I was one of about 13 people in America last weekend who saw Neil LaBute's remake of "The Wicker Man," and, more to the point, I was one of only three people who actually enjoyed it. It's not really a good movie by any stretch of the imagination — no movie that features Nicolas Cage trying to destroy a pagan cult as he sprints Pacific-Northwest in a bear suit could ever really be considered artistically relevant — but it is curiously enjoyable, in an eccentric, "is-this-really-happening" kind of way. It's the type of movie that will appeal to people with certain types of low-grade schizophrenia and will likely confuse everyone else.
Because America's mainstream film critics have a built-in aversion to movies about murderous cults, "The Wicker Man" was panned by nearly every reviewer who bothered to see it. This is understandable. Again, the movie is not good in the traditional sense of the word — nor is it bad in the traditional sense of the word, but more on that later.
The curious thing is that much of the criticism of "The Wicker Man" is based on the fact that the movie is a remake. The original was made in 1974 by Robin Hardy from a script by Anthony Shaffer's "Sleuth" and starred Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee. It has, over the past three decades, achieved low-level classic status in the realm of British horror movies. It is pretty good — unnerving, elliptical and surprisingly poignant, which is not an adjective one generally associates with movies where Christopher Lee plays the charismatic leader of a naturalist cult.
However, like the LaBute remake, the original movie is also, at times, horrible. The editing is shaky, Woodward's character is underwritten, and the less said about the performance of Britt Ekland, the better.
Another problem: it is, at times, bat-shit crazy, what with the third act where the villains dress up as animals and chase Woodward through an elaborate series of underground tunnels, or when Ekland dances naked and rubs her body against a hotel room door. There may have been a time and a place when all of this was common behavior in the British Isles, but, watching it now in the year 2006, it seems, well, weird — a cultural relic from an era when people were doing way too much blow for their own good.
To me, criticizing the LaBute reason simply because it's a remake of a fairly decent 70s movie seems a bit lazy and reactionary, especially when there are so many other things you could criticize. The flaws in LaBute's remake include but are not limited to: the acting (everybody in the impressive ensemble is so determined to underplay his or her roles that Cage is forced to dust off his old "8mm," "I'm trying to understand!" screaming act in order to convey basic human frustration), editing (uneven, like the original) and general weirdness (the whole dressing up as animals and burning-people-alive-while-chanting plotline remains in tact). Overall though, the movie is more than a little bit interesting, and, more to the point, it's relevant. In the modern American religious climate, updating "The Wicker Man," for all its coo-coo-ca-choo silliness, is timely enough to warrant a closer look. Where Shaffer and Hardy went for general creepiness, LaBute and Cage present an intriguing (if misguided) examination of misguided love and obsession.
Which brings me to my central question: What does everybody have against remakes? I'm not talking about the Gus Van Sant "Psycho"-style remake where every scene from the original is copied, shot-for-shot. I would have liked to have been in the room at that movie pitch with Universal when Van Sant stood up and said, "For my first movie after 'Good Will Hunting,' I'd like to do a scene-for-scene remake of 'Psycho,' and I want Anne Heche for the lead. Give me $50 million, please." That experience really would have been great. Or maybe it wouldn't have been, since I probably would have stabbed myself in the eye with my pen.
The truth is that only about, I don't know, 21 percent of the movies that come out of the studio system are worth seeing — I made that number up, but it sounds about right. The same number holds true for independent films, but those poor bastards are in no position to acquire remake rights, so for the sake of this column, they can go to hell. With numbers like that, what's wrong with reworking a successful movie from another era or country and tweaking it so that it can become more culturally relevant?
If a movie worked before, it's very likely that it will work again, provided that no producer or director comes in with a hacksaw determined to fix problems that don't exist. If you're an audience member, why not invest your time and money in something that has already worked well, as opposed to rolling the dice on something that has a 79 percent chance of sucking?
Intellectual elitism — probably the only prejudice that is still accepted in our society — is the only convincing argument against remakes.
We are generally taught to think that prejudices are bad, and I suppose they are, but our society appears to have made an exception when it comes to hating people or things of lesser sophistication. Remakes fit into that category, because they are not original and therefore must be destroyed.
Life's too short to let somebody bitch at you for not scouring the Internet to try and find a copy of "Abre Los Ojos" when "Vanilla Sky" is actually a better movie, has a kick-ass soundtrack and is on HBO every three hours. Reading subtitles might make you feel smarter, but they don't make a movie any funnier, more romantic or emotionally affecting.
This is not a call to apathy. I am not saying that people should give up on foreign and classic movies in the hopes they may get repackaged one day. I simply cannot accept this notion that movies are these sacred objects that can never be re-examined. The truth is, if you can find a great old movie that has become dated, why not try and revive the good parts and maybe — just maybe — add a few new insights?
This summer, "The Omen" was remade, and pretty much everyone I talked to seems to agree that it is an improvement over the original — it took a delightfully creepy premise, got rid of the flaws from the uber-campy original and managed to make the whole thing a hell of a lot more unsettling. If this year's crop of summer movies taught me anything, it's that when you're trying to kidnap the Antichrist from his bed in the dead of night, you should never let Mia Farrow get the drop on you.
Still, for whatever reason, everybody felt compelled to say, "It was good, but Liev Schreiber is no Gregory Peck, and Julia Stiles is no Lee Remick." This is true — Schreiber was better suited to the role than Peck was. Peck's performance will invariably go down in movie history as one of the worst performances ever given by a great actor. It's almost worth watching so you can try and guess if he was even alive during the shoot. Julia Stiles is no Lee Remick, and, trust me, that's a very good thing.
This past winter, I gave a positive review to the Steve Martin remake of "The Pink Panther," a decision for which I was pretty much universally pilloried by my friends and family. In retrospect, I may have been a bit over-the-top when I called Inspector Clouseau a tragic hero and compared Martin's performance to an avant-garde performance of "Macbeth." I was reaching because I couldn't just come right out and say why I liked the movie — it made me laugh — and "The Omen" scared me, and "The Wicker Man" scared me and made me laugh, and really, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
Still, Nic Cage in a bear suit? That's fucked up.
