The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: Film Remakes, Part One

By Michelle Patterson

La belle et la bête, 1946

I had what I thought to be the perfect metaphor for this article series. It started out well enough and soon became an epic flowchart in the grand tradition of Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris on How I Met Your Mother), complete with elaborate examples and explanations, some even color-coded, and most of them flimsy enough to fall apart upon closer examination. Then, it started to become creepier and more in poor taste. It just made me too uncomfortable to continue. Finally the thought hit me that the exercise itself—trying to find the ultimate way to explain just why and how remakes are usually not a good idea at all and leave you feeling devastated and empty—had actually turned into the real metaphor I was looking for. This was followed by the realization that the explanation of the explanation had become just what I needed: a way to prove why remakes are mostly bad, sometimes good, but usually ugly. I’ll start and maybe you’ll understand what I mean.

Film remakes are like the rebound guys after a very serious relationship: you start dating them with a mixture of blind hope and a tiny fraction of optimism, but ultimately you have a gut feeling that the relationship will end in catastrophic failure and will never, ever live up to the previously set expectations, no matter how unrealistic. On rare occasions there are guys that will surprise you and turn out to be just as good as the original, sometimes even better, but those are the atypical ones and become ear-markers themselves. Usually you end up judging every guy you date as pure disappointment before the date even begins. They pick the wrong songs; they don’t know how to get a girl in the mood; they never finish what they started. . . if you know what I mean.

Trying to explain it just becomes an exercise in frustration. First, you use eloquent discourse. Nothing changes. Then, you try to simplify it a little bit with a diagram. No one is the wiser. Finally, you end up distilling your original explanation—of why and how that person is failing so much—to the point where you’re performing shadow puppet theatre and basically realizing that no one is learning the real lesson.

See? Bewildering. Weird. Not getting my point across at all, whatsoever. But you’re starting to get the picture behind the explanation of the explanation, right? Film remakes are hard, especially when you’re handling a treasure with fans spanning generations of audiences. Then again, Hollywood never really has enough originality to go around. They’ve been remaking their own movies from the very beginning and when they ran out of remakes of American films, they drew from the international well. Followed by more remakes of the first cycle of remakes and then back to more remakes of the remakes of the foreign variety. If you look at the list, it folds back on itself again and again until you’re back to feeling frustrated and unfulfilled. Having expectations is too hard. Then again if you didn’t, you would find the brainless and the dull acceptable.

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