I've been brewing up this one for years...
U.S. versions of the TV shows and films from other countries always have to strip away ambiguities and make
situations and characters explicit, because the audience can't be trusted to
get the point otherwise. A feelgood factor is also obligatory. It's akin to still needing stabilisers on their bikes. The U.S. version
of The Office is accordingly far
inferior to the original in both intellectual and satirical terms, and doesn't
feel far off having a canned laughter track to ram the point home. But this is
nothing surprising: in the entire history of American plundering of British (or other foreign) source material, I doubt there has ever been a single case where the original
has been matched, let alone improved on, and in some cases the results have
been hideous, such as the American remake of Being Human or Lee redoing Oldboy. Perhaps House of
Cards was an exception to the rule in being a different beast to its parent
and thus having different virtues. Even more so in the case of Soderbergh’s
remake of Solaris, where Tarkovsky’s
original got lost in cold abstraction and the remake isn’t just more coherent,
but also manages to convey gut-wrenching emotion.
But it’s a sad indictment of
the bulk of American film and TV culture (some excellent HBO productions and a
few independent filmmakers excepted) that not only are unimaginative remakes of
their own and others’ works so widely accepted by mercenary actors and the viewing
public alike, but that 99% of the time they will reduce everything that is distinctive
to the lowest common denominators, resulting in an expensive but formless grey
sludge.
No comments:
Post a Comment