A DECADE OF DEJA VU AND FLASH

The ‘80s are Hollywood’s Deja Vu Decade. Call it distant replay. Is it any wonder the sequel is film’s new art form? Just imagine Hollywood as a gigantic Cuisinart--gobbling up old movies, spiffing them up and spitting them out.

Throw together a bunch of old Saturday afternoon serials, punch up those special effects and you’ve got “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (and all of its Xeroxed imitations). Bring back the Three Stooges, update the wise-cracks (more special effects, please) and welcome to “Ghostbusters.” Send John Wayne back to Vietnam as “Rambo,” let Clint Eastwood try his hand as “Cobra” or just bring back Howard Hawks’ daring young men in their flying machines, give them some high-tech chewing gum and baling wire and-- voila --”Top Gun.”

Is “The Wizard of Oz” under contract? What if we brought him back in a spaceship as “E.T.?” Let’s find a bow-tie for Jerry Lewis and let him run amuck in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” Better yet, how about a yuppie Western like “Silverado?” After all, what was so appealing about “Back to the Future?” It wasn’t so much a parody of the placid ‘50s as a clever send-up of the ‘80s--the time-travel angle merely heightened the irony. What could have possibly made the film’s crack-pot scientist seem nuttier than his prediction that Ronald Reagan would be President? And which decade is the butt of that joke?

There’s nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from the cultural icons of the past. Revisionist cinema has been with us for years. Just look at what recent film makers have done with the fertile film noir territory, using it for ironic humor (Carl Reiner’s “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”) or to ponder new notions of alienation and cool (Alan Rudolph’s “Trouble in Mind”).

But is it enough to be enthralled by these wizardly time bandits’ re-creations of the past? Already, the time lag between the source and its instant replay has shrunk alarmingly--this year’s “Short Circuit” was little more than a raid of a movie refrigerator, snatching a reel of “War Games” from one shelf, a spool of “E.T.” from another.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so surprised--we live in a junk culture, crammed with half-remembered images and sub-conscious cliches. And in virtually every other art form, Post Modernism has been marked by the shift from linear forms to a fragmented, collage style. But what’s the real future of film--will it soar and explore, will it capture the unsettling (and sometimes inspiring) ambiguities of our age? Or will it be content with replaying our charged-up fantasies from the past, like a VCR stuck on fast forward?