Imported Ideas: Asian
Remakes Ring True in Hollywood |
On Oct. 18, 2002 DreamWorks pictures will release
a remake of the internationally known Hideo Nakata
horror film Ringu, otherwise known as The
Ring. The Ring was released in Japan
in 1998 to a wave of critical acclaim and financial
success. It has since become a worldwide horror phenomenon
thanks to its inventive and genuinely terrifying premise
and coldly creepy direction. It has also spawned 2
sequels and a horde of copycat films, trying to cash
in on the grand success of The Ring. But
even with all of its success, most Americans have
never heard of it. Most Americans will see the remake
thinking it is an original film, conceived for an
American audience. And that’s just what DreamWorks
wants you to think. DreamWorks wants American moviegoers
to see their version of The Ring without
the slightest hint of influence from seeing, or even
knowing about the original version. And it seems like
more and more movie studios are catching onto this
idea. Is the marketing of The Ring an indication
of the future of Hollywood? Are remOakes of International
films, films Americans never see, becoming the new
market trend in Hollywood?
Remakes are nothing new. Since the beginning of cinema,
American filmmakers have turned to 19th century literary
works for their inspiration. A prime example of this
kind of footrace to churn out cinematic versions of
literary works is the amount of films based on the
poem Enoch Arden by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
For example, there is the 1911 two-part film Enoch
Arden by D.W. Griffith; as well, The Man
From Yesterday in 1932 by Berthold Viertel; and
in 1946, Tomorrow is Forever by Irving Pichel.
The base story of the poem Enoch Arden has
been twisted and turned into about 15 different film
narratives throughout the years (maybe even more),
much the same way E. Phillips Oppenheim’s novel
The Great Impersonation has been cannibalized
in film over and over again. And as time passed, the
urge to recycle others’ works became more and
more frequent in Hollywood until soon, films themselves
were being recycled, to either modernize the so called
“classic” film or “improve”
on the film techniques and storylines of past films.
Just look at many of the classic American films from
last century that were “modernized”. In
the past five years alone we had to deal with the
swelling trend of remaking such familiar film fare
as Day of the Jackal & Shaft (1973),
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Purple
Noon as well as Psycho (1960), Dial
M for Murder as well as Dr. Dolittle (1967),
The Nutty Professor (1963), and of course
William Castle’s enjoyably exploitive 1960 film,
13 Ghosts. Let’s not forget the even
more alarming frequency to turn barley remembered
retro TV shows (The Mod Squad, The Wild Wild West
and McHale’s Navy) into major motion
pictures. This is just the tip of the current iceberg,
we won’t even get into the whole Disney re-remake
mentality or the turning of luke warm films into even
worse TV shows (anyone remember The Client
on CBS?).
Before, there was always the safety net of “We’re
doing this because the technology is so far superior
now to when the film was originally made” (ex:
Tim Burton’s claustrophobic set design nightmare
Planet of the Apes) or “It just felt
like the idea could use some more fleshing out and
a bigger budget, plus it works so much better with
a sympathetic lead character.” (ex: the abysmal
Get Carter remake with Sly Stalone or the
Mel Gibson rape of Point Blank, Payback.
Take your pick).
Now, instead of justifying their actions, studios
are simply swallowing up wonderfully made imports
at a breakneck pace, making sure none of us simple
minded metroplex popcorn huffers will ever see the
wool being pulled over our eyes, at least not before
we pay good money to see the generally inferior remake.
From Spanish cinema (Alejandro Amenabar’s 1997
film Abre los Ojos AKA Open Your Eyes turned
into Cameron Crowe’s phony existential thriller
Vanilla Sky) to German films (Wem Wender’s
brilliant 1987 film Wings of Desire became
the moronic City of Angels starring Nicolas
Cage), International fare is redone without the slightest
hint of honesty from the filmmakers or studios that
bankroll these abortions. And it seems the newest
country raped and pillaged by the remake machine is
Japan, a country whose films and filmmakers have always
been on the cutting edge of style and substance: Koji
Wakamatsu’s Violated Angels to Takashi
Miike’s Ichi the Killer.
The repurposing of Japanese cinematic storylines has
been going on for quite some time. Just look at the
Bruce Willis movie Last Man Standing, ripped
from the Sergio Leone classic A Fist Full of Dollars,
taken from the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo,
taken from the Raymond Chandler novel Red Harvest.
Or the little known film by George Lucas, called Star
Wars, a chopped up mess of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey and Kurosawa’s
Hidden Fortress. Let’s not forget The
Magnificent Seven, a direct remake of the Kurosawa
masterpiece The Seven Samurai. Or The
Road to Perdition, a major motion picture starring
Tom Hanks, based on the graphic novel of the same
name by noted Asian filmfile Max Collin; in turn heavily
derived from the blatant American repackaging of the
Lone Wolf and Cub films (a 6 film series
in Japan, not to mention a successful comic book,
TV show and more), which Roger Corman turned into
Shogun Assassin & Lightning Swords
of Death in the early 80’s. Phew! Gets
confusing, doesn’t it?
Japan is becoming more and more the “go to”
country for American remakes and it looks like Korea
is not far behind. This excessive repurposing began
with Hideo Nakata’s 1998 horror film Ringu
AKA The Ring, recently remade by Steven
Spielberg’s DreamWorks Studio as the hit of
this Halloween season, starring new Hollywood golden
girl Naomi Watts and directed by Mouse Hunt’s
Gore Verbinski. The funny thing is that Ringu
has already been remade to death the world over!
The film was based on a Japanese TV show called Ring:
Kanzen-ban (The Complete Edition) based on a
novel by Koji Suzuki. Hideo Nakata’s Ringu
was remade as The Ring Virus in 1999 by Korean
filmmaker Dong-bin Kim. Plus it has 3 sequels already
under it’s belt: The Ring 2, as well
as the alternate “sequel” called Rasen
aka Spiral as well as the prequel The
Ring 0: Birthday. I even heard there is talk
of a Ring –1 in the works! And even
with all of this substantial back history floating
around, Ringu has managed to remain virtually
unknown in the US, making it the perfect film to remake.
For one thing, it’s a truly creative and frightening
horror film, something that seems to be unthinkable
to find here in the US. And it’s a proven success
everywhere else in the world, the UK included. So
why wouldn’t it hit big in the states, especially
if you toss out all the Japs, replace them with good
ol’ English speakin’, meat & potatoes
eatin’ Americans (well one of them is a Brit)
and whip up an exploitive street campaign, going as
far as planting unmarked VHS tapes around LA that
contain the cursed footage featured in the remake!
Apparently, a guy by the name of Roy Lee, executive
producer for the The Ring remake, may be
the man most responsible for the current up-and-coming
rash of Japanese remakes in America. In an interview
conducted for an Asian film review site, Lee was quoted
as saying “The Ring was shown to me
by a person who runs film festivals, actually it's
the one I'm going to this month, the Puchon International
Film Festival, a fantasy, sci-fi, horror film festival
where it won BEST PICTURE three years ago, I think.
Last year, Turn, another film I'm doing won the DIRECTORS
AWARD for Hideyuki Hirayama. And this year, two movies
that are in competition are films I'm already producing.
And so that just seemed like the best area to find
movies that would be good for US remakes.” If
these films are so good, why do they need to be remade
for US release? Are we so dumbed down that we need
to remove all foreign elements from our films? Would
the original The Ring not succeed at the
General Cinema down the block? Whatever the reason,
it looks like we’d better get used to the results.
There is currently a staggering line-up of remakes
on the cutting board, including two new films by The
Ring director Hideo Nakata: Chaos and
Dark Water. Chaos is a disorienting
noir thriller originally released in 2000, slatted
to be directed by Jonathon Glacer and starring Robert
Dinero and Benicio Del Toro. Dark Water is
a disarming horror film about a mother & daughter
who move into a strange and disturbing apartment complex.
Coming soon after The Ring remake, there
will be a Wes Craven helmed remake of the amazingly
creepy Kiyoshi Kurosawa film Pulse, about
ghosts who transmit messages, and eventually murder,
through the Internet. Pulse is a film already
ripped off by the American film Fear Dot Com
just some 4 months ago; a movie that’s only
staying quality was it’s moronic promotional
Internet address, www.feardotcom.com. Soon after Pulse
there will be a remake of the Japanese film Turn,
about a woman who gets hit by a truck and finds herself
reliving the same day over and over again, and it
looks like, if The Ring remake is a success,
we will see the other Ring sequels remade
as well. Then look for a whole slew of Korean retreads,
starting with My Wife is a Gangster, Il Mare,
My Sassy, No Blood No Tears (starring Jennifer
Love Hewitt!?) and Failan. But that’s
not all folks, Tom Cruise has secured the rights for
a remake of the Pang Brothers disturbingly haunting
ghost thriller The Eye, about a blind woman
who undergoes a cornea operation and discovers that
with her new found sight comes the ability to see
ghosts and the way they died. The real irony behind
that one is the fact that The Pang Brothers admittedly
borrowed heavily from M. Knights’ The Sixth
Sense, an American film that wasn’t all
that original in the first place (can you say The
Changeling?), so Cruise is basically buying into
a remake of a Chinese movie that used numerous elements
from a successful American movie that got its major
plot points from other sources as well. So the cannibalization
comes full circle.
The most disturbing element in all of this current
remake frenzy is the rumor going around that DreamWorks
bought the US distribution rights to the original
The Ring simply so they could keep it from
coming out in the US. It seems almost impossible to
believe that they would stoop to such a paranoid business
venture to try and preserve a kind of false integrity
in their version. To erase the actual existence of
the original in this country in order to make their
remake an “original” film is nothing short
of a criminal act. It’s also one step closer
to a scary kind of post-modern approach to filmmaking.
If this concept catches on, we may just see a whole
summer season of blockbuster hits based on movies
we’ve never heard of—and if they have
their way, never will. The American film market could
become a mass of repurposed information, the parasitic
leach of the film community, counting on already successful
foreign film plots tied to “dye in the wool”
movie stars to make their money. It’s the absolute
antithesis of the kind of tactics Quentin Tarantino
used to create his best work (granted, at least his
rip-offs were generally better than the originals
he stole from) and the way Miramax Films tried to
repackage 10-year-old Jackie Chan movies as “new
releases” in the 90’s. I’s a dreadful
sign of things to come.
Maybe I’m being dramatic. Maybe I’m being
paranoid about all of this. But it seems to me that
the act of remaking a film that is only a year old
movie from a foreign country, then buying the rights
to the original so it doesn’t get released in
the US before the remake is released, then potentially
hiding the overall existence of the original for some
time to come, is an incredible manipulation of the
masses, as well as a mechanical repurposing of someone
else’s silenced art. Sure, the studio that made
the original paid for the rights to the original (a
fairly high 6 figure payment for The Ring).
Plain and simple, it is an insult to American movie
fans and the most guilt-ridden form of exploitation
yet devised by the film industry. The saddest part
is, it works, and if it works, it will stick around
for a long, long time to come. There is a lot of great
stuff out there that most of us are not given the
chance to see, unless you do the leg work, and generally,
people don’t want to put any more work into
their viewing experience than buying a ticket and
finding a seat. The only possible good I can make
of this growing trend of remakes is the hope that
these films will cause more casual film fans to seek
out the original movies, to learn more about the background
of the films they are going to see and become more
in tune with world cinema in general. Of course, this
is about as potential an idea as the possibility that
the remake of The Eye will be good!
-Sam McAbee
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