Pictured: Hollywood.

Why do we keep remaking things?

Not to sound like my Dad right now - a man who will really only watch movies that: 1) have dead actors; 2) or are about a historical event (preferably from the turn of the 20th century through the late 1960s); and 3) definitely do not involve Nicolas Cage or Sean Penn (though he did warm to Sean Penn's portrayal of David Kleinfeld in Carlito's Way) - but why do we keep remaking things?


And why do we let John Leguizamo be in them?

I just saw the trailer for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ("TGWTDT"). For those that don't know, this is the filmed adaptation of Stieg Larsson's very popular posthumously-published book of the same name (translated from the Swedish ("Man som hatar kvinnor") it means, "Men Who Hate Women." No joke there.).
It is also a remake.
See, the Swedes already made a movie adaptation of this book back in 2009, and it was pretty damn popular. It was like a Swedish blockbuster, if you can imagine such a thing!


Oh, I can imagine it alright....

It made a ton of money (or kroner, I guess), and had a pretty good international release to boot. So, despite the Swedes making the whole trilogy (the last one was just released, in fact) into movies and raking in the kroner, what does America do? Do we let them have their entry into psychological thriller-dom? Do we sit idly by and accept that Scandinavians might have something to offer the rape-revenge genre of movies other than the US and Korea?
Nope. We buy the rights, and remake that shit.
And here it is:



If you can't see it, it is likely that Youtube took it down for copyright infringement reasons. It looked like it was bootlegged in a theater anyway, but I will say that those iPhones sure have upped the quality of former in-theater bootleggings.

Now, this version of TGWTDT does have some things that make it appealing:

• Daniel "I'm obviously not gay, I'm James Bond" Craig as the investigative journalist hero.
• Relative unknown (unless you saw The Social Network, the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street from 2010, or some show called Women's Murder Club...which, with a name like that, should be remade) Rooney Mara as the dragon-tattooed lesbian/not lesbian/tough-as-nails-yet-shy-and-vulnerable computer hacker main character.
  
• David Fincher at the helm.
• Steve Zaillian writing the screenplay. Here's hoping it turns out better than Jack the Bear.
• That title sequence and Trent Reznor cover of The Immigrant Song which makes it look more like Se7en than The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

And about the use of The Immigrant Song: Isn't it incredibly ironic that the producers chose that song? A song about Scandinavians that come to your shore to rape and pillage? The movie is about Scandinavians. Set in Scandinavia (read: Sweden). So, is this some kind of reverse-irony or inverted irony, then? Here we have Anglos pillaging a Scandinavian best-seller and bringing it to America, only to export it back to Scandinavia when it goes into foreign release, in order to re-pillage the pockets of the Scandinavians that created and supported the original work to begin with.


Pictured: Scandinavian irony. Not pictured: Vikings.

Further, The Immigrant Song itself was written and performed by a band of notorious pillagers: Led Zeppelin. If you had a song laying around in the 1970s you better lock it up because Page and Plant and going to snatch it, remake it into a hit, and snort the proceeds faster than you can say, "I'm a fan of traditional American blues music."


"Plagiarism never tasted so sweet." - Jimmy Page

But all that aside...Hollywood is remaking a movie that's two years old. Two years! That is simply not long enough before you jump into remake territory. It smacks of two things Hollywood has long been known for:

1. the naked cash-grab;
   
2. a sense of entitlement

Examples? Gladly:

1. THE NAKED CASH GRAB -


Harrison Ford's expression says, "I know you're mad, but there's nothing I can do. Did you see that divorce settlement I got slapped with?"


I know it's easy to take jabs at George Lucas, but seriously - he's been nakedly grabbing cash off this franchise for a generation.


Some cash-grabs are more smash-and-grabs, but they are naked, nonetheless.

2. A SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT -


When actors decide to direct and have success (regardless of how overly-lauded that film was in reality (read: Braveheart)), sometimes they take their already inflated egos too far...by making an entire film in maya yucateco - a language spoken only in the Yucatan peninsula - that is enjoyed by no one.


Other times, actors choose to direct a project that is so near and dear to them, that they quite literally become the character. Kevin Spacey is a great actor, sure, but you can't decide to make a Bobby Darin movie, direct it, star in it, sing all the songs, and then actually GO ON TOUR with a full orchestra to sing the forgotten songs of Bobby Darin! And you wonder why you haven't seen Kevin Spacey in any movies lately.


And then sometimes one's own hubris becomes so all-encompassing that you believe that the public "must" have the last chapter to your saga. But you are wrong, notwithstanding Robert Duvall's absence. See also Back to the Future, Part 3 (1990); The Two Jakes (1990); Ghostbusters II (1989).

So, while it may make no sense that Hollywood is hell-bent on remaking a very popular and very recent movie, it is not surprising. Remember, Hollywood is the same place that convinced you Tom Cruise can act and that you really do like Cameron Diaz.


You do not like them together, however.

Hollywood will go back to the well as often as they can, so long as it means butts in the seats, money in the bank, and cocaine on the credenza.


Surely you saw that coming?

Even back in the day Hollywood was doing this. Now, some of that was due to the whole silent picture/talking picture revolution, but it came from the same idea: dolla dolla bill, y'all. There were multiple versions of The Wizard of Oz (1925, 1939), The Maltese Falcon (1931, 1941), and Ben-Hur (1925, 1959). Hell, Alfred Hitchcock damn near remade all of his silent movies as talkies once the technology was around. It was as if he got Hollywood to pay him for practicing movie-making.

So, while it's nothing new (get it?), it is disappointing. Not disappointing in an existential "there's-no-new-stories-to-tell-because-we're-living-the-same-life-cycle-over-and-over" or Nietzschean "eternal return" sort of way, but disappointing in that Hollywood is not attempting to try to create something new. Taking a common story and changing the characters, the setting, or the manner in which it is told is fine. In fact, it's what the art of storytelling is, right? But just lifting the same source material that was capably made into a hit movie by foreigners that already had all the trappings of an American action movie is just disappointing.

I guess I can understand the trend in Hollywood to reboot. This is the word they use to describe the process of taking a series that has been ridden so hard and putten away so wet (is that even a phrase?) that the only way they can get any more cash out of it is to start all over. The series is barren, so they must breathe new life into it from scratch. They had to, you see, for the ART! You've seen this happen to:

Batman

• In 1989, the first real cinematic attempt at getting Batman to the screen was a HUGE success (despite Tim Burton obviously never having read one single page of the comic book). A decent sequel followed. Two more were ordered. A new director takes over. All hell breaks loose and we are left with two awfully different Batmen (Batmans?) that are differently awful, the worst in costume design and art direction, and not one marquee actor cashing checks with their god-awful villainous one-liners but FOUR. Not to mention Alicia Silverstone. It is almost incomprehensible how that fourth one got made.

Alicia Silverstone - graduate of the Keanu Reeves School for Acting (1992, summa cum laude; B.F.A. in "Reactions").

• The reboot - Christopher Nolan takes over, hits reset with Batman Begins, takes a more serious tone (despite the addition of terrible female leads), and now people can't wait to see the third and final film. This is an example of rebooting that can work. They made a mint on the back of the bat, not once, but twice!

Superman

• Although it seems that reboots work best for superheroes, that's not dispositive. Just check out A Nightmare on Elm Street, the Halloweens, or the Screams. I sense a trend there.
• Anyway, Superman finally hit the big screen way back in 1978. This was a long time coming, too. It was huge! Flying Christopher Reeve, script by Mario "The Godfather, yeah that Godfather" Puzo, music by John Williams, and Marlon f-ing Brando! They knew it was such a bank-breaker that director Richard Donner was shooting the sequel at the same time. Superman was headed for the big screen!
• Like all good franchises, the Christopher Reeve Superman quickly went downhill. Superman III (which I seem to remember being played endlessly on HBO in the 1980s) had Robert Vaughn as a great villain, but the studio added Richard Pryor for comic relief (and to capitalize on the success of The Toy, maybe? or did he have some community service to do?). Now, I'm not some die-hard Superman nerd over here, but let's just say Pryor was a little out of place:

"My hat's too big." - Richard Pryor

• Then, the death knell was sounded with Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, where Superman fought a poor man's Dolph Lundgren (Mark Pillow as "Nuclear Man") on the moon. Awful.

Maybe more Harry Hamlin than Dolph Lundgren.

• The reboot: after many (like many - including one by Tim Burton and Kevin Smith starring Nicolas Cage (my Dad would HATE that!) that is hilariously recounted at the above link) attempts to get Supes back to the big screen, Warner Bros. decided to hand it over to Bryan Singer. At this point, he had had a little success with The Usual Suspects and the X-Men franchise (another example of these trends, in itself). The result was a no-name Superman in a forgettable movie. Well done.
• Either way, you're glad you didn't see that Tim Burton one get made:

Like, really glad.

And this rebooting trend is continuing. It's as if this is the new plan for Hollywood - take what the public already loves and sell it back to them, because times have changed and this product really needs to be updated so we can play on nostalgia for the original while introducing the same old thing to a new generation, paving the way for a third reboot 5 years from now!

Some reboots in the works:

• Total Recall - but this time with Colin Farrell. As if the plot wasn't confusing enough, now you've got Mumbles McGillicutty to watch for 2 hours.
  
• Teen Wolf - MTV is turning this into a TV show. Why? Were all the best elements of the story not mined in the 186 minutes that make up Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too?
  
• The Amazing Spider-Man - again, with the superheroes. The last entry in this series was 4 years ago. They've taken the Batman reboot doctrine and sped up the timeline considerably.
• Judge Dredd - maybe this one is ok. Judge Dredd might be an interesting character, but I think the stigma of the Sly Stallone/Rob Schneider shitstorm of 1995 is still looming.
• Footloose - because Hollywood hates your memories. Directed by Craig Brewer of Hustle and Flow fame.
  

So, there's just a few examples for you. Make what you will of Hollywood's intentions, but I think it's lame. I can understand remaking a movie that was not widely seen, or taking a new look at a classic to get different results (see True Grit by the Coens). And I can understand the notion of tapping into a collective nostalgia for the movies of our youth, or to take the reigns of a once-great franchise and make it great again. People can really appreciate it when it's done well, and it's not like great art hasn't been remade ad nauseum before. But the naked-cash-grabbing of most of these titles just makes me lose what little respect I had left for the movie business.

But it's not like they have a complete lack of conscience, right?



Not pictured: restraint.

Is this Swedish girl from the future?

Robin Carlsson - the Swedish Marty McFly?

Anyone out there heard of Robyn? If you were graduating from high school and watching a lot of MTV back in 1997 like I was, then you've answered "yes" to the preceding question.
Robyn is the Nordic pop-princess that brought us such hits as, "Do You Know (What It Takes)", "Show Me Love", and "Konichiwa Bitches" (to which we will return).
I remember seeing the video for "Do You Know (What It Takes)" on MTV (at a time when they still showed music videos) and really liked it. I mean, I was admittedly a music snob back in high school, with music snob friends, so for me to admit this was pretty difficult to do. I think that I had earlier admitted that I did, in fact, like Duran Duran - and this was a breakthrough that allowed me to publicly approve of Robyn in the summer of 1997. I liked Robyn so much, in fact, that I purchased the CD-single of the song, "Do You Know"...perhaps it was because I thought it was funny, perhaps it was because I really liked songs with parentheticals, or perhaps I really did enjoy the new sounding pop of this Robyn with a 'y'. Either way, I was pretty happy with my purchase (and now-defunct Tower Records was happy for me to have their overpriced CD).

Fast forward to 1999. I'm living in San Jose, CA now, working at Warehouse Music and am introduced to a new pop-princess, American style: Britney Spears. I'm sure we don't need to go over this, but, Britney Spears was the high school girl that couldn't really sing but looked great in her 'not-yet-barely-legal' Catholic schoolgirl uniform dance video that took over pop music for a few years (500,000 copies sold of her debut single in one day) because she preyed on statutory rape fantasies and the dispensable income of young people aged 13-21 (these two phenomena are not related).


"These are the furry epaulets that will change music...forever!" - Britney Spears

As you recall, her debut single, "...Baby One More Time", was a monster. The video was everywhere, it was played all the time, and the whole country now had a female analogue to their fascination with the Backstreet Boys and N*Sync. Perfect.

I heard "...Baby One More Time", but I wasn't struck with Britney's bad singing, I was struck by the overwhelming similarity to a one-named Swede who was pretty much forgotten by now: Robyn.

Listen to the two side by side, and you've got pretty much the same song. All the way down to the vocal stylings of Ms. Carlsson (who can sort of sing) and the vocal impressions of Britney Spears (who cannot), the two songs are strikingly similar (to use copyright infringement parlance) to me. Maybe not the same exact melody or chord progression, but the style is certainly the same, right on down to those eighth-note synth parts and the ultra-clean harmonies (well balanced, to boot).

Compare for yourself (we can wait 9 minutes):

Baby One More Time.mp3

01 Do You Know (What It Takes).mp3

I was upset by this. No one remembered poor Robyn, with her bleached blonde anime bangs from 1997; everyone wanted Britney Spears to save pop music, to bring back its youthful glee (largely absent since the over-exposure of David Cassidy, et al.), and to rake in millions of dollars. All Britney did was steal Robyn's style and put a youthful face on it. No justice.

So this leads me to the first prong of my thesis: Robyn was a musical visionary, and Britney Spears is akin to Elvis Presley.

That sounds incendiary, I know, to equate Louisana/Mickey Mouse Club trash with Mississippi/Memphis/gospel music trash 'The King', but think about how similar the situation is: Robyn puts out her album in the US, it does ok (maybe that's an understatement, it did go platinum), but she is largely forgotten. Britney comes along 2 years later, does pretty much the same thing but puts her plaid skirt and pigtails on it and it's a sensation (like, 14 times platinum). Just like Elvis stealing rock n' roll (whether he stole that from Little Richard is for another time). Right place, right time. Sorry Robyn.


The possibility of an NSFW up-skirt shot surely contributed to at least 1 million of those sales.

Well, it turns out that Robyn and Britney's striking similarities may not have been due to musical prolepsis/Britney Spears-being-like-Elvis after all. I did a little research on the matter (not that you're surprised by this), and found that the link between Robyn and Brit-Brit is actually this man:


Max Martin - a Swedish musical badass that is always getting chased by sharks.

Max Martin is a Swedish music producer/writer that has pretty much written most of the popular songs from the end of the 90s and on into today (a quick resume? "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)"; "Since U Been Gone"; "California Gurls" to name a few). I mean, really, you look at the guys resume and you can't really believe he was involved in so many hits! He's like Lionel Richie, but Swedish! He did a lot of work with American pop acts (Britney, Backstreet Boys, and Kelly Clarkson, to name a few), but he started with hometown artists like Robyn. That's right...this guy wrote "Do You Know (What It Takes)" a couple years before he wrote it again for Britney, this time as "...Baby One More Time". Lightning strikes twice, I guess.

As a side note, although Martin did write many of Britney's best songs ("...Baby One More Time", "If You Seek Amy", and "3" *a fantastically underrated song, I might add*), he did not write her best work, which is obviously (and undisputed-ly) "Toxic".


Thanks to two ridiculously-named producers (Bloodshy and Avant) we have this masterpiece of synth-pop and surf guitar.

Britney Spears - Toxic.mp3


With the first prong of my thesis so thoroughly disproved, we'll put that aside and continue forward into the second part of this post and prong two of thesis:

Robyn must be from the future.


With our limited research, we believe this to be the most likely means of travel for Robyn.

...to be continued in Part 2!

Serendipity or Plagiarism? You decide.

Not to be confused with this "Serendipity", which everyone has decided is crap.


Driving home today, I heard the following on the radio.



That's Sly and the Family Stone's "Hot Fun In The Summertime" from 1969. A fantastic song for a summer day like today. Hearing Sly Stone is usually a great experience and I highly recommend it.

As I was listening to the chorus, the encyclopedia of pop music in my head was cross referenced to the volume "L":



That's Led Zeppelin's "Fool in the Rain" from 1979's In Through the Out Door. Strikingly similar? You betcha...and I can guarantee those English blokes had heard a Sly record or two by the late 1970s.

As the Family Stone continued another volume of my inner encyclopedia of pop music was brought down from the shelf...Volume "G":



That's Genesis' "Misunderstanding" from 1980's Duke. No hiding here...more English blokes, led by a drummer (Phil Collins), taking liberally from an English band with a pretty damn famous English drummer (John Bonham of Led Zeppelin), who took liberally from a pretty damn famous American band (and really, who made a career out of 'taking liberally' from anyone and everyone who wrote a song and didn't become famous for it). I think serendipity might be out on this one.

Then there's this piece to the puzzle:



That's Toto's "Hold the Line" from 1979's Toto. As far as it fitting into the lineage (before Genesis), here's what Toto's famous drummer (Jeff Porcaro) had to say:

That was me trying to play like Sly Stone's original drummer, Greg Errico, who played drums on "Hot Fun In The Summertime." The hi-hat is doing triplets, the snare drum is playing 2 and 4 backbeats, and the bass drum is on 1 and the & of 2. That 8th note on the second beat is an 8th-note triplet feel, pushed. When we did the tune, I said, "Gee, this is going to be a heavy four-on-the-floor rocker, but we want a Sly groove." The triplet groove of the tune was David's writing. It was taking the Sly groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman approach - from Modern Drummer Magazine, 1988

So, I can further guarantee that Genesis knew of Toto (since they were a band made up of very famous, very employed session players that got together to lay down all-too-perfect music of their own), and just ripped them off too.

Nothing against Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford, and Tony Banks, mind you, I like "Invisible Touch" as much as the next guy...I'm just hoping Sly got his props.

-C Murder