Inspiration Can Lend Remakes Originality

Every now and then a bright young newspaper writer will bemoan that there are no new ideas in Hollywood. That’s almost as old a notion as the one that says there are no new ideas anywhere.

In art and entertainment, what ranks as “new”--or, for that matter, an “idea”--isn’t something like the law of gravity. It may be just a strategy for recasting an old fable so that it speaks freshly yet still preserves the magic of antiquity.

This Christmas, Hollywood’s big-ticket items are hand-me-downs--and that may be a good thing. “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Ali” and “Vanilla Sky” could all be considered remakes. Knee-jerk punditry aside, that needn’t be a stigma. Remaking previous movies probably dates back to the second year (perhaps the second month) of movie history.

Movies that stand as pillars of Hollywood’s peak years were often the best versions of oft-filmed stories such as “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Beloved hits such as “Gunga Din” were re-released just like “Star Wars” and “Spartacus”--usually in shorter studio cuts, not longer director’s cuts.

A new movie idea may simply be a way of combining two or more time-tested entertainment forms --whether in the lowdown tradition of “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” or the amusingly upwardly mobile tradition of the characters from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” meeting ‘50s sci-fi in “Forbidden Planet.” In that vein, Jim Carrey’s new film, “The Majestic,” looks like a mixture of “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Last Picture Show”--and Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” is like a cross between Agatha Christie’s “The Mirror Crack’d” and Jean Renoir’s “The Rules of the Game.”

One of the most eloquent of all statements on filmmaking was made by Sam Peckinpah to Walon Green, his co-writer on “The Wild Bunch.” Green protested that Peckinpah was going to explode a conventional bridge rather than film a rope-bridge crossing in that epic Western. “Christ, you’re not going to blow up another bridge,” Green griped. Peckinpah responded, “It’s not just blowing up a bridge; it’s the way you blow up a bridge.” You can expand that to the whole concept of making movies.

What counts is not just the relative freshness of your story--it’s how you tell it. The New York Times editorial page recently declared that reviewers critical of “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” missed the boat when they complained that the movie was too faithful. Unfortunately, that’s not what reviewers were complaining about--they were more upset that the filmmaking was cautious and uninspired in its faithfulness. As Peckinpah might have said, it’s the way you blow up Lord Voldemort.

At best, remakes can be highly original, even novel, like the 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which moved the classic 1956 fable about conformity from California suburbia to San Francisco and (some of us feel) topped the original in the process. At worst, these movies send you back to their predecessors to rediscover parts of movie history--or in some cases to go back to the source material for respite.

In the case of “Ocean’s Eleven,” that would mean dusting off the turntable and spinning some old platters of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. practicing the art of musical hit-making. The 1960 picture, which inexplicably was nominated for a best screenplay Oscar, is due out in fancy new DVD and VHS editions come January, but is barely a movie at all. It’s a perilously wispy caper-cum-promotional movie, made when Sinatra convened his show-biz “summit” with his Rat Pack pals in Las Vegas.

Faced with feckless stars, all that director Lewis Milestone could do was focus on their camaraderie and cool, and their status as arbiters of America’s postwar, pre-counterculture idea of adult, freewheeling fun. The movie positions Sinatra and his men--who also include the flaccidly debonair Peter Lawford and the hangdog Joey Bishop--as former members of the 82nd Airborne who miss their wartime action and use their military skills to knock off a string of Vegas casinos. Not even Sinatra’s wife (Angie Dickinson) stays mad at him long, despite his footloose ways.

“Ocean’s Eleven” is a group self-love letter that American moviegoers didn’t mind receiving. After this profitable debacle, the stars did better work elsewhere--Sinatra in “The Manchurian Candidate,” Martin in Billy Wilder’s “Kiss Me, Stupid”--but continued to pawn off Rat Pack holidays as real movies. To his credit, the new “Ocean’s Eleven” director, Steven Soderbergh, knew he couldn’t re-create the ring-a-ding-ding allure of 1960 with George Clooney, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt--they don’t stand for anything outside the movies the way Sammy, Dean and Frank did. Soderbergh simply aimed at making a better movie about ripping off Las Vegas. After a year in which we’ve seen hollow thrillers named “The Score” and “Heist,” let’s hope he doesn’t merely give us another generic movie that could have been called “Caper.”

For features, the most acclaimed source movie for this season of Christmas retreads is “Open Your Eyes,” a spooky Spanish thriller from 1997 that marked an international breakthrough for filmmaker Alejandro Amenabar--the director of this year’s English-language hit “The Others.” Already, high-toned critics have sharpened their knives for Cameron Crowe’s American remake, “Vanilla Sky,” which stars Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz and one of Amenabar’s own cast members, Penelope Cruz. According to the critics’ argument, Amenabar is a born fantasist and Crowe a natural naturalist.

The Spanish movie, about the collision of dreams and reality in the world of a handsome playboy disfigured by a car crash, cobbles together elements of American ruined-face movies such as “A Woman’s Face” and “Johnny Handsome” with a psycho-murder story, a fable about love after death, and a science-fiction subplot a la Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” that may be the key to the whole scramble.

Amenabar has a significant talent for mixing alienation techniques with a compelling narrative, and a knack for conjuring feelings such as foreboding, but his payoffs here and in “The Others” are unsatisfying--they seem to be calculated from previous filmmakers’ gambles. Crowe, who lavishes such affection on his characters that he sometimes can’t help giving happy endings to all, might humanize Amenabar’s mosaic. The warm emotions the American writer-director displayed in his best movie, “Say Anything,” may be just the ingredient to make “Vanilla Sky” a better film than “Open Your Eyes.”