Stephen Bjork

While it’s easy to criticize the Hollywood of today for releasing a seemingly endless stream of sequels and remakes, it’s just as easy to forget that there’s nothing new under the sun. Remakes are as old as the cinema itself, and they even predate the feature film era. The first 1896 Georges Méliès short Une partie de cartes was actually a remake/rip-off of the Lumière brothers short Partie d’écarté (perhaps it was his revenge for the fact that they refused to sell their camera equipment to him). Filmmakers have been recycling ideas ever since then, and Hollywood has never been an exception to the rule. Yet there’s an art to remaking other works that’s akin to recording a cover version of a song. Some of the best covers completely re-invent the original, and even supplant it in the popular consciousness. When Aretha Franklin recorded her own version of Otis Redding’s Respect, she made it decisively her own—even Redding had to grudgingly admit that she ended up taking the song away from him. The best cinematic remakes have done something similar, becoming so indelible that the originals end up being overshadowed. Such is the case with the Howard Hawks version of The Front Page, which he immortalized as His Girl Friday.

South African writer/director Richard Stanley is a fascinating filmmaker who has frequently had a cloud over his head, both personally and professionally. He made a splash in 1990 with his debut feature Hardware, but just six years later, he was fired a few days into the production of the legendarily troubled The Island of Dr. Moreau remake (in hindsight, Stanley may have actually dodged a bullet with that one). That left him in director’s jail for more than two decades, at least as far as mainstream filmmaking was concerned, and his eventual return behind the director’s chair with Color Out of Space in 2019 was marred when he was accused of domestic abuse two years later. Yet that dark cloud has followed Stanley all throughout his career, and it didn’t start with The Island of Dr. Moreau, either. During the six-year span between Hardware and that film, he worked on another project that seemed cursed from its inception: Dust Devil.

When full-time maverick and part-time movie mogul Howard Hughes decided that he wanted to make a gangster picture based on the life of Al Capone, he took no chances by buying the screen rights to the 1930 Armitage Trail novel Scarface—which may have been a work of fiction, but it was unquestionably inspired by Capone’s infamous criminal activities. Further taking no chances, Hughes brought in his Hell’s Angels collaborator Howard Hawks to produce and direct, with Ben Hecht (among others) penning the screenplay. Mind you, the final shooting script drifted far afield from Trail’s story, but hell, at least it still provided a swell title. Aided by a towering performance from Paul Muni in the lead role of Tony Camonte, the 1932 version of Scarface ended up becoming a gangster movie classic despite facing some challenges from the Hayes Office (and arguably, in some ways because of having to work around that censorship).

The Hungarian film Sirius (aka Szíriusz) may not be familiar to most Western audiences, and yet in the great cycle of influences, it’s a forgotten link in a chain that leads from A Connecticut Yankee in King Aurthur’s Court and The Time Machine to Time After Time, Somewhere in Time and Back to the Future. There’s truly nothing new under the sun, and whenever a film is released that seems like a breath of fresh air, it has always taken at least some of that oxygen from the cinema, literature, and theatre that preceded it. Back to the Future’s mad scientist with a time machine didn’t come out of nowhere (although the DeLorean was a relatively novel twist), nor did Somewhere in Time’s star-crossed romantic fantasy. In the latter case, it was based on Richard Matheson’s 1975 novel Bid Time Return, although even Matheson borrowed the concept of time travel via hypnotic suggestion from Jack Finney’s 1970 novel Time and Again (and both of them arguably drew from J.W. Dunne’s philosophical and metaphysical musings in the 1927 book An Experiment in Time). And all of them borrowed from Mark Twain, at least indirectly. In the never-ending cycle of influences, it can be challenging to locate anything that qualifies as a prime mover.

South African writer/director Richard Stanley is a fascinating filmmaker who has frequently had a cloud over his head, both personally and professionally. He made a splash in 1990 with his debut feature Hardware, but just six years later, he was fired a few days into the production of the legendarily troubled The Island of Dr. Moreau remake (in hindsight, Stanley may have actually dodged a bullet with that one). That left him in director’s jail for more than two decades, at least as far as mainstream filmmaking was concerned, and his eventual return behind the director’s chair with Color Out of Space in 2019 was marred when he was accused of domestic abuse two years later. Yet that dark cloud has followed Stanley all throughout his career, and it didn’t start with The Island of Dr. Moreau, either. During the six-year span between Hardware and that film, he worked on another project that seemed cursed from its inception: Dust Devil.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s breakthrough film Boogie Nights opens with a virtuoso uninterrupted shot that starts out by focusing on a marquee displaying the title of the film (with a quick pan to let us know that we’re in Reseda), and then it swoops down over the city streets and into the night club Hot Traxx, which is the home away from home for many of the main characters. As the camera pushes in and enters the club, it introduces us to several of them: the club’s owner Maurice (Luis Guzman); adult filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds); his leading lady Amber Waves (Julianne Moore); and her fellow performers Reed Rothschild (John C. Reilly), Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker), and Rollergirl (Heather Graham).

Michael Winner’s Death Wish II was a belated sequel to his controversial 1974 vigilante film, released eight years down the road after the rights to the story had jumped from Dino De Laurentiis to Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of Cannon Films. That’s arguably an “out of the frying pan, into the fire” situation, at least from a creative perspective—although to be fair, it ensured that the franchise would continue for years to come, since De Laurentiis was already sliding inexorably toward financial ruin. Regardless, the world had changed significantly during that eight-year span, offering plenty of opportunity for reflection, contemplation, and re-evaluation. Yet Golan-Globus wasn’t particularly interested in anything like that that, and Death Wish II ended up delivering exactly what they wanted. Still, it’s the complete lack of reflection in Death Wish II that remains one of its most interesting qualities, because it’s a film that stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the passage of time.

There are many iconic settings that horror movies return to again and again—haunted houses, creepy forests, etc.—but one that hasn’t been utilized quite as much is what lies beneath them: caves, tunnels, and other underground settings. They’re no less ideal for a horror story, playing on fears of claustrophobia, uncertainty, and the creepy crawlies that may lurk in the darkness beyond. Yet while Neil Marshall’s sophomore feature The Descent does offer some creepy crawlies of its own (dubbed “crawlers,” appropriately enough), it’s not really so much about what may be concealed by the darkness as it is about the darkness itself. “Here there be dragons,” the legends on ancient maps sometimes warned, but while The Descent similarly plays on fears of the unknown, Marshall’s monsters are more of a means to an end than an end unto themselves.

Great art is sometimes born out of great pain, serving as a means for the artist to exorcise his or her demons. That can get a wee bit complicated when it comes to the cinema, since this kind of personal expression can be at odds with the commercial nature of the medium. Yet there are exceptions, like when Roman Polanski took Robert Towne’s script for Chinatown, fused it with the pain he was experiencing after the murder of Sharon Tate, and crafted a film that was an instant critical and commercial success despite the nihilistic ending that Polanski added over Towne’s objections. Still, in the world of Hollywood filmmaking, successful personal tragedies are generally the exception, not the rule.

Hair High was Bill Plympton’s fourth feature-length animated film, and it represented something of a turning point for him. While the world of traditional cel animation had already moved into the digital realm by 2004, Plympton was still stubbornly sticking with his hand-crafted ways. Yet even his own process had evolved ever since his first feature The Tune in 1992, and while he was still handling all of the drawings personally, he was working with teams that dealt with other things like the inking and painting. Hair High was produced the same way, and yet it marked the end of that era, as he would end up transitioning to digital afterwards (and given how labor-intensive his work had been up until that point, he never looked back, either). While there’s nothing inherently wrong with digital animation, Hair High arguably remains the pinnacle of his work, partly due to its hand-crafted nature, but also due to the fact that he was telling a personal story inspired (ever so loosely) by a few of his experiences as a young person.