Canny description.
Yeah, I agree. There’s a thread on this very board called The Remake is Never Better? where I point out all the cases of the remake being so good, it obliterates the memory of the past versions.
I feel like a lot of modern movies are obliterated by the shadows of their predecessors. Someone mentioned Total Recall and Conan, and those are in the categories of movies for me where I have to think really hard to remember that they have been remade.
So, why does “A Christmas Carol” work then? And Shakespeare, and Austen, and Poe? It’s an interesting question. I wonder if it’s because nobody owns them—and nobody tries to claim them.
Studios of course own all these properties they’re rebooting and so they have a tremendous amount of pressure that more-or-less guarantees the worst possible artistic choices. They’ll do it up all in the modern tech and styles but they’ll be terrified of putting any life into it. It’s an embalmed corpse in mortician’s makeup.
And then generations feel like they “own” the things they grew up with, were fans of. In the past people tended to set those things aside when they became adults, and maybe give a little eyeroll when they were “updated”. Now there’s a kind of paralysis.
But nobody “owns” the classics. Everybody accepts that there are different ways to tell the same stories, and everyone brings their own flavor to it, whether it’s to our taste or not.
This is why we must limit copyright to 4 years.
My dream project was always Pride and Prejudice, but with entirely black actors, no changes, no explanations or rationales. Denzel would’ve made such a great Mr. Darcy.
Very true.
Which is maybe why she couldn’t get it made in the first place.