Wednesday, September 03, 2003
Eddie Izzard has this routine about films which was that British films would be very buttoned down, Merchant Ivory affairs, probably with Helena Bonham-Carter, full of people who wore evening suits all day walking into rooms and saying things like "oh I say" and never finishing their conversations with each other before walking off in a huff. If the film did at all well, as Izzard had it, Hollywood would buy the rights and reshoot it as a gritty drama way off the wrong tracks of Noo Yawk but that halfway through it would abandon all semblance of the original plot as the film would have the main character attacked by space monkeys.
Which, as far as I can tell, is what's happening with this American remake of The Italian Job. I saw the ad for it at the cinema on Sunday before Pirates of the Caribbean and, as far as I can tell, bares almost no relationship to the original. If the IMDB is to be believed, the thieves don't even leave the US, they're stealing money from somewhere in Los Angeles, therefore suggesting that the title now has no relevence to the story! I mean, we have so few decent films as it is, why do Americans hate us so much they want to take the few good films we've made and defile them? Why can't they do crap remakes of some of the shit ones, like Four Weddings and a Funeral with Sly Stallone as Hugh Grant, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Simon Callow, Andie MacDowall as Andie Macdowall and Jeff Goldblum as Rowan Atkinson? Only this time, we discover that Stallone is only going to these weddings to get his chance to assasinate Arnie, who is in fact the boss of a Russian drug cartel in town to close a deal with the head of the CIA (Goldblum) to help stem the tide of illegal drugs coming into the country from the Soviet Bloc. There is in fact only one wedding and Stallone and Macdowall attend the funerals of everyone else at the end of the film but why let a little detail like that necessitate changing the title? The theme, 'Love is all Around' is heartwarmingly reinterpreted, again, as a touching duet sung by Jon Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams.
Which, as far as I can tell, is what's happening with this American remake of The Italian Job. I saw the ad for it at the cinema on Sunday before Pirates of the Caribbean and, as far as I can tell, bares almost no relationship to the original. If the IMDB is to be believed, the thieves don't even leave the US, they're stealing money from somewhere in Los Angeles, therefore suggesting that the title now has no relevence to the story! I mean, we have so few decent films as it is, why do Americans hate us so much they want to take the few good films we've made and defile them? Why can't they do crap remakes of some of the shit ones, like Four Weddings and a Funeral with Sly Stallone as Hugh Grant, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Simon Callow, Andie MacDowall as Andie Macdowall and Jeff Goldblum as Rowan Atkinson? Only this time, we discover that Stallone is only going to these weddings to get his chance to assasinate Arnie, who is in fact the boss of a Russian drug cartel in town to close a deal with the head of the CIA (Goldblum) to help stem the tide of illegal drugs coming into the country from the Soviet Bloc. There is in fact only one wedding and Stallone and Macdowall attend the funerals of everyone else at the end of the film but why let a little detail like that necessitate changing the title? The theme, 'Love is all Around' is heartwarmingly reinterpreted, again, as a touching duet sung by Jon Bon Jovi and Bryan Adams.
