This remake is too close for comfort

Isn’t it terrible that there are so many remakes and sequels in cinemas these days? The lack of imagination in today’s Hollywood is truly mind-boggling. Until last Wednesday, cinemas were full of excellent new films based on fresh, original ideas. Then, I had to write some stupid article or make some stupid radio broadcast, and it became clear that – for the first time since the invention of the medium – the studios had begun lapping up their own vomit.

Regular readers of this perennially facetious column will have noticed the unsubtle levels of sarcasm running beneath the above paragraph. Given that Hollywood has always played this game – and played it this shamelessly for a quarter of a century – the argument about sequels and remakes is hardly worth having (even if I touched upon it in last week’s summer preview). A good handful of the best films ever made are retreads of one sort or another.

In a few weeks, however, a film emerges that appears designed to redraw the rules on what constitutes appropriate inspiration for a mainstream remake.

Death at a Funeralis an African-American reinvention of a British comedy from 2007 that nobody much liked first time around. The original has barely been shown on terrestrial TV, and cinemas are already clearing screens for its premature disinterment.

Keep in mind that it takes at least a year for a film to get from green-light to cinema screen and you’ll begin to understand quite what an odd beast this is.

“So, you want to rework a film that made no money, got fairly bad reviews and only left theatres a few months ago?” our movie executive snorts, before opening an envelope containing Polaroids showing him in compromising sexual positions with two goats and a greased-up vacuum cleaner. “Erm? That sounds like a wonderful idea. Please feel free to call both Mr Chris Rock and Mr Danny Glover.”

The strangely lauded, inappropriately highbrow Neil La Bute, director of the piece, has previous form in the field of ill-judged remakes (he was at the helm of that catastrophic Nic Cage version of The Wicker Man). But even La Bute must have thought twice about returning so rapidly to such a conspicuously poisoned well.

There is, of course, no set of rules for any film-maker pondering a remake, but any movie less than 10 years old is surely a little too fresh to mess with. The more successful the film, the greater the gap between original and Version 2.0 should be: the upcoming revival of Dune (1984) seems inevitable; any attempt to tackle Jaws (1975) would come across as madness.

So, what’s going on with Death at a Funeral? Well, any film made in a foreign language is, for obvious reasons of inevitable obscurity, exempt from our hastily devised 10-year rule. Heck, that original film is set in Weirdshire, England, and they talk darn funny there.

Still, a taboo is, perhaps, being broken here. Expect a remake of Leap Year within the month.