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

All of this jabber jawing of mine has been merely an attempt to say that there really aren’t any romantic comedy remakes that break the mold. In fact, there aren’t any comedy remakes that improve upon the original formula, period. There isn’t one solitary example that I could find, so this will close on a note of heartbreak. No happy endings to be found here! Not only is that a seriously depressing thought, it unquestionably confirms that the comedy is usually the most non-ambitious genre of all in this day and age. We can start with romantic comedy’s laziest filmmaker, Nora Ephron.

The Shop Around The Corner, 1940

For example, when you pit Ernest Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner against Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail it isn’t even a close match. Lubitsch always had a flair for the delicate romantic comedy rooted in the melancholy, whereas Ephron has always just had a hard-on for the romantic film. She is one of the few filmmakers who, I can say with absolute conviction, fetishizes without any imagination. She thinks it is merely enough to have her characters repeat again and again that an old movie is so good without ever being able to explain or show why. The original film has a real sense of camaraderie among its characters, who all work in the same store, but who still can’t seem to fully trust one another. It is a workplace romance where the (penpal) romance is between two co-workers who are competitive in a realistic sense and don’t know that they are also madly in love. They have to make money as it depends on their very survival in a bleak economy.

In You’ve Got Mail, Tom Hanks is as charming as always, but playing against the never-more-saccharine Meg Ryan. The mere task of typing on a computer fills her with glee that only grates and it never really makes sense that the characters fall in love. Nor does the reality of her going out of business. She’ll still maintain that Upper East-side apartment. The truthfully drawn co-workers in Lubitsch’s film have a personality beyond the store and the two main characters, while the co-workers in Ephron’s film wouldn’t exist without the two main characters and we really wouldn’t care if they did.

The Women, 2008

The recent remake of George Cukor’s The Women by Diane English is almost too terrible to mention, yet it does prove the depressing, but real, idea that most of the films made by women directors in Hollywood show women in the worst light of all. Merely craven when it needs to be delectably wicked and shrill when it needs to underline its point about how even supposed female friends are one another’s worst enemies, it also attains the honor of exhibiting the worst lighting, costuming, and make-up for a cast full of beautiful actresses. The original shows off some truly gorgeous women looking as gorgeous as they ought to. It is certainly surprising that a woman like Diane English, the talented creator of the television show Murphy Brown, would create such an ugly film, both on the page, and on the screen. It is a serious mystery that probably won’t ever be solved.

Comedian shelf life as done by contemporary Hollywood: more flash-in-the-pan, flavor-of-the-week, and catch-of-the-day. Only, that isn’t the point at all with romantic comedies redone for new audiences. It is evidently very difficult to translate what was once smart and insightful decades ago into something that can still resonate with an audience. More than any other genre, comedy in this current day and age is the pure distillation of the current pop cultural landscape. Perhaps filmmakers and studios are just worried about staying relevant long enough to make some serious change at the box office. Yet good comedy doesn’t have to gather up the information, the sound bytes, the history of the era—good and bad—and regurgitate it as entertainment pellets for mass audiences. We can get it and we’re smart enough to always get it. I only hope after this experiment of mine, I will tread lightly when it comes to the film remake. And, maybe, if I’ve done my job right, you will, too.

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