Within the next week, I will hear the phrase “the book was better.” While I usually agree if it’s a book I have read, I’ll be honest and say that unless it’s a hyped-up children’s series not involving vampires, or a trilogy directed by Peter Jackson, there are few books I’ve ever read that have film adaptations. I suppose that’s why some books get made into movies — so the stories they tell can be digested in less than two hours and I can get back to more important things, like choosing what combination of outerwear I want to lug around as the Florida weather covers every temperature and humidity level in the span of a day.
The adaptation of books to films makes sense from a business standpoint. Investment in the film industry is risky, but with potentially great rewards, including standing as a legacy engrained in the collective cultural mind. To this end, when going out on a limb and mashing together famous actors with a capable crew and director, it helps to have a story your audience already knows via a book. This makes sense.
The mentality also makes sense if you take it a step further and look at the concept of the remake. Remember that old movie from the ’70s about a kid who goes to a candy factory and wins a grand prize because he has a pure heart? Let’s remake it and have Johnny Depp bounce around the screen like the love-child of Oscar Wilde and a drag queen. The people love him, and they can’t get enough feel-good kids’ movies. The remake is a safe venture because, like the book adaptations, you already have a sampling of the film’s potential success. Even if your movie is terrible, you can guarantee a core audience of original-version lovers who will put up with your butchery at least once. You will at least break even.
This results in rampant unoriginality in the entertainment business. We need to be more critical of how we spend our free time and what we decide to throw our money at.
Bad remakes are also happening with foreign films coming to the U.S. Original, beautiful films get the “Hollywood treatment” and are made worse when re-written and shot for a U.S. audience. It’s like scrubbing away any semblance of foreign culture to make the story more digestible. Among the myriad of vampire stories these past few years, there is an amazingly dark and mesmerizing foreign vampire film set in a suburb of Stockholm, Sweden, called “Let the Right One In.” All the violence happens off-screen, and it gives you shivers you’d forgotten you missed. But it’s not in English, and therefore not good enough for a U.S. audience, so millions were spent re-shooting and changing it. Now you are left with “Let Me In,” an inferior movie.
Remakes in entertainment have their successes, some most notably in television — look at The Office. But re-branding should annoy you. With music, would you pay an equal amount to see an American Radiohead cover band as you would Radiohead themselves? The concept is absurd. Why the film industry decides the message of a movie is untranslatable is beyond me. The music industry has no problem here. But I say this ignoring some differences. Difficulty is one. I could easily freestyle a pop song but couldn’t come up with an equivalent to “Gattaca” off the top of my head. The original movies coming out of Hollywood are the best they can come up with. No wonder there are so many re-makes.
In the end, I’d lay my chips with the quick re-makes over recent reality television. Some shows look like the casting directors closed their eyes, pointed to a few disorders in the DSM-IV, screened out everyone with a triple digit IQ and then made Teen Mom, Hoarders, Jersey Shore, et al. I just came up with a new show: a pregnant Jersey girl with a machismo boyfriend who hoards military memorabilia. It will be called Grenades.
Wesley Campbell is a fifth-year English student. His column appears on Wednesdays.
