By Jerry Saravia
By Jerry Saravia
In the opening scene of 1999�s The Muse, Albert Brooks plays a screenwriter who is told by a movie executive that he has lost his "edge." All through the movie, Brooks is told time and again that he lost his edge. Mulling over this scene in context, I wondered the same thing about Hollywood.
There is little edge at play when we see the same old formulas and clich�s applied to the same watered down genres. For instance, in the last two years alone, we have been bombarded with more remakes and sequels than in any other time in Hollywood history. Consider the recent following remakes: the earsplittingly numbing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, the 3-hour epic King Kong, the histrionic Red Dragon, The Hills Have Eyes, Dawn of the Dead, The Omen, Guess Who, Freaky Friday, The Manchurian Candidate, Last Holiday, War of the Worlds, The Fog, The Ladykillers, etc. Then there are the Japanese horror flicks that have been remade such as The Ring, Dark Water and The Grudge, not to mention their own inevitable sequels. Some remakes are already being made as we speak, such as The Evil Dead, Day of the Dead, and Charlotte�s Web. Scorsese is scoring a remake for the third time in his career, namely The Departed, a 90 million dollar redo of the Chinese crime film, Infernal Affairs. I love Scorsese and I am sure he will bring his own brand of street ethics to it (and his Cape Fear remake was psychologically superior to the original). Excepting �King Kong,� �War of the Worlds,� �The Ladykillers,� and the truly scary �Dawn of the Dead,� I can�t say I was enamored by most remakes. Some I plainly refuse to see (�Guess Who� and a feature-length version of The Honeymooners come immediately to mind), and others should simply be dismissed (Jonathan Demme�s �The Manchurian Candidate� was decent but simply overlong and unrewarding).
And there are the sequels and prequels. Some go straight to video, like Band Camp: American Pie or a Carlito�s Way prequel, and others are released in theatres such as X-Men: United, Underworld: Evolution, The Chronicles of Riddick, Mission: Impossible III, Superman Returns, Batman Begins, Spider-Man 2, Saw II & III, and so on. Some are good, some not so good. I think �Batman Begins� was one of the best superhero films ever made, whereas the last �Superman� was only marginally better than the last two Chris Reeve films.
So what is the underlying principle behind these innumerable sequels and remakes? Money, money, money. If they do well, there will be more � simple economics (this is a business after all). A sequel is being planned to Hulk, which is surprising since the original didn�t do as well as expected. Perhaps fans scoffed at an �intellectual� and serious-minded �Hulk� movie, so you can bet the sequel will feature more Hulk action and less thought. Spider-Man 3 is on its way, but it has characters worth carrying about and I love the damn web slinger anyway. However, who the hell wants another �American Pie� or a prequel featuring a younger Hannibal Lecter? Bad Boys 3, anyone? Armageddon 2? �Grudge 2� is coming soon, and wild Rob Zombie is considering a true Halloween sequel (or a remake depending on who you believe). I like Michael Myers, Fred Krueger and the like but I have little desire to see any more stories involving them (For the record, I have seen all the �Halloween� flicks). As far as I am concerned, Nightmare on Elm Street ended resolutely with Wes Craven�s own postmodernist, brilliant take, New Nightmare. Freddy vs. Jason was merely an entertaining, post-Scream joke.
Money dictates success in movies. But there is a deeper, more fundamental ploy at work. The 90�s was the Age of Irony, relatively starting in 1994 with Pulp Fiction, and it hasn�t diminished since. Even after the 9/11 catastrophe, the thought process for executives in Hollywood was that America needed more comedies and thrillers, neither with an existential edge. Hence, the re-release of Legally Blonde and The Score shortly after 9/11 � two harmless films without an offensive bone in their bodies. More safe, commercially viable comedies were released, including the blander-than-thou romantic comedy Serendipity, Hardball with Keanu Reeves, and Zoolander with Ben Stiller. As for conventional thrillers, there was The Glass House and Don�t Say a Word, though the noir-like The Deep End didn�t get much of an audience. Schwarzenegger�s Collateral Damage, a terrorist thriller about a firefighter seeking revenge, was postponed till early 2002 and it crashed and burned (no doubt if it was released today, it might do better). A Beautiful Mind, a penetrating, psychological picture, won Best Picture of 2001 and I think it won because it was uplifting � a downer with a happy ending. You might recall that Scorsese�s maligned historical epic, Gangs of New York, was to be released in December of 2001 but since it featured a story that represented America at its worst, it was delayed by a whole year. Essentially, 9/11 solidified what has always been at the forefront of Hollywood: safe, commercial, bland, inoffensive cinema. Period.
So what about the edge? It has been lost. Films today seem to take fewer chances, fewer risks, and the Hollywood studios are to blame (of course, audiences are shelling out the bucks so they are to blame as well). I have nothing against Bend it Like Beckham or Christopher Guest comedies or anything with Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell or Steve Carell, but let�s be honest � most of their films are not risky ventures. There is nothing at stake, nothing too confrontational or controversial in their choice of subject matter. That is fine but as Peggy Lee once said, is that all there is? I don�t want to see comedies and action-adventure and fables and nothing else for the rest of my life. We are being constantly bombarded with these movies shaped as theme parks of one ilk or another, and a majority of them are sequels. And the audiences are turning out in droves! What they apparently want is Pirates of the Caribbean 1, 2, 3, more comic-book heroes, more Harry Potter, more Narnia tales, more Ocean�s 11 heists, more TV shows translated to the big screen (a comedic show helps), and that�s all folks (for the record, I like Harry Potter but I am no fan of Narnia). They don�t want a film about 9/11 (United 93), a political foray into today�s ongoing wars and foreign investments (Syriana), a 20th century historical drama about Communism (Good Night, Good Luck), and they don�t want Steven Spielberg making a film about the Munich hostage tragedy of 1972.
There are certain recent exceptions to the spate of entertainment on display. 2004�s Fahrenheit 9/11 was a major success, a documentary on the polarized America we live in, and it was released in the summer (my, what did Hollywood think of that anomaly?) 2005�s March of the Penguins was a major success, another documentary, and its subject? Penguins! (I think audiences will warm up more so to penguins than Michael Moore and Al Gore any day). And there was the highly controversial The Passion of the Christ with its nearly vicious, relentless violence that depicted what Christ suffered � a big box-office winner! Hey, Jesus Christ has an audience after all, minus any temptations of course! On the whole, though, with the exception of the incendiary and still urgent Michael Moore film, audiences want to come out of the cinemas in a good mood. I guess they feel that they get enough terrible news through the media � they don�t want it represented in any artistic manner on the big screen. Entertainment without thought or principle is what they would prefer. Like an Entertainment Weekly reader once said about the horrendous Godzilla remake in 1998: �I wanted to see a movie about a giant lizard and I got what I paid seven dollars for.� Yeah, but what�s wrong with a good movie about a giant lizard?
The edge seems to be lost in some of our edgiest filmmakers. Take Oliver Stone�s World Trade Center, which is being marketed as an apolitical story of survival. Leaving aside such horrid fare as Any Given Sunday and given Oliver Stone�s track record, when has he ever been anything less than political? A sentimentalist? To be sure, but typically political when you consider Nixon, Natural Born Killers, JFK, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, a pro-Castro documentary, and so on. So what gives? Here�s the answer: the money. Stone�s snooze-fest Alexander was a critical and financial disaster and someone had to make up for it, so why not an uplifting tale about 9/11? That may explain Stone�s movie, which has conservatives waxing positive praise (a first for this radical filmmaker).
But that doesn�t explain Scorsese�s record. Scorsese has worked with big budgets and has always come up short at the box-office, yet his recent films had budgets that fluctuated between 50 to 120 million. I would say that Scorsese has always taken risks and still works within the studio system, so why can�t Oliver Stone? Maybe Stone is mellowing a bit but it says something that a guy like Spielberg makes a film like Munich at this point in his career when, in fact, we expect Stone to be doing such films. Who is taking the bigger risk? Who has the edge?
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