Sometimes we self-appointed and (as yet) unpaid wannabe critics of society and pop culture do tend to take on a rather snotty “seen it all before” stance, and it’s fair to say that this is a sometimes irritating side effect of a technology that allows anyone to spout off his or her worthless opinions almost instantly to the entire world. And, while it is still safe to say that no one has yet seen it all before, it would appear that such days are now somewhat numbered….
Take a good long look at originality, folks; you might even want to take a picture and stick it in your Hello Kitty scrapbook, as the days of inventiveness and inspiration are now officially on the clock, and the ticking is getting ever louder. In the history of art, there has always been both the good and bad, the transcendent and abysmal, and it is my belief that the existence of shit art has always been among the things that have helped to give us great art. We learn far more from mistakes and failures, both our own and those of others, than we ever could from triumphs, because the mistakes teach us what not to do, which is a far more important lesson than simply aping the successes of others.
And yet, there are those who still subscribe to the notion that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. A number of them have, in fact, taken it a step further and have based their lives, reputations and careers on being blatant ripoffs of that which has come before them. Nowhere is this more shamelessly obvious than in the worlds of music and film, but, at least with music, it is somewhat easier to see and call out the copycat phonies and leave them to die on the vine or in the cut-out bins, while film is something of a trickier proposition.
Filmmakers who have run out of original ideas can always say they’re “paying homage” to a certain director, film or style of filmmaking– and the use of the term “homage” is somehow supposed to imply that there is something of great intellectual importance and far more beneath the surface that most of us naysaying plebes just aren’t getting if we cry foul.
Which is, of course, bullshit.
While not necessarily inherently evil, even the lowliest of filmmakers all seem to carry with them a degree of hubris that screams, “I am an auteur, so do not dare question my vision!”, even if their so-called vision makes them the cinematic equivalents of third-rate cover bands from Ottumwa, Iowa.
Nowhere is this more glaringly apparent than in the phenomenon of movie remakes. Find me another art form where it is okay to just take someone else’s work, add a bit of updated window dressing, and then slap your name on it and call it your own? Can a fledgling writer take, say, A Catcher In The Rye, recast Holden Caulfield as an anime-lovin’ fish, and then call it a work of his own doing?
Not without a pack of yowling lawyers burrowing up his ass, he can’t. At least with bands doing cover songs, there are things more inherently ripe for reinterpretation in song than there are in film: doing an old acoustic folk tune with a wall of screaming, amplified guitars, or reversing it and doing some ELP prog thing with a hollowed out cucumber and a kazoo. It may be crap, but the possibilities are infinite, and on top of that, we as listeners are all aware (or should be, anyway) that such a song was in fact originally done by someone else.
So what has me frothing at the mouth to such an extent that I’ve just spent the last thousand words or so blithering on in such a manner?
Robert Zemeckis and the pod people over at Disney are remaking the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.
I kid you not.
Now, before some of you start tripping all over yourselves trying to bust out some blast about me being some sort of dewy-eyed hippie who thinks the Beatles are above being covered or copied or anything else like that, put your dicks back in your pants for a second; I love it when any band takes a whack at covering the Beatles (check out White Flag’s “I’m Down,” the Parasites’ “Paperback Writer,” and Electric Love Muffin’s “Norwegian Wood,” for starters), and one of my favorite bands is easily the biggest Beatleoid band ever: Oasis. So, I’m not for a moment saying the Beatles are to be kept in a dust-proof case and only admired from a safe distance, all right?
The problem here is not really with the music side of the equation at all. If reports are accurate, the film will include Beatles music as done by the Beatles, which is fine by me.
No, boys and girls, the thing that crawled up my ass, set itself on fire, and died has to do with the movie side of things, and the fact that this horrid idea of a remake is happening right now.
Has anyone noticed that in the past decade or so Hollywood has fallen in love with remakes? Yeah, yeah, trends come and go, and this is just one of them– I get it. But, it isn’t just the remake trend itself that is so irritating, it is the choice of material which truly grates. Used to be the movies that were redone for a new audience were the ones revered a generation or two before, as opposed to just old, schlocky dreck. Now, this has all been replaced by a sense of self-conscious faux-irony so forcefully pandered that Hollywood believes we’ll eat just about any plateful of shit they lay down in front of us.
Setting aside movie franchises such as the Die Hard, Star Wars, and Rocky stuff, just look at some of the utterly regurgitated shit puked up onto the screens in the past dozen or so years: Bewitched, Starsky And Hutch, Lost In Space, The Flinstones (like, three of them!), Bad News Bears, la la la….
And, let us not forget, Scooby Doo.
Scooby Doo?!
On second thought, let’s forget it as quickly as possible.
Think of it this way: while there are, in fact, possibly still a few young and deserving filmmakers out there with original ideas who’d chop off an arm to get a chance to make a movie with a fresh and unique point of view, the big Hollywood machine has fallen in love with just sitting back, jacking itself off, and cannibalizing away at the crap it flushed years ago. As impossible as it is to fathom, there was actually a room full of executives a few years ago who heard a pitch, looked around at each other and declared it a good idea to remake one of the Herbie The Love Bug movies with Lindsay-fucking-Lohan! Other rooms full of executives thought it wise to chuck millions upon millions of dollars at ideas ranging from live-action Scooby shit, to Will Ferrell and Nicole Kidman doing Bewitched, and the band just fucking played on.
So, why should I care if the big movie machine chooses to go instead with a tax loss straight-to-video write off as opposed to giving new ideas a chance? Truth is, in most cases, I really don’t, as I’m not a huge movie buff fan-type. But when it’s one of the few movies I actually truly give a rat’s ass about, the idea of it being fruited up and desecrated just to sell some merch cuts me in half. (And if they redid The Natural with Zac Efron, or The Graduate with Lance Bass, I’d jump into the wood chipper before you could push me.)
So now Robert Zemeckis and Disney are gonna take a whack at Yellow Submarine. Aside from the obvious motive ($$), this is a puzzling move at best. Hollywood has always had something of an odd relationship with the Beatles, and in an industry where the bottom line trumps art and all other concerns, the results have been far less than middling. Aside from the original Yellow Submarine (which had American input from the likes of Al Brodax, Erich Segal, etc), the other four Beatles movies (A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, and Let It Be) were mainly British productions (even if American expatriate Richard Lester directed the first two…), removed from the Hollywood machine. To varying degrees, the movies did well enough in the United States, especially the first two. However, this wasn’t good enough, and so Hollywood kept trying every few years or so to somehow get in on the gravy train, usually with disastrous results.
The Dick Clark produced TV biopic, Birth Of The Beatles, was a rating smash in the fall of 1979, and the 1994 big-screener, Backbeat did well enough, but beyond those two, pretty much everything else Hollywood tried with the band was complete garbage– the absolute nadir being Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band in 1978. How fucking retarded does one have to be to conceive of a Beatles themed movie featuring the Bee Gees, George Burns, Steve Martin, someone called Sandy Farina and…Peter Frampton? And, beyond that, what horrid strain of mass delusion and psychosis would cause a panel of executives at a major movie studio to hear such a pitch and NOT immediately rape and beat to death the creator in front of his family?
Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea.
And the new Zemeckis version of Yellow Submarine will be no different, even if it does somehow manage to be a cash cow. Why?
Because it’s just unnecessary.
Some people commenting about this production on various websites such as Variety have tried to rationalize it with arguments along the lines of, “Well, this will be a good way to expose kids today to the Beatles’ music, etc.”
Say fucking what? Last time I checked, the Beatles are still any and everywhere you go. The music is still all over the radio, and played to death in markets, car dealerships and pretty much every other public place you’d care to visit. On top of that, let us not forget this here Internet, with the endless streaming stations, file sharing/trading, fansites….
The Beatles have never been in danger of fading away, and the idea that they occasionally need help in getting dusted off for a new generation is completely fucking absurd. Besides, if this is a motivator, why not, as several others have also noted, just digitally redo the visuals and audio and rerelease the original movie itself? Would it be a super terrific blockbuster? Probably not; but it also won’t be an artistic embarrassment like the new one is sure to be.
It’s bad enough that the new one will be done in that dead-eyed, creepy motion capture technology, a la Zemeckis’ Polar Express from 2004, but like with all other remakes, this one is sure to suffer from the gratuitous attempts to update and hip it up for the new kids of today. Yes, the Beatles’ music was and is timeless, but, their movies were strictly of their time, the 1960s, which is as it should be. Music, no matter the band nor the era, plays to a very fluid and non-specific set of criteria unique to each listener. You and I may like with equal passion the same artists, but our reactions to songs by, say, the Beatles, Tom Waits and John Lee Hooker (for example) will most likely be markedly different. Yeah, we may both dig the same songs, but they’ll hit you, me, the lady down the street and the fat kid in Belgium in very personal ways: what we visualize, what we’re reminded of, you name it.
And, yes, this is somewhat true about movies as well, but only to the small extent in which the visuals and narrative parameters are already laid out before us, so our interpretations have far less room to roam as we see the same thing. Doesn’t mean we won’t get different things from the same experience, it’s just that those things won’t be nearly as disparate in a movie as they can and usually are with music. But, I digress.
Given that it was a 1960s cartoon, done in a 1960s style about a band from the 1960s, there is literally no point in remaking this movie, and the attempts to make the Beatles palatable to the Speidi-lovers of now will be even more embarrassing than watching Looney Tunes characters high-fiving and talking trash in 1996′s Space Jam.
Yellow Submarine’s plot was a charmingly slight one: the Beatles take on the Blue Meanies in an attempt to return color and music to Pepperland. That was it. And if the animation now looks old and dated, well, that’s how it’s supposed to look!
I cringe at the thought of modern YS Ringo fumbling with a Blackberry, or making references to “tweeting” (fucking hate that term…), or hearing George hit one of the Blue Meanies with an “oh no you di’int!!” during the climactic crumpin’ war between good and evil, or maybe the Beatles wear their psychedelic pants real low so we can see their JoBoxers or the Blue Meanies throw Pepperland into darkness by foreclosing on the only Ed Hardy shop in town or….
Enough. Suffice it to say such a movie remake is even more unnecessary than the 45 minutes you’ve just wasted here.
But, since everyone loves a quick buck, I may as well pitch one remake of my own (are you listening, Judd Apatow?).
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Wilburys:
When Roy Orbison (Jonah Hill) drops dead after hearing the greatest dick joke ever, George Harrison (Leslie Mann) and the rest of the band take him on one last booze and pot-fueled road trip to a whorehouse in Vegas. With Michael Cera as Tom Petty, Seth Rogen as Bob Dylan, and absolutely no one as Jeff Lynne.
Yeah, it’s lame, but it didn’t cost you $12.50 to find that out, did it?
You’re welcome.
