remake
Wednesday, April 11, 2001

OK, what is in the water this week? First, Christina Aguilera, Pink, Mya, and Lil' Kim (with her lil kims just a-bustin' out all over) remake "Lady Marmalade" and then Geri Halliwell remakes "It's Raining Men" for Bridget Jones' Diary, with a video--directed by two different men--that apparently channels both "Fame" and the Airotica Airlines sequence from "All That Jazz". (An interesting side note: Geri's .com domain has apparently been hijacked by someone called "Sam the Record Man", and her .co.uk domain was apparently supposed to be up last year but hasn't made it yet.)

I'm not saying that songs shouldn't be remade. It's just ... somehow, songs that you hear when you're young, and which manage to survive quite some time without being remade acquire a certain sort of feeling in your mind. It just somehow feels wrong for that song to be remade--and if anyone was going to redo it, it should have been LaBelle herself.

As an example, this remake of "It's Raining Men" (NOT Geri's and RealPlayer required) works as a song--to the extent that it does work--in part because Martha Wash still carries the vocal load, despite the ever-glamorous presence that is RuPaul. It sounds right, even though it sounds different. (The video, on the other hand .... just watch that part where it starts literally raining men. I'm sorry, but I do NOT want to take a man into my mouth quite that way. Ever. I mean, yes, we have been called cannibals, but nobody meant it literally, for heaven's sake!)

On the other hand ... there is a certain panache to the attitudes of Christina et al in doing that particular video. Never has being a 'ho looked so kicky and glamorous and fun! (And, after all, the fact that it glamorized prostitution was one of the knocks against the song back in its day in the first place.) And the video has an entirely different reason for existing, anyway. (A "reinvention of the musical form." Based "loosely" on the Offenbach opera Orpheus in the Underworld. Yes. Well.)

And it finally gives Christina an excuse for the hair.

It's not just records that are subject to this peculiar remake craze, of course. It extends to the current ongoing rage for redoing tv projects as film and dredging up blasts from the past that should have stayed past. And some rather odd choices, at that.

Josie and the Pussycats? They only made something like 36 total episodes of both the main series and its sequel Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space. What on earth is the audience for this film? The boomers who are too old to really want to go see it? The kids who are too young to remember it? The Cartoon Network only put the cartoon itself back into rotation shortly before the film's release date was set. Nobody remembers this 'toon except the executives who greenlighted the project.

Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles. Ten years after the last (not that successful) film. Why? What has Paul Hogan done lately besides Subaru commercials?

Rat Race. A remake of It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Cast of thousands. OK. whatever.

Planet of the Apes I am somewhat curious about ... although that doesn't quite mean that remaking it is a particularly sensible decision. However, with improvements in technology and makeup and whatnot, it should look quite a bit less cheesy than the original (although that's part of its charm, to be sure; that and Moses' the Gun Lord--aka Charlton Heston--overacting, of course) If nothine else, the photo on that page looks as if the actors have quite a lot more expressiveness than they did in the original.

I can't even begin to imagine how far out they'll have to push the violence Rollerball to make it work; it was extraordinarily violent for its day. And in this day of Congress and various groups up in arms about violence in movies marked to youth (and who else is going to see a film about rollerskating murder as sport?), it's certainly a peculiar enough choice.

Ocean's Eleven is certainly an... odd choice, as well.

The thing about this whole sequence of remakes upcoming is that it's the sort of thing that you can see appealing to executives my age and slighly older. Things they saw, remember, enjoyed, that haven't been around for a while, and they think, "Well, why not?" And, after all, they could hit that moment again, wind up with something like The Brady Bunch Movie or The Addams Family. Of course, those things had been in front of both old and young audiences on television for decades and more audiences were familiar with them. It will be interesting to see if these film remakes fare as well.

As for the music ... I know it's purely selfish of me, but I do secretly hope that both of those songs will flop. Partly because both of those actual songs, as performed by the remakers, are fairly awful. And partly ... just because.

(4/16/2001: Well, I suppose I have to accede to the remade "Lady Marmalade"; no less than LaBelle herself watched the video on today's Access Hollywood and liked it and the song, although she seemed to like the video more. If nothing else, though, it was worth it to see the startled look on her face and see her say, "Oh, they're really whores, aren't they?" I mean, she didn't mean it THAT way, but it was one of those "Wait ... what did she say?" moments.)

© 2001 Iain Jackson, after-words.org

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