| With 2004 now in the rear-view mirror, film geeks from all walks of life are putting the final touches on their Top 10 lists. However, it doesn’t take a hardcore enthusiast to realize that decent quality cinema was alarmingly lacking this year. When it came to studio-funded Hollywood movies, the best you could hope for this year were pale retreads and risk-free money hogs. With a near-record number of remakes, sequels and adaptations, there wasn’t much worthwhile from the studios.
The films of 2004 proved so tepid, in fact, that in hindsight a film such as Birth (the controversial re-incarnation drama starring Nicole Kidman), although not universally acclaimed, has to be given credit for at least taking chances. The film features a scene where Kidman shares a bath with a precocious pre-teen, which may not sound like groundbreaking stuff, but given the choice between that and Garfield: The Movie, the choice is obvious.
Sadly, Garfield wasn’t alone this year. Riding hard on the wave of Marvel Comics’s domination of the box office, we saw big-screen adaptations of Hellboy, Catwoman and The Punisher, a second Spider-Man film, and Alien vs. Predator. With the exception of Sam Raimi’s Spider-sequel, these films, despite being much anticipated in comic circles, were huge disappointments – the most notable being the laughable concept of the Predator teaming up with a human to beat the Alien (who knew?). When you consider that last year’s American Splendor effectively established a new standard for comic-book movies, this year’s crop is sketchy at best.
If crappy adaptations had been limited to the comic-book arena, 2004 could have been a passable year, but in the quest for easy box-office dollars Hollywood set its sights on any project that didn’t require an original story. Whether they were tackling history (Troy, The Alamo), revisionist history (King Arthur), biography (The Aviator, De-Lovely, Ray), vintage TV (Starsky and Hutch, Fat Albert), real-life sports "drama" (Against the Ropes), sequels (Anacondas, Agent Cody Banks 2, Superbabies, Exorcist the Beginning, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, The Whole 10 Yards) or literature (I Robot, Republic of Love), writers expended the absolute minimum amount of effort necessary to complete their scripts.
It’s easy to understand why the studios make these movies. They look at existing source material and figure that built-in audiences will buy tickets. What they forget is that you can’t simply transfer the characters and events to a new medium – there has to be an effort to ensure the story works in the new format. A film such as I, Robot bore almost no resemblance to Isaac Asimov’s original story – one gets the impression that the changes were made to make Will Smith look like a bigger movie star, not to improve the film.
The worst offenders were the avalanche of remakes that buried the multiplex. The Stepford Wives was transformed from a feminist horror film into a laughless and borderline offensive satire. Takashi Shimizu added computer-generated effects and Sarah Michelle Gellar to the mix for The Grudge, his lacklustre remake of Ju-On. In The Manchurian Candidate, Jonathan Demme sullied the name of one of the greatest films of all time with his aimless approach to political thriller. Even Joel and Ethan Coen, two of the most imaginative filmmakers working in Hollywood today, turned in a well acted but mediocre effort with The Ladykillers, a Tom Hanks-led remake of the Alec Guinness classic.
I can’t comment on all the remakes (I just couldn’t bring myself to see what J. Lo and Richard Gere did to the understated charm of Shall We Dance, nor did I see Jude Law in Alfie), but the best remake I saw was Dawn of the Dead. Statistically speaking, this wasn’t even much of a risk – zombies are "in" right now and any male between the ages of 14 and 40 loves that kind of gore.
There is a ridiculous double standard at work in Hollywood. Given the amount of material adapted from other mediums, it would appear that nobody in Tinseltown is willing to spend the money needed to develop new ideas. This would be acceptable if filmmakers could find something interesting to do with the old scripts they seem so intent on reworking (take Steven Soderbergh’s version of Oceans 11). However, this year’s crop of films indicates that the motive is simply to bide enough time until old ideas seem new again. Then producers can spend the money they would have used for script development to hire big-name stars.
I guess they figure that if pretty, famous people do the talking, then no one will notice that they aren’t saying anything. Then again, if the remake of The Manchurian Candidate can make nearly $70 million, maybe the audiences don’t care. |
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