“Reality is that the vast American public will not accept films with subtitles. People in Ohio have to go and see the movie.” – Helen Mirren (Hollywood Reporter, 2014)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the first entry in my “Customs of Cinema,” blog. I’ll primarily be discussing trends in film, making reviews of specific movies, and giving out suggestions for what films you should watch. I’d like these entries to focus on multiple pieces of media with shared connections such as genre or theme, offering readers a chance to experience films that they might not have known about. As a result, I try to keep my reviews spoiler free, although minor spoilers surrounding themes and general story structure will be present. Thank you for taking the time to read this, even if only in part. Without further ado, let’s get right into it.
This past month, Chris Rock signed a deal to direct the remake of Thomas Vinterberg’s critically acclaimed 2020 dark comedy, Another Round (Druk). Widely considered to be Vinterberg’s best effort, the director partnered with Mads Mikkelson and Thomas Bo Larson who both starred in his Oscar nominated film, The Hunt (Jagten) (2012). At the 2020 Oscars, Another Round was nominated for Best Director and won Best International Feature Film. Reactions to the remake announcement ranged from mixed to negative, noting the stark cultural differences that would make an American remake unfeasible. Druk, the Danish title of the film, quite literally translates to “binge drinking” and the majority of the film surrounds Scandinavian drinking culture. Something that most Americans, understandably, would know very little about. Possibly noting another entry in Hollywood’s slew of bad remakes. So, it got me thinking, are there any good Hollywood remakes and which one is the best? Are any of them “better” than the original? And, of all the mediocre Hollywood remakes, which ones are the worst? I’ll only be looking at three Hollywood remakes of international films (independent from Hollywood), so no Cabin Fever (2014), Rollerball (2002), or Total Recall (2012). With that being said, let’s get into the good, the bad, and the really, really, REALLY, ugly.
Good: Remake: The Departed (2006), Martin Scorsese. Original: Infernal Affairs (2002), Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, Hong Kong.
Undercover cop vs. undercover mobster, who wins this game of cat and mouse? A simple crime-thriller story enhanced by mountains of suspense and exceptional character writing. Infernal Affairs, set in Hong Kong, follows Inspector Lau (Andy Lau) and Officer Chen (Tony Leung). Inspector Lau is a cop who works for the triad, Officer Chen is an undercover cop in Lau’s gang. When a drug deal goes wrong, both groups know that there’s a mole and the rest of the film follows the mind games that ensue.
As the film goes on, we get deeper into the characters and their motivations towards keeping their identity secret. Both Andy Lau and Tony Leung are known for their dramatic acting work with director Wong Kar-Wai and their performances carry the film to its heart wrenching conclusion. The remake, set in Boston, follows Leonardo Dicaprio as the undercover cop and Matt Damon as the police infiltrator from the Irish mob. Scorsese’s version is even more star studded, with Jack Nicholson playing the mob boss, Marky Mark Whalberg and Martin Sheen as police captains, and Vera Farmiga as the psychiatrist, arguably the most understated role.
What The Departed does best as a film is giving these characters more room to grow. With an extra 40 minutes of runtime, we get more scenes to show character dynamics and let the emotions sink in for the audience. Damon and Dicaprio also outdo their counterparts because of changes that are surprisingly American. Vera Farmiga’s psychiatrist is involved in a love triangle with our leads, a common Hollywood stereotype. Something that would seem like a downgrade but allows the psychiatrist greater characterization, especially since she only saw a few scenes in the original. Interacting with the psychiatrist is the only time our protagonists reveal parts of themselves they keep hidden. Having more of these interactions gives the audience a better sense of how the characters are changing over the course of the film.
Frustration and stress for our undercover leads is also more subtle in Infernal Affairs, using non-verbal cues and silence to convey these emotions more than dialogue. Scorsese employs the explosive outbursts more commonly seen in Hollywood which, in my opinion, builds tension better than the subtle approach. Especially in the scenes with mob boss Jack Nicholson, making each interaction unpredictable with an inherent sense of danger. Scorsese is a master of these types of characters, springing to mind Joe Pesci’s role in Goodfellas (1990), and his directorial expertise is on full display in The Departed.
As a big fan of Hong Kong cinema and Infernal Affairs, I was surprised by how much I liked The Departed and I’d argue that it’s even better than the original, which is why it’s my “Good” pick for this category. What can be learned from this remake is that it’s best to pick stories that are universal. Crime-thrillers like Infernal Affairs could be set in any country in the world and the theme of self-identity contains ideas that are purely human and relatable to everyone. Other foreign crime thrillers have been adapted by Hollywood to great success. Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002) adapted a Norwegian story about a police investigation gone wrong and the cover up that ensues. True Lies (1994), the action-comedy from director James Cameron, is a remake of the French film La Totale (1991). Good directors pick films they know an American audience can relate to and understand on a deeper level. A common thread in a lot of poor remakes is not understanding the film from a foreign perspective, which will be demonstrated with my next entry.
Bad: Remake: Breathless (1983), Jim McBride. Original: A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) (1960), Jean Luc-Godard, France.
As a person on Reddit so duly noted, “Breathless is hot garbage. But, like, HOT garbage” which is the most astute assessment of the film I have ever read. Never at any point during A Bout de Souffle (1960) did I want to see Jean-Paul Belmondo’s bare rear, Breathless insists we see Richard Gere’s. McBride’s version of the film seemingly thinks that the sex scene in A Bout de Souffle was the crux of the movie. As a result, the remake is a sexually charged romance with very little effort put into the characters and the original story simply used as a backdrop.
In both versions of the film, we follow a small-time criminal (Belmondo/Gere) who ends up killing a police officer. While he tries to get the money to run away he ends up back with one of his girlfriends, a foreign exchange student (OG: Jean Seberg RE: Valerie Kaprisky). After spending more time with her, he attempts to get her to run away with him and the rest of the film is essentially a dialogue between the characters about this issue.
Gere’s character, Jesse, shares in the temperamental, insecure, and superficial masculine archetype that Belmondo portrays in the original. Yet, he lacks a lot of what made the original character so compelling. The characters in the remake fail to serve as allegories and representations for societal commentary, a cornerstone of French New Wave cinema. A Bout de Souffle is an allegorical romance about the relationship between cinema and culture. How the characters act and interact with one another is commentary about the influence of Hollywood on French filmmaking. Belmondo’s character is essentially an homage by Godard to classic Hollywood cinema, particularly Humphrey Bogart, and is also a critique of the Bogart-esque tough guy. Belmondo wants to be Bogart; he makes the faces, he dresses the same, he smokes the same, and he is a massive misogynist. All of this stems from an insecure need to feel big and accepted as such, which leads to the reckless behavior that drives the story. What does Gere want to be? The Silver Surfer. He bases his whole tough guy personality on a comic book character and, instead of appearing sympathetic like Belmondo, just comes off like a jerk.
Despite being more attractive, Gere lacks the charisma of Belmondo’s performance. The whole point of Belmondo’s character is playing it cool when he shouldn’t be. As we learn more about the character, we realize it’s all a facade. Jesse appears to be lost in the sauce and fully believes his eccentric tough guy personality. However, I will give Gere’s character one up over Belmondo because he’s less misogynist. Yet, this is surprisingly also to his detriment as a character. Belmondo’s misogyny is the antagonist to Seberg’s independence, a pointed commentary about the portrayal of feminism in movies. Meanwhile, Kaprisky’s performance doesn’t give the same aura of self-determination that Seberg brought to A Bout de Souffle. Her character is head over heels for Jesse, giving him very little pushback on his myriad of advances. Charmed by his machismo and obvious attention-seeking, she doesn’t have the space to build her character antagonistically to Jesse. She essentially has no agency in this relationship and she seems to be fine with it because she’s fallen for his stupidity. Seberg’s rendition had dreams and goals that she has to weigh against her relationship with the lead character, while Kaprisky just throws them out the window.
McBride’s rendition just doesn’t seem to understand what the original film was trying to convey. A lot of the middling American remakes, e.g. Solaris (2002) or City of Angels (1998), suffer from this same problem. It’s possible that Breathless is a deeply complex reflection on Hollywood story telling but it truly feels like a surface level film. Despite all its style and flair, the story and characters are lackluster in comparison to the original. Even with 11 more minutes of runtime, the characters feel one dimensional and the story ends up falling flat. A lot of the technical aspects of the film are actually well done. The lighting, costume design, and a lot of the action scenes gave the film a very 1980’s vibe, similar to films like Roadhouse (1989). If you told me Breathless served as inspiration for Roadhouse, even down to the one-dimensional, attractive male lead, I’d believe you. As a result, the film has gained a cult following among 1980’s movie watchers and some prefer this version over the original. I do agree that A Bout de Souffle has a lot of problematic dialogue and can be too sluggish for some audiences. However, the remake still doesn’t come close to the original as a story or as a piece of social commentary.
If you think I’m going too hard on a film that some people like, I haven’t gotten started. Breathless has some aspects I liked and would probably watch it again if I caught it on TV. The next film, however, I believe has no redeeming qualities and would liken it to watching a fiery car crash.
Ugly: Remake: Oldboy (2013), dir. Spike Lee. Original: Oldboy (2003), Park Chan-wook, South Korea.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it, Spike Lee’s Oldboy (2013) is a bad film. Out of all the Hollywood remakes of foreign films, I asked which one is the absolute worst? I’m going to argue that this film is that. Not only is it a poor adaptation of an already great film, it’s simply a terrible movie.
The original Oldboy (2003), directed by Park Chan-wook as part of his Vengeance Trilogy, is an adaptation of a Japanese manga of the same name. In the original, the story follows protagonist Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) as he is kidnapped and held captive for 15 years. Kept in the same room and fed the same food, he watches the world around him change through the television. While he’s away, his captors frame him for the murder of his wife, while his daughter practically disappears from Dae-su’s life. Slowly, Oh Dae-su begins to claw his way out of his prison, training his body, planning his escape, and learning everything he can from the wealth of information the TV provides. Coming within one month of escape, Oh Dae-su is unexpectedly released in the same spot he was taken from.
Oh Dae-su sets out on a journey to find and kill whoever it is that stole his family and 15 years from his life. Along the way he gets closer to a sushi chef named Mi-do (Kang He-yung) who helps him find the mysterious kidnapper. As the film progresses, the importance of killing his rival becomes less important than figuring out why he was targeted. Unraveling a rabbit hole of revenge as Oh Dae-su searches his past for a wrong he can no longer remember.
The official remake of the film was in development hell for five years leading up to the 2013 release under director Spike Lee. Starring Josh Brolin as protagonist, Joe Doucett; alongside Elizabeth Olsen, Samuel L. Jackson, and Sharlto Copely. In interviews leading up to the film, Spike Lee called his version of the film a “Reinterpretation” of the original and told audiences to see it with an open mind. Hmm… I wonder where I’ve heard that before? cough Cowboy Bebop, 2021 cough.
First off, the biggest problem with this film is Josh Brolin. The original actor, Choi Min-sik, did an amazing job of portraying a man who’s been held captive for 15 years. Once he’s released, he is an awkward mess and is meant to be seen as very sympathetic to the audience. We root for him because we want him to figure out the who’s and why’s of his predicament. Brolin, on the other hand, does not play an appealing character in any way, shape, or form. He’s a giant asshole for the first few scenes and when he gets kidnapped, I felt absolutely no sympathy. Oh Dae-su isn’t perfect, but you want him to succeed. Meanwhile, I actively wanted Brolin to fail because I thought he kinda deserved all the shit that happened to him.
The character Brolin plays is just stone cold nothingness 99% of the time. Whenever he shows an emotion that isn’t anger, it feels completely out of place, like he’s faking it. Having all the personality of a boulder, you need to find a way to make him interesting, which leads into the next problem.
Joe Doucett (Brolin) can be described as either an indestructible caveman or a less intelligent Jack Reacher. If you’ve heard of Oldboy, then you probably know about the famous “One-Shot Hammer Scene,” a fight scene where Oh Dae-su fights through a crowd of gangsters in a tiny hallway, all done in one take. In the scene, Oh Dae-su is kicked, beaten, and stabbed but he keeps getting back up, showing perseverance and his need for revenge. Since the scene was so famous, it absolutely had to be recreated in the 2013 version. Only this time, we’re just going to have Brolin plow through everyone like he’s the Incredible Hulk. It felt like him getting stabbed was a fluke because the scene literally cuts to a different shot of him getting stabbed, like they forgot to put it in the original fight scene. It’s a cop-out to further the plot that’s so flagrant it seems out of line for it to even happen. He also mauls a group of high school football players because they tried to stop him from stalking a woman. In the original, Oh Dae-su beats up some hoodlums to test his skills but Brolin nearly kills these teenagers and for what? Drinking beer on an empty football field? Death sentence, buddy, can’t stop Joe Doucett from harassing women, he’s on a revenge mission.
The composition of the film is also lackluster in comparison to the original. Regarding the soundtrack, the score of the original Oldboy is great in many aspects but it seems that no inspiration was taken by Lee and the composer in crafting the score for the remake. It is some of the most inoffensive, barebones music used in a film and is easily forgettable. Which I found especially disappointing because I loved the soundtrack Lee used for BlacKkKlannsman (2018).
Same could be said about the cinematography of the new version. The original used a wide variety of angles, movement, and color to tell the story in a stylized fashion. Coming from the director of Do The Right Thing (1989), one would expect a lot of interesting shots and coloring. Sadly, none of the style that made Oldboy or Lee’s previous films so iconic are present in the remake. The majority of the film is covered in industrial, desaturated ugliness; devoid of all the contrasting color palettes that held meaning in the original. Shot composition is also an issue that the remake needlessly creates. The audience gets no real sense of space because the film doesn’t care to build it. For example, After just two scenes in Mi-do’s room or the villain’s apartment you can mentally map out where all the important things are. Oldboy goes out of its way to make objects have meaning to the characters, for example a motif of tapes, cameras, and notebooks. All of these items link our characters to the past and Oh Dae-su’s search for the specific memory. The difference with the remake is that there are no important objects, so there’s no need to make the setting interesting or important. It’s not just a bad remake, it’s also a truly awful film considering all aspects.
Breathless at least had examples of good filmmaking. What made Breathless such a bad remake was the film’s insistence to detract from the original story and themes. What McBride does is a common problem with remakes and is often why they fall flat. I’m of the opinion that the film could have been better if they chose to take the story in a completely new direction. Instead, McBride tries to ride the fence of wanting both an homage to the original film and a glitzy, over the top 1980’s movie. Two opposing forces that can’t coexist considering the themes presented in the original. Oldboy follows the same path but is poorly executed in terms of filmmaking. Lee tries to capture the themes presented in the original Oldboy but all of the changes he made work antithetical to that goal.
Bad remakes usually try to tell the original film in a new style and it usually doesn’t work. The Departed is one of the films that does it successfully but that’s an exception to the rule. Due mainly in part to great direction, acting, and the right story to adapt. For every The Departed, there are 3 or more remakes that fall tremendously short of their original counterparts. The worst remakes are the ones that are just bad films. If Oldboy (2013) had been the only version of the film it would still be a poor film. The fact that there’s already an Oldboy, one of the best revenge films in the history of cinema, makes the remake even more egregious. Audiences who watched Spike Lee’s film might not go see the original because of their experience with this version.
Hollywood making needless remakes really stems from a problem with American audiences, albeit one that has diminished in recent years. We don’t like reading subtitles because films aren’t books, why would I want to read when I should be watching? Well, the truth is that you actually can do both. Even if you can’t do it well, chances are you’re watching it on Netflix, Hulu, or even the Criterion Channel (if you’re a snob like me) and you can always rewind the movie. If that’s too immersion breaking for you, last resort, you can watch the dub of the film. Usually some emotional storytelling is lost in dubs, but even greater can be lost in a bad remake. Anything would be better than watching a shoddy “Reinterpretation,” when a perfectly good, or possibly great, version of the film already exists. Anything would also be better than watching Spike Lee’s Oldboy, so save yourself the trouble and watch the original.
– Dennis Vargas, Blogger.
Dennis Vargas – Blogger: Dennis is a senior at Lewis University majoring in Air Traffic Control Management. He has a passion for cinema and filmmaking, spending free time watching basically anything movie related or perusing Letterboxd for new recommendations. He’s also an avid concert goer and enjoys listening to rock/metal primarily. You can often find him in the gym or on the university nature trail in between classes. Top 4 films: The Killer (1989), Whiplash, New Rose Hotel, and American Psycho.