Everything Old is New Again, but Newer.

The Cap'n was all set to go off on another rant about remakes (in part because I saw that the Highlander remake is moving forward), where I'd gripe and moan about how the 1980s are being singled out as a decade to be pillaged - mostly because the studios know people know the name and that they can talk a young filmmaker into directing based on nostalgia for their youth.

I was all set to yammer about how while artistic repetition is nothing new, this is an unprecedented era of recycling without even bothering to pass the film off as anything but a copy of the "original" blah blah blah. But, to cover my bases, I decided to do a little experiment - the Cap'n would check out a list of movies remade during the 1980s. Surely that would provide a good balance to our remake heavy 21st century cannibalization of cinema.

And then, during a cursory Wikipedia search, I filled up both sides of an envelope.

Oh sure, I made some excuses here and there - 1984 is a re-adaptation, not a remake. The same argument could be made for The Thing, so that doesn't count. But the honest truth is that doesn't really hold water when the same argument can be made now about True Grit or Let Me In, etc. What I found was a snapshot of a decade filled with remakes - some of films audiences may not have known (films released in another country, obscure titles), but many they would have. I can't help but think that the only difference is that the internet allows for more grousing, more open hostility to the process.

Allow me to demonstrate with a smaller version of the list I made; many of the films didn't bother to change the names, but the ones that did I'll point out.

Against All Odds (Out of the Past)
Always (A Guy Named Joe)
The Bad Seed
The Blob
Body Heat (Double Indemnity)
Breathless
The Burmese Harp
Cat People
Cousins (Cousin Cousine)
D.O.A.
The Defiant Ones
Down and Out in Beverly Hills (Boudu Saved from Drowning)
The Fly
The Hand (The Beast with Five Fingers)
Outland (High Noon)
Invaders from Mars
Little Shop of Horrors
The Man with One Red Shoe (Le grand blond avec une chaussure noire)
Mister Roberts
Not of This Earth
Scarface
Stagecoach
Suspicion
The Thing (The Thing from Another World)
Three Men and a Baby (3 hommes et un couffin)
To Be or not to Be
The Toy (Le Jouet)
Unfaithfully Yours
Victor / Victoria
We're No Angels
Where the Boys are '84
The Woman in Red

So maybe that gives us a sense of context; the largest difference between films remade from 1980-1989 and now is a larger cross-section of decades the remakes came from. Still, I think it's not only fair, but appropriate to point out that not only is artistic repetition not new, but the argument that films are simply being remade to capitalize on a recognizable name isn't unique at all, either to the 21st century or the "Golden Age" of Hollywood, an argument I too have made in the past.

Well, so much for that post. Now what am I supposed to write about today?