Remake love not war

Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant has little in common with Abel Ferrara's 1992 film of the same name. But it's made from the heart.

As you know, Shakespeare was the main specialist in remakes: he took famous stories and retold them in a free style. Herzog is almost a Shakespeare: he took the plot from Abel Ferrara and made a film that can only be called a remake while being stoned as the main character. You can be convinced of this from November 26 - the film is released.

In fact, the word "remake" is already going out of fashion. There are more and more re-shot films, but don't call them that rude word, don't offend the artists. Fuckers are engaged in reshooting, true creators are busy “rebooting” and “rethinking” classic paintings.

There have been many such reboots this year. In Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant, only the name and profession of the protagonist are reminiscent of Abel Ferrara's classic dark action movie. Tony Scott re-played trains in the thriller Dangerous Passengers on Train 123. Dennis Iliadis, under the direction of Wes Craven, ruined Craven's "The Last House on the Left" (which, in turn, repeated the plot of Bergman's "The Maiden's Spring"). Anders Banke re-shot "Hot News" by Johnny To on Russian material. Kim Ji-won celebrated Sergio Leone's "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly" by making "The Good, the Bad, the Fucking". And that's not to mention the 3D mochilov "My Bloody Valentine" and a couple of under-remakes, films "based on" - like "Friday the 13th" and "Star Trek". And in the next - or, at the latest, in 2011 - we are promised new versions of "Red Sonja" (perhaps), "Robocop" (Darren Aronofsky was going to "reboot" it, but seemed to be distracted by another project), "Red Dawn" , last year's painfully beautiful vampire drama Let Me In and Bonnie and Clyde.

Here, of course, one immediately wants to ask why spoil good things like Bonnie and Clyde or the Swedish film Let Me In? Why rethrash a trash like Red Dawn? With a Swedish film, everything is clear: in Hollywood, they cannot but remake foreign cinema. For example, now American studios are busy rethinking the films of the bloody Korean Pak Chan-wook (Oldboy, Sympathy for Madam Revenge). Japanese horror has become a true Hollywood genre in recent years. And last year, Austrian Michael Haneke reinvented himself and made an American remake of his own Funny Games and ruined everything himself.

Foreign films are lucky not only in Hollywood: for example, in Turkey in the 70s and 80s, Batman, Superman, and The Exorcist were re-shot, and these are very sincere, albeit hilarious films. Zhang Yimou has now taken on Blood Simple, the Coen brothers' classic black comedy; he saw it at some film festival, did not understand a single word, because there were no Chinese subtitles, but the story itself delighted him. Zhang Yimou is remaking Blood Simple in much the same way that Herzog did with Ferrara: moving the action to China, instead of a bar, placing the characters in a noodle eatery, and generally diluting black Cohen humor with healthy Chinese comedy. The Coens themselves, meanwhile, are busy remaking the old western True Valor.

Westerns are understandable, they always look like one endless story about masculinity and honor. You can reshoot as many times as you like. But why remake a thrash classic? It does not need to be improved, it is good just because it is made on the knee.

Probably, they just really want money, and besides, for some reason, the studios are sure that young people do not watch old films. And if you shoot the classics again, then young people will allegedly rush to the cinema. Young people, meanwhile, are not only signing online petitions “Say no to The Exorcist Remake!” but are also making their own remakes of classic films.

You can learn more about the movement of sweded movies, amateur remakes, from Michel Gondry's film "Rewind": we are talking about reshooting classic films, and in the process of remaking they shrink to a couple of minutes. Films are re-shot on their own, again on their knees, with the excessive use of foil and cardboard boxes in the manufacture of scenery and props. Instead of computer graphics, notebook sheets with different inscriptions are usually used, and someone from the film crew sings the musical theme behind the scenes - usually this is the person with the most obnoxious voice.

"Forrest Gump" breaks into one minute of screen time, the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy - into 1'58 (it gets boring at the fortieth second), in the four-minute version of "Predator" the characters run around with machine guns cut out of cardboard and shout "special effects!" And all this is done not for profit, but out of sincere love for cinema.

This fall, blogs posted a link to a frame-by-frame remake of Fight Club, made three years ago by Krasnodar high school students Dmitry Ivanov and Alexander Kukhar. In some ways, this remake is even cooler than the original - in any case, the age of the participants adds charm to the film. And in Moscow, a whole festival dedicated to the “removal” movement, Art of Remake, was recently held. The festival participants re-shot Terminator 2, Fight Club and The Diamond Arm. True, judging by the results, they re-shot with the goal of purely neighing, the love of cinema was in last place here.

Real remakes - whether sweded or regular - are made out of love. You can see how time changes in them, and this is especially noticeable when comparing Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenants and Abel Ferrara. Crazy coke-covered New York, in the middle of which the twin towers are still phallically sticking out, does not in any way resemble New Orleans melting under the sun after the flood. In the original film by Ferrara, the hero was played by the most powerful and terrible Harvey Keitel. Herzog has Nicolas Cage as a police officer, who surprisingly suits the role of a sluggish village dope.

A corrupt cop needs to get drugs somewhere, so he has to set up different people, and he also has to work. In Herzog's film, the hero sees iguanas and dancing souls while high, and dirt and murder when not high. Cage is very persuasive. In some interview, the actor told a confusing and extremely unreliable story that he could not remember the sensations of cocaine. But when they sent him the script, he was just in Australia, and there, you won’t believe it, they treat a runny nose with cocaine. And so, having come from the doctor, Cage began to briskly make notes on the script. And I realized how it would be necessary to play this role, often swallowing, pointlessly staring, giggling.

Cage copied his character not from Keitel, but from Richard the Third, a hunchback who said: "I do evil - and bawl about evil myself." Cage walks all crooked, does not fit on the screen, but plays a creature, in principle, quite harmless. For the Ferrara lieutenant, time, the spirit of the city, the absence of God were the reasons for rage and drugs. The lieutenant in Herzog's film simply has a backache - he accomplished a feat and was crippled. Therefore, he constantly needs painkillers. It seems that Werner Herzog did not have the necessary props at hand and he re-shot Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant" as a sweded movie, with a cardboard cage instead of a stone Keitel, with iguanas instead of Christ and with luck instead of fate.

Werner Herzog is very annoyed by questions about the original "Bad Lieutenant": he assures that he did not see Ferrara's film at all, but filmed it solely because he liked the script. These two films have little in common - except perhaps the profession of the protagonist and his passion for drugs. From a crime drama, Herzog created something like a drug addicted crime comedy. But with love.

But not all remakes, unfortunately, can be compared with sweded movies in terms of sincerity and naivety of performance: usually remakes are still filmed out of a desire for money, trying to squeeze everything possible out of cult classics. It's probably better to shoot like Herzog or Krasnodar teenagers: there is a good plot, there is a love for cinema - let's do something about it.