Let me rephrase that: I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate Hollywood remakes of foreign films.
I’ve hated Hollywood remakes since (at least) the 1970s, but my current rancor is focused on the English-language remake now being filmed of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first part of the Stieg Larsson Swedish murder-mystery Millennium Trilogy.
This big-$$$$ remake is happening less than a year after the great (and successful) Swedish film version of Dragon Tattoo was released in North America. All three Swedish film adaptations of the trilogy are still in various theatres around the GTA. Cripes, the corpse isn’t even cold yet. Hollywood has no shame.
The really appalling thing is that a pretty good director (David Fincher) and some very good actors (Christopher Plummer, Daniel Craig, Robin Wright) are taking part in this hack work.
Why on earth would they do it?
What artist worth his or her salt would take a commission to paint a copy of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night?
And what buyer in his or her right mind would possibly prefer the knockoff to the original — or even bother looking at the knockoff?
And you, dear consuming reader, would you rather buy a CD of the Rolling Stones performing their greatest hits or would you buy the Kay-Tel Karaoke Session All-Stars Sing the Stones?
Don’t answer any of those questions: They’re all rhetorical.
Of course we know why those pretty good actors and director are mucking around in second-hand productions: For the money, of course.
But how on earth could Fincher possibly pretend to himself that he will do a better job of making Tattoo in English than Niels Arden Oplev did making the original film in Swedish?
And is Daniel Craig — an actor I quite liked before this — vain enough to think he will even begin to compare to Michael Nyqvist, the Swedish actor who played investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist.
The Hollywood remakes — even when they are better than average — are never as good as the original.
Why?
Because they’re always dumbed down.
What do I mean “dumbed down” — are North American audiences stupid?
No, I mean the original film is coming from an original point of creativity. The Hollywood copycat, no matter how good its intentions, is trying to copy original spark without having it. I think that’s called a fake orgasm. Or zombie-ism. Or something.
And why does Hollywood do this, apart from the basic fact that it’s an industry town that has raised whoring to an art level not seen since the Bourbons were guillotined?
Well, mainly because Americans can’t stand subtitles. Canadians are much better at dealing with subtitles but still infected with the American disease of auricular chauvinism.
American audiences are viscerally trained to see anything in subtitles as hard work and suspiciously foreign.
Let’s not even talk about dubbed movies.
I want to hear the actors’ own voices conveying the words the way their art and craft is telling them to.
(Here’s a funny thing: The actor who has become the dubbed “voice” of Tom Hanks in Germany is a comedian who started doing Tom Hanks when Hanks was doing goofy comedies like Splash and Big. So now, as Hanks has spread his wings wide as a dramatic actor, you’ve still got a verbal comedian trying to catch up to Hanks’ emotional complexity. Just doesn’t work. More about tom Hanks later.)
Another reason Hollywood is remaking foreign films is that the originals were a success.
Seems strange, doesn’t it, that somebody would copy a successful original piece of art? How are you going to make it better? Oh, that’s right, the object isn’t to make it better; it’s to make it more profitable.
Hollywood always chases success, always tries to suck the last dram of blood out of the creative corpse.
Hollywood always wants a bigger piece of the cheesecake, even if they have to remake it with an edible oil product instead of the original artisan cheese that gave the original its character — and made it a success.
For the moment, let’s get back to my current beef: the David Fincher/Daniel Craig version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (the original Swedish name of which was Män som hatar kvinnor —Men Who Hate Women — a more direct but less evocative title.)
First and foremost, nobody is ever, ever going to replace Noomi Rapace as the damaged, dangerous computer-hacking heroine Lisbeth Salander.
Certainly not spoiled little rich girl Rooney Mara, cast as Lisbeth in the Hollywoodized version. And just what is Rooney Mara’s compelling claim to artistic fame (apart from the fact that she’s an heiress of the Mara clan that owns two NFL teams)?
Well, she was in a couple of TV shows and a couple of indie movies and then her big break came — she starred (or should that be scarred?) in the recent slasher remake of Nightmare On Elm Street.
And Daniel Craig as Mikael Blomkvist? Maybe okay if it’s an original film, but Craig can just never connect to the gut nerve of Michael Nyqvist who played the Blomkvist character in the three Swedish films based on Larsson’s trilogy.
Hell, Nyqvist was friends with Stieg Larrson, hung out in the same political circles, even had crusading journalist Larrson’s help when Swedish neo-Nazis were threatening to kill Nyqvist over a play he appeared in about Auschwitz death camp a decade ago.
You just don’t get that connection and authenticity in Hollywood. I guarantee you Daniel Craig never had a conversation with Stieg Larrson about neo-Nazis.
Director David Fincher I just don’t understand at all. He’s the guy who did Fight Club, Benjamin Button, the recent hit The Social Network and lots of other well-received films.
Fincher says he is going to be more faithful to the books than the Swedish films were.
First of all, if he is going to be faithful to the plot, he will end up with a 25-hour-long movie.
Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev did an incredible job capturing the sense and feel of the novel and he managed to disentangle the main storyline from dozens of subplots that were interesting reading but were not essential elements of the film version.
Yes, Oplev made a couple of minor plot changes but — this will sound like heresy to some people — I think in many ways he IMPROVED Larrson’s original written work, at least in the first film of the trilogy.
Oplev doesn’t seem to understand why Fincher is doing an English-language version of Dragon Tattoo either. Here’s what he had to say recently:
“Even in Hollywood there seems to be a kind of anger about the remake, like, ‘Why would they remake something when they can just go see the original?’ Everybody who loves film will go see the original one. It’s like, what do you want to see, the French version of “La Femme Nikita” or the American one? You can hope that Fincher does a better job.”
I’m glad Oplev brought up Nikita. That’s a similar situation from the 1990s I was going to get into anyway.
It really is unbelievable the number of foreign films that Hollywood has remade — almost always badly. But I’ve gone on too long already, so I’ll save a wider look at Hollywood’s remake Walk of Shame for tomorrow.
There seems to be a complete dearth of creativity in North America that has lasted a long time.
Remakes of other countries’ movies, remakes of other countries’ TV shows – even in TV commercials, if one guy comes up with a new trick, within a month everyone else is using it to the point that you can’t tell one commercial from another.
TV ‘franchises’ like Law and Order where the same plotlines will be used in each entity within the franchise.
I’ve really been going to the library a lot again.
Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and combined with it’s insatiable greed and lack of shame will not be satisfied until they remake every film including it’s own classic movies.Casablanca and The African Queen will be remade sooner or later as well as The Exorcist.The real problem is the public who continually pay to see these wretched remakes and are willing whores to Hollywood’s pimp.
I understand your frustration with the Hollywood money-making marketing machine. But not all remakes have to be worth less then the celuloid they are filmed on.
I suppose discussion of “The Magnificent Seven” is inevitable (I’m not a huge film buff, so there are probably other ‘big’ productions before or since that might serve as better Exhibit A’s). I’m quite fond of the remake of ‘Seven Samurai’. Each actor and character was distinct and it certainly seemed to fit into the western mould of the time (I gather Kurosawa himself was framing his original story as a ‘Japanese take on the Western’).
It helped that each film dealt with a distinct and archetypal breed of man, Samurai and Cowboy, so the similarity in the storyline was subsumed a bit under the colorful nature of the settings and cultures and personalities.
With Dramas such as ‘The Girl…” you’re on much shakier ground. You’re really only substituting language and actor’s faces. The story, character, even culture and ‘western sensibility’ are all going to be similar. One just becomes a re-painted copy of the other, instead of a ‘reinterpretation’ with it’s own take on a primal story thread (rescuing the common farmer from a band of rogues).
Unfortunately it’s true that most North Americans will pass over the original in favor of the glitzy uber-budget Hollywood version that’s playing in every Multiplex across the continent. They know all too well their audience loves the familar, be it in language, actor, style, etc. I won’t let it cloud my opinion of Craig or Fincher overmuch. Maybe they genuinly like the original written story and figure they have a good take on it. At then end of the day the audience votes with their wallets…we only have ourselves to blame for cheap knockoffs.
Alan,
I don’t think you went on long enough! You’ve put into words everything I’ve been thinking about this fiasco! Face it, it’s all about money. Hollywood didn’t make anything off the original movies, so all they see is a cash cow.
Can’t wait to read your next installment.
I call them “xenoremakes”: xenophobic remakes. The US public loathes and is afraid of the external world, so the media need to homogeineze and sterilize its contents before they reach the border. One can only imagine what would happen if the brainwashing ever wears off…!
Sure Hollywood always needs to make re-makes of great films. It’s so their own can understand them. European films need thought and imagination something the U.S has not been pushing on the youth of that country and it starting to be the same here in Canada. Keep them dumb and they won’t have a valid opinion. The Romans did it way before our time and governments are still doing it today. Now this is very general and not meant for everyone but you gotta admit if its not written out for them they just do not grasp the point.
Rock band 10cc nailed it in the 70s: “Art for art’s sake….money for God’s sake”.
Yes, Nikita IS a case in point! And now it has degenerated into a rather dumb TV show.
I think the prime example, though, is how the magnificent and imaginative ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ managed to morph into the dull, predictable, and entirely UNimaginative ‘So Long Wong Foo and thanks for all the Fish” or whatever it was called. (Did I just confuse it with a Hitchhiker movie? Shame! The answer is obviously 42.) Let’s see Hollywood, and especially Disney, stick with creating their own stuff.
Hollywood movie remakes… kind of like getting the gum underneath a restaurant table to get whatever flavour there’s left.
Just was at the theater…. and there is a remake of True Grit in the previews. Hollywood will do anything to make a buck. One of the all time classic movies……. remake !!!!! Will not see or rent it…. I have the original…. and look great
….has anyone figured out yet why they’re re-making Buffy The Vampire Slayer?
I’m not a fan of remakes, but isn’t it perhaps hypocritical to accuse “Hollywood” of being creatively dead when it adapts a Swedish work when the Sweidsh work itself is simply another adaption of the creativity of an expired author?
Oh God. Speaking of subtitles…Pan’s Labyrinth must have really screwed mainstream dumbed down Americans. It was popular here in Canada and a lot of films with subtitles do well here. Pan had subtitles for the folks who don’t speak Spanish, so I bet the Hispanics might have liked it…but Hollywood’s creativity stopped after the 1970s. Gradually Canadian made films are coming into their own, but it’s hard when you’re next to the US. (Though David Cronenberg has done quite well. His crews are Canadian, many of his actors and actresses are Canadian and when he uses US actors they’re good, like Viggo Mortensen.
There are many re-makes that should never have happened however if you put some thought into it there are many great scripts from great books that were badly made the first time and perhaps should be re-made. I can” imagin remaking Citizen Kane and the likes…….but other need a second look for the sake of the author.
That was an amazingly lucid, well articulated piece, while maybe not accurate for every single Hollywood remake of a foreign film, certainly covers most of them and certainly covers this particular one. Noomi Repace displays such an energy on the screen it’s almost non-paralleled is screen history (IMO it was THAT good). At least Hollywood paid her the tribute of offering her the role if she desired it. And that WAS an amazing tribute because NOBODY in this country (USA) has heard of her except the small amount of people that saw the movie. So maybe there IS just a spark of insight in this remake. Thankfully she was intelligent enough to turn it down. She also intimated that she put so much of herself into the role the first time that duplicating it would be an impossibility.
By the way, I saw True Grit in the theater with Duke in the lead when it first came out and I just saw the remake over the Xmas Holidays. It was John Wayne’s best role and he deserved the oscar for it but I liked the remake better.
When an american film comes out it gets subtitled in the rest of the world, when a foreign film gets to USA it gets a bad remake, ain’t that funny?
Anyway thanks, I was looking for an article like this from someone who shares the same feelings.
I agree with your opinion in the general case, but having seen both movies, I think the remake was actually better. David Fincher really brought his own interesting spin to it and you can’t deny the cinematic power of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ score. Also, I feel like Rooney Mara looks more like my mental picture of Salander from reading the books; Noomi Rapace (even though she’s only slightly bigger than Mara) just feels too imposing for the role. Mara has more of the vulnerability-hostility mix of Salander.