stanley Kubrick and went under. I am probably not the only Scala fan, whose response on hearing of Stan’s death was, “Serve the fucker right.”] The original masters for most of the early issues of TC. An copy of Deep Red magazine, autographed by Dario Argento. Man, I had some cool stuff. It took most of an afternoon just to go through the movie posters: memo to self, next house must have more walls.

All told, however, I was ruthless. Ok, mostly I was ruthless with Chris’s stuff – it would probably have made sense for her to go through my possessions, and vice-versa. Still, we ended up throwing out a massive amount of stuff: almost the entire length of the drive-way was filled with garbage bags and unwanted items, from monitors to swing-sets. It wasn’t enough. We originally ordered a 16-foot pod, in the expectation it would be large enough for almost everything. But we needed to add another, similarly-sized truck, and even after that, there were still several van-loads which needed to be moved down to the new house. For days, it seemed it was an apparently endless job; no matter how much we packed, another cupboard would be discovered, and the amount remaining seemed no less.

We were basically cut off from the outside world for the last couple of days: we’d unplugged the ‘puters and TVs and moved them down there, for a scheduled install of cable and Internet there on the Monday. However, Cox unilaterally shifted that to the previous day, and were surprised when there was no-one there. This was not unexpected, since they had also disconnected things at the old house at 8pm on a previous Saturday night, the fact that we hadn’t quite left there yet having escaped them. Despite being called within ten minutes, it took them 48 hours to reconnect us, and if Chris hadn’t threatened a fatwa, it would have been three times as long. Really, if we didn’t have about forty hours of stuff on the Tivo, we’d have probably told them exactly where they could stick their cable. And they might have had difficulty picking up a signal thereafter.

Finally, the great day dawned, with the truck packed up and the contents delivered to the new location. Now, all we had to do was find somewhere to put it all. For part of the problem is that we moved to a smaller house. This made logical sense, in that one child had already flown the coop [albeit at her third attempt – however, does look like this one has stuck], so her bedroom was providing the dogs with accommodation. However, I think the key difference was forgetting that we had an entire two-car garage, basically stuffed to the gunnels with beads…and no garage in the new place. As a result, the only way it was all going to fit, was if the new house was also capable of travelling through time and space, and came with a companion and a sonic screwdriver.

We have adopted a pragmatic approach to this point, working on the principle that we should only unpack stuff likely to be used. Laserdiscs, for example, will remain in their current boxes, pending a move to a permanent location in a couple of years [once it’s just me and Chris, we can find a place from where we will be the ones being carried out in boxes…] However, there is just no way the number of books, for example, can be fitted on to the available shelfspace, or the clothes in the closets. Especially when both will likely been co-opted for beads by the time we’re done, since the corridor outside the room where I’m typing is currently reduced to half its width, due to bead cabinets. It doesn’t help that the dogs like to sleep there too, meaning that a trip to the bathroom is fraught with furry anti-personnel devices, ones which get up off the floor just as you step over them, just in case of the unlikely event that you might,  at three in the morning, be going to the kitchen to feed them.

So it’s still very much a work in progress: at this moment, Chris is putting up blinds in the bedroom, to prevent a 5am wake-up call from Mr. Arizona Sun. However, it does feel like home, with the living-room, office and bedroom now in a state of acceptable habitability: it may still be quite some time before there be enough room for a house-warming party, never mind the inclination!

It’s somewhat ironic that, less than 48 hours after stating how I’ve not been to the doctor for anything meaningful in almost twenty years, I found myself being driven to the ER at the local hospital, just after midnight. Things began to unravel as I finished up on the ‘puter and, wearily, rubbed my eyes. [Ping] The vision in my left eye grew blurry, as my rubbing had knocked the contact lens off the center of the eyeball. No big: this kind of thing happens two or three times a week, and is a peril of wearing lenses. Go to the bathroom, push lens back to center of eye, blink ferociously for a bit – problem solved.

Except, this time, I couldn’t find the lens.

Oh, it was in my eye somewhere. Of that I was fairly sure. But normally, it’s just tucked up in the corner somewhere. Or at least, visible on my eyeball, with the aid of a mirror. Now, not so much. I rubbed, prodded, tweaked, pried, massaged, manipulated, squeezed and thesaurused my eyeball: nothing. Maybe it wasn’t in there at all? My eye was feeling pretty icky, and looking kinda grim, but given I’d just put it through the opthalmic version of eight rounds with Mike Tyson [and the bad Tyson, not the coke-snorting, strip-club patronizing parody of himself he turned into], that was no surprise.

There followed a brief period of crawling on hands and knees around the floor of the office, with a flashlight, hoping to catch the glint of something small and shiny. 38 cents richer, and with fluffy knees, I emerged, still in a state of contactlessness. Even the intervention of Chris, armed with a maglite torch, failed to reveal anything in the depths of my eye, and the decision was made to fling myself on the mercies of the American healthcare system. Now, we did so with some trepidation, a) possessing no health insurance [frankly, there are many better things to do with the $250 per month it costs] and b) having seen Sicko, in which Michael Moore shows how health-care in the US for the uninsured is abysmal, and far better in places like Cuba, Canada and the UK, where it’s “free”.

While, for the purposes of this story, I’m being driven to the ER at Paradise Valley Hospital by Chris, I’d like to go on a rant. The National Health Service in the UK costs over 100 billion pounds per year. Where the hell does Michael Moore think that comes from? Donations by Janeane Garofalo? No: there is no such thing as ‘free’ health care, contrary to what he claimed, approximately one million times in the course of Sicko. There is only health care funded by taxation, so that the rich or healthy [and I fall into the latter category much more than the former] are forced to pay more than their share, subsidizing the sickly. Here in America, rather than having National Insurance taken out of your pay before you see it, you are at least given the choice of rolling the dice and taking your chances. Which is how we came rolling into the car-park at PVH.

It was quiet. Eerily quiet, compared to my previous trip to casualty, which happened after I went down while in the mosh pit at a Brixton Academy Cramps concert, and ended up needing stitches put in my lip. I still have the bump to remember that night at King’s College Hospital by, back in – and I’m going by Google here – February 1990. I do recall having to wait a while, and the med. student who sewed me up very clearly not believing that I was actually sober. No such issue here – not, not the question-marks over my sobriety, the waiting. Up to the front desk, fill in the basic paper-work and get taken into the back where a rather dykey looking nurse took my blood-pressure. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but let’s just say when you Google Image search for nurses, that isn’t what you get. [Link very NSFW – like you expected anything else?]

Then it was off into the depths of the hospital – the eerie quiet continued, to the point where I expected to go past a room and catch a glimpse of some unspeakable atrocity, or zombies munching down on a patient, that kind of thing. We were finally parked in a room, and cooled our heels gently waiting for the medical professional to show up. A cleaner mopped the hall outside – until her pager went off, and we debated whether a cleaner in a hospital made a good wage or not. Chris didn’t seem to think so, but I reckon, given the “stuff” they are going to be involved in cleaning up, they would deserve a good deal more than someone cleaning an office. The speculation was brought to an end by the arrival of Dr. Geares. Or George. Or Geesas. Look: it was a doctor signing my release slip – you really think it’s going to be legible?

The actual medical procedure part of the evening was, to be honest, an anti-climax. Some numbing drops in the eye, and Doctor Whatever began to operate. Well, it was more a question of peeling back the eyelid and getting me to look in various directions. That allowed the offending contact lens to be located [phew – at least it was in my eye], and removed with the most precise of surgical instruments: a Q-Tip. My saviour was thanked effusively, and he swept out to the next stupid idiot emergency case awaiting him on the night shift.

More documentation followed, with an orderly asking me my medical history, etc. – which seemed like it was a little too late, but there you go. My blood pressure was taken once again too, and we filed out, towards the most painful and tricky part of the procedure: paying for it. Chris’s estimate was three to four hundred dollars, but it turned out they give you a hefty discount for paying on the night. I imagine they have a lot of “undocumented immigrants,” whom they are obliged to treat, but from whom they have some difficulty extracting payment – me, not so much. You take credit-cards? Perfect. Total cost $140, which is about what two weeks of medical insurance for Chris and I would cost.

Final tally: one hour. 30 minutes hanging around; 25 minutes bureaucracy of some form; five minutes actual medical treatment. Still, I felt a great deal better leaving than coming back, though it took a couple of weeks before I was brave enough to put my contact lenses back in. All told, my first experience of the American medical system was a pleasant surprise: efficient, effective, and you pay for what you need, not a penny more. And that aspect certainly appeals to the libertarian in me.

It came quietly at the start of the year – not with a bang, followed by weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Just a two-line notice in the Akihabara Times, quoting a press release on the Pioneer website [I presume, anyway – the second link is in Japanese, so I’m going on faith with that one]:

This is a sad day for all LD (Laser Disc) fans… Pioneer is stopping the production of their three latest LD players, the DVL-919, DVK-900 and DVL-K88… For your information, Pioneer sold over 3.6 Million LD players in Japan from 1981 to 2002.

I must confess, my first thought on this was not dissimilar to my first thought on hearing about The Wrestler: “I didn’t know he was still alive.” If asked, I’d probably have said that the last player rolled off the production lines in Japan at least five years ago, probably longer. But no: though the release of software pretty much petered out not long after the new millennium, laserdisc lasted for over three decades, with more than 360 million units sold. Do you think we’ll still be watching DVDs thirty years after their arrival? I sincerely doubt it.

LDs were for the truly hardcore cinephile. Hell, I started buying discs before I even owned a player: I think the first one I got was Cat People, and had to get Lino to dupe it down to tape for me. Even though it was widescreen, this did somewhat negate the point. The 420 lines of resolution they offered may seem weak now, compared to Blu-Ray’s 720, but they kicked the arse of VHS’s 250. However, there was a price to pay for this, and it came in the form of cold, hard cash. Very few laserdiscs were made in Britain, so you almost inevitably had to rely on imports, mostly from the US, but occasionally from Hong Kong or Japan. Those movie fairs held at places like the Electric Ballroom in Camden, were goldmines for these, but some of the shops on Tottenham Court Road had a few, and there were also the Cinema Store, Psychotronic Video and Eastern Heroes, who all had their moments.

These were of extremely dubious legality, since none of the imports had been passed by the BBFC; even if there were no cuts, the higher frame-rate for NTSC made the running-time different, ergo they were uncertificated. Most stores got around this by slapping stickers on them, though I vaguely recall the late, unlamented [due to their horrific over-pricing] Tower Records getting into trouble for adopting this technique. And, like most things illegal, they weren’t cheap: the most I recall paying for a single disk, was 65 quid for a copy of Flying Daggers, though there may have been a Yellow Magic Orchestra LD – from Tower, natch – that was a little higher. If you paid less than twenty pounds for a movie in Great Britain, you were doing really well.

Devo do a commercial for the joy of laserdisc, 1984

As a result of these cost and availability issues, there were overseas buying trips – most commonly to the USA, but I also recall trips to Paris, and raiding stores such as FNAC. Back in 1998, on the final leg in New York, I spent an entire afternoon in the Virgin Megastore, going through their complete stock. I ended up with so many discs, that I had to take a taxi back to the hotel. No matter the haul, all these shopping-sprees ended in basically the same way. Who can forget the ripple of fear as you approached HM Customs at Gatwick, staggering under the weight of uncertificated material? Or the thrill as you exited the ‘Nothing to Declare’ channel to freedom, intent on subverting the very fabric of British civilization with your uncut copy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Of course, you could order discs by mail, and enjoy the delightful game of Postal Roulette that followed. Would they arrive intact? Would they arrive at all? To this day, one of the highlights of my life remains getting HM C+E to cough up compensation, after they badly scratched a disc during one of their Naziesque inspections.

Laserdiscs were simply so much cooler than videotapes, coming as they did with extra features – again, this is now something we take for granted with DVD [“No in-depth interview with the costume designer? Wot kind of ‘special edition’ is this?”], but it opened up a whole glorious vista of experience, since VHS rarely had anything apart from the movie. The director’s commentaries were the bomb: a good one would be like having the people concerned sitting beside you, drinking a beer and telling you about the movie. Escape From New York, with Kurt Russell and John Carpenter pointing out each other’s ex-wives, would be a classic example. And much as I hate Quentin Tarantino, his and Robert Rodriguez’s chat on From Dusk Till Dawn, with input from Greg Nicotero, is another that highlights the possibilities offered by the medium.

I still watch my discs occasionally – most recently, Basic Instinct, only a couple of weeks back [Paul Verhoeven is another commentary master]. I have to admit, the video quality does look a bit dodgy, especially on a large screen, which are much more common now than they were at the time. But there’s something about a laserdisc which is more physical than a DVD, in much the same way that a vinyl LP offers more scope for design than a CD. Some of the box-sets that were released were simply phenomenal: Toy Story and Hellraiser are the first couple that come to mind, and occupy an honoured spot on the bookshelves in TC Towers. Criterion also did some impressive work, but their sets always seemed over-priced, even by the standards of the medium; I think the only one of theirs I ever got was Hard Boiled.

Laserdisc never became more than a fringe market in the West; in echoes of the VHS/Betamax battle, the technically-inferior videotape won. Though to be honest, it was never much of a battle, LD failing to capture more than a couple of percent of the market, due to various criticisms, valid or otherwise. “You can’t record on it.” “What? Turn the disc over in the middle?” “They keep falling off my record-player.” And when DVD arrived – much though I tried to deny it – I knew in my heart that it sounded the death-knell for laserdisc. However, with two bookcases, still stacked more or less floor to ceiling with the damn things, they may be gone but certainly aren’t forgotten, at least hear in TC Towers. Let’s just hope our player soldiers on for the next thirty years.

[Thanks to Alex M for being the bearer of these sad tidings!]

This is something that I touched upon last week, but was brought back to the forefront of consciousness with the news that, in the first two months of operation, more than 40,000 tickets were issued, purely as a result of the cameras being triggered. Equally staggering, the cameras actually went off more than four times as often – a total of 166,176 times on freeways. Three out of four photos have to be discarded because they don’t clearly show the driver or the number-plate, necessary in order to begin the citation process.

That’s based on sixty cameras [forty mobile, twenty fixed], and would lead to an income of about $6.6 million for the state, if everyone were to pay up at the average rate of $165 per ticket. A nice windfall, especially in a state that is facing a serious budget deficit this year. The system is being run by a for-profit corporation, and the idea that this is about “safety” is given the lie by the fact that anyone caught speeding does not incur any penalty points on their license – they simply have to pay the fine, and nothing else will happen to them. It’s basically a speed tax, and one you can largely bypass if you know whereabout the fixed cameras are located.

As noted previously, the concept of a fixed speed-limit on any highway is entirely ridiculous, because the safe speed on a road is subject to a wide range of variables: time of day, volume of traffic, weather conditions, etc. There are times – and I’m thinking particularly of rain, which seems like an foreign concept to Arizona drivers – when even 55 mph is too fast. But there are others, where the road is entirely empty, when you can go a lot faster without putting anyone else [or even yourself] in jeopardy. Speed cameras have no concept of this; they offer a “one size fits all” approach to justice, which makes as much sense as the laughable ‘zero tolerance’ policy schools have for violence, that results in idiotic concepts such as kids being suspended for playing with a water-gun.

Any inflexible or automated process of law-enforcement is always going to result in this kind of idiocy, because of the difference between enforcing the letter of the law and enforcing justice. The latter is, naturally, harder and requires the presence of actual human to assess the situation and take appropriate action. I am reminded of Demolition Man, where Sly Stallone’s retro-cop is automatically fined every time he uses bad language – which happens about once every five seconds. It also makes me fear that the United States is going the same way as the United Kingdom, which I was fortunate enough to leave before the closed-circuit cameras became omnipresent.

Inevitably, the same arguments are being used here: “If you don’t break the law, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Of course, you can extend the concept as far as you want to go. Hey, let’s put a camera in your bedroom, shall we? After all – all together! – “If you don’t break the law, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” Once the basic principle has become established, and the public has become comfortable with it, then it becomes a lot easier to take the next step. We’ve already seen this with GPS devices being placed in cars, in case of an accident or theft. However, you can now get the same thing for your kids, or elderly relatives who might be liable to wander off. How long before they become [at first, anyway] optional accessories for all adults, just to be safe?

This probably seems like paranoid thinking, but I recall thinking much the same about those who predicted that cameras would be observing our every act. George Orwell probably got the much the same reaction for 1984, and I suspect he was exaggerating what seemed plausible to him for literary effect. Seems that reality has done a very effective job of catching up on speculative fiction.