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Foreign films are having a bit of a rough time at the moment. Aside from the usual mixture of people either being too dumb to read subtitles or (often rightly) accusing the films of being pretentious, there is a new threat. This comes from Hollywood, which keeps its eyes peeled for a successful or interesting foreign film and then completely re-makes it badly and pretends that it's an original idea.
Yes, believe it or not, Vanilla Sky was a fairly shoddy re-make of a Spanish film called "Abre los Ojos", which was not only better but featured Penelope Cruz topless for much longer. And with this I will start my defence of foreign films. French and Spanish people aren't afraid of nudity; they don't have a Mary Whitehouse mob who believe that flesh is sinful and set up rigorous barriers to letting anyone under the age of 18 see a bit of nudity. Admittedly the standards are falling over here, mean 12 year olds could watch Kate Winslet's baps in Titanic, but the thing about foreigners is that they really don't care about it at all. Adverts on French daytime TV regularly feature naked women and no-one bats an eyelid. I think this is a fairly strong point to start on. If you watch a foreign film that's been rated above a 12 you're pretty much guaranteed a lot of nudity. And everyone knows that the best films feature fit women naked :-)
But it's not just that. See foreign films can get away with more. More sex, more violence, you name it, and they can be excessive because there's no studio pressure to make the films commercial, and because the ratings aren't greatly affected. This is carried over into our own rating system; partly because if French children are deemed old enough to watch naked people, then British children should be too, but also because nobody watches foreign films. This means that films like "Battle Royale", which would be slaughtered by the Daily Mail brigade if they were made over here get through the BBFC with little problem (pfft Japanese film with subtitles - no-one's going to watch it anyway). This means that in comparison to American films, foreign films rock.
The other reason that they're better than most American films is that not all foreigners speak English, which is a blessing. You see because we speak English, the British film industry is pounded into submission due to everyone watching American-made films. The last good Brit-flic I saw was "The Lawless Heart", which nearly didn't get made because it couldn't get funding. In France they don't suffer the same problem. Their attitude to American films is the same as ours is to French films ("ooh subtitles I don't want to watch that") and what's worse is that the subtitles are done very quickly and very badly rendering many films completely different. I saw Armageddon in France a week after it came out in Britain. At one point someone, possibly brucey-boy, said "That asteroid is a million miles away yadda yadda yadda" - the subtitler had given an exact figure in kilometres for the "million miles" part. So instead of watching dumb American movies they make their own - same thing in Spain and Germany and Denmark and Sweden. All over the world. Because these films are on smaller budgets and more indepedently funded, most of them actually turn out very well indeed. Sure you get incomprehensibly poncy films (stand up Dogme '95 directors and "Y tu mama tambien") but you also get films that rock a lot.
Many of these films are now under threat from Hollywood, which has decided to let them be re-made my plebs and morons for a mass commercial audience. And we all know what commercialism means...
*waves bye bye to Steve Lamacq*
Take a danish TV series called "The Kingdom". It was made by Lars von Trier, who was a director of some considerable talent before he decided that Dogme was the way to go ("You can see the boom mike and I'm shooting on handheld and all that means my film is free of over-the-top direction and concentrates only on human emotions. Ohh ohh aahh I think I'm having an orgasm from my own brilliance." - No Lars the films suck. A lot.) "The Kingdom" was basically a "Twin Peaks" for Danish TV - a soap that was self-consciously a soap and played on the fact directed by a surrealist auteur-director with just the right amount of pretentiousness. It was set in a hospital filled with weird and wonderful characters but was a ghost story at the same time and it featured a Swedish doctor who hated Danes, a hypochondriac clairvoyant patient, a female doctor pregnant with a full grown man, and a greek chorus effect involving two children with Downs Syndrome who comment on the action while washing dishes in the hospital basement. And it rocked.
Now Stephen King saw this and thought righty-o then I'm having that one. And as I write "Kingdom Hospital" is slated in for a 2003 release as a TV series. If King has any grasp of irony he will probably remove the storyline about the consultant neurosurgeon who steals other doctors' research and publishes it under his own name. I'm pretty sure that King's version will stink. Not because I dislike Stephen King, but because he's got some jumped up ex-stuntman to direct it; a jumped up stuntman who transformed from Craig Baxley to Craig R. Baxley when he decided to be a director. Now isn't that pretentious? Well, no, not by Lars von Trier standards and that's the problem. Baxley will probably look at the jaundiced colouring and the shaky camera and think that he can do it much better with a good ol' steadycam, and he'll have missed the point. He'll Americanize the series and so crap it up. As to americanize is to dumb down and homogenize something until it appeals to as many people as possible.
Von Trier isn't the only one who's about to get bum-raped by the Hollywood moguls. A guy called Gilles Mimouni is really in for it, not only is his baby of a film "L'Appartement" being re-made as an American blockbuster called "Wicker Park", but Vincent Cassel's role has been taken up by Josh Harnett - a 'no-talent ass-clown' to borrow an insult from "Office Space". The French version wasn't in the least bit poncy; it was just a satisfyingly twistily plotted thriller which featured fit women with their baps on show. Think the Coen brothers with more nudity in French and you're there. The French version was a great film and no mistake, but however you play it, the American version just isn't going to work. Someone as spectacularly ugly as Vincent Cassel can be can't rely on his looks to get him a role, which tends to lead to his being cast on acting merit rather than looks. Josh Harnett is a pretty boy, and while it is more plausible to believe that a pretty boy like Josh would become embroiled in three relationships simultaneously with three attractive women - he's going to muck it up by being crap just as he has done in every single film I've seen him in.
And to top it off Hollywood producers announced that they were going to re-make an Argentinian film - "Nine Queens" - before it had even been released over there. Why? Because it was an intelligent heist movie in a Guy Ritch-ish-ish way (more like Mamet actually but how many people have heard of him?) and because no-one would watch such a film unless it was in English they could do so.
My problem is one of respect. Time and time again foreign directors have their films bastardised by some talentless Hollywood hack, who gets kudos for doing so and the foreign director - often the author of the film as well - gets no credit at all. In fact he gets shafted every which way. Cameron Crowe pretended in interviews that "Vanilla Sky" was his baby and even had the audacity to give himself prominence as the scriptwriter. "Vanilla Sky" sucked. "Wicker Park" will suck. "Kingdom Hospital" will suck. "Nine Queens Remake" will suck. For me, that is, because I have seen the originals. For other people they will be fair to middling, maybe even good because they will have no basis for comparison. So do yourself a favour and have the individuality to go and watch "L'Appartement" or "the Kingdom" before the trashy American versions come out. I'll promise you more nudity, more flair and more individuality.
The problem with current cinema releases is that anyone whose films will not pull in audiences is suffering. David Lynch couldn't get "Mulholland Dr." commissioned as a TV series, despite the success of "Twin Peaks", Sam Raimi had to fight tooth and nail to make "Spider-man" his way and not the studio's. Instead films with Vin Diesel grunting and blowing things up get ludicrous budgets at the expense of more worthwhile films. So do what I do and take solace in the dusty foreign section of blockbuster, or the awkwardly-placed world cinema section in MVC. Because there, along with the poncy films, you'll find some damn good films which you would only watch otherwise when they get re-made.
Yes, believe it or not, Vanilla Sky was a fairly shoddy re-make of a Spanish film called "Abre los Ojos", which was not only better but featured Penelope Cruz topless for much longer. And with this I will start my defence of foreign films. French and Spanish people aren't afraid of nudity; they don't have a Mary Whitehouse mob who believe that flesh is sinful and set up rigorous barriers to letting anyone under the age of 18 see a bit of nudity. Admittedly the standards are falling over here, mean 12 year olds could watch Kate Winslet's baps in Titanic, but the thing about foreigners is that they really don't care about it at all. Adverts on French daytime TV regularly feature naked women and no-one bats an eyelid. I think this is a fairly strong point to start on. If you watch a foreign film that's been rated above a 12 you're pretty much guaranteed a lot of nudity. And everyone knows that the best films feature fit women naked :-)
But it's not just that. See foreign films can get away with more. More sex, more violence, you name it, and they can be excessive because there's no studio pressure to make the films commercial, and because the ratings aren't greatly affected. This is carried over into our own rating system; partly because if French children are deemed old enough to watch naked people, then British children should be too, but also because nobody watches foreign films. This means that films like "Battle Royale", which would be slaughtered by the Daily Mail brigade if they were made over here get through the BBFC with little problem (pfft Japanese film with subtitles - no-one's going to watch it anyway). This means that in comparison to American films, foreign films rock.
The other reason that they're better than most American films is that not all foreigners speak English, which is a blessing. You see because we speak English, the British film industry is pounded into submission due to everyone watching American-made films. The last good Brit-flic I saw was "The Lawless Heart", which nearly didn't get made because it couldn't get funding. In France they don't suffer the same problem. Their attitude to American films is the same as ours is to French films ("ooh subtitles I don't want to watch that") and what's worse is that the subtitles are done very quickly and very badly rendering many films completely different. I saw Armageddon in France a week after it came out in Britain. At one point someone, possibly brucey-boy, said "That asteroid is a million miles away yadda yadda yadda" - the subtitler had given an exact figure in kilometres for the "million miles" part. So instead of watching dumb American movies they make their own - same thing in Spain and Germany and Denmark and Sweden. All over the world. Because these films are on smaller budgets and more indepedently funded, most of them actually turn out very well indeed. Sure you get incomprehensibly poncy films (stand up Dogme '95 directors and "Y tu mama tambien") but you also get films that rock a lot.
Many of these films are now under threat from Hollywood, which has decided to let them be re-made my plebs and morons for a mass commercial audience. And we all know what commercialism means...
*waves bye bye to Steve Lamacq*
Take a danish TV series called "The Kingdom". It was made by Lars von Trier, who was a director of some considerable talent before he decided that Dogme was the way to go ("You can see the boom mike and I'm shooting on handheld and all that means my film is free of over-the-top direction and concentrates only on human emotions. Ohh ohh aahh I think I'm having an orgasm from my own brilliance." - No Lars the films suck. A lot.) "The Kingdom" was basically a "Twin Peaks" for Danish TV - a soap that was self-consciously a soap and played on the fact directed by a surrealist auteur-director with just the right amount of pretentiousness. It was set in a hospital filled with weird and wonderful characters but was a ghost story at the same time and it featured a Swedish doctor who hated Danes, a hypochondriac clairvoyant patient, a female doctor pregnant with a full grown man, and a greek chorus effect involving two children with Downs Syndrome who comment on the action while washing dishes in the hospital basement. And it rocked.
Now Stephen King saw this and thought righty-o then I'm having that one. And as I write "Kingdom Hospital" is slated in for a 2003 release as a TV series. If King has any grasp of irony he will probably remove the storyline about the consultant neurosurgeon who steals other doctors' research and publishes it under his own name. I'm pretty sure that King's version will stink. Not because I dislike Stephen King, but because he's got some jumped up ex-stuntman to direct it; a jumped up stuntman who transformed from Craig Baxley to Craig R. Baxley when he decided to be a director. Now isn't that pretentious? Well, no, not by Lars von Trier standards and that's the problem. Baxley will probably look at the jaundiced colouring and the shaky camera and think that he can do it much better with a good ol' steadycam, and he'll have missed the point. He'll Americanize the series and so crap it up. As to americanize is to dumb down and homogenize something until it appeals to as many people as possible.
Von Trier isn't the only one who's about to get bum-raped by the Hollywood moguls. A guy called Gilles Mimouni is really in for it, not only is his baby of a film "L'Appartement" being re-made as an American blockbuster called "Wicker Park", but Vincent Cassel's role has been taken up by Josh Harnett - a 'no-talent ass-clown' to borrow an insult from "Office Space". The French version wasn't in the least bit poncy; it was just a satisfyingly twistily plotted thriller which featured fit women with their baps on show. Think the Coen brothers with more nudity in French and you're there. The French version was a great film and no mistake, but however you play it, the American version just isn't going to work. Someone as spectacularly ugly as Vincent Cassel can be can't rely on his looks to get him a role, which tends to lead to his being cast on acting merit rather than looks. Josh Harnett is a pretty boy, and while it is more plausible to believe that a pretty boy like Josh would become embroiled in three relationships simultaneously with three attractive women - he's going to muck it up by being crap just as he has done in every single film I've seen him in.
And to top it off Hollywood producers announced that they were going to re-make an Argentinian film - "Nine Queens" - before it had even been released over there. Why? Because it was an intelligent heist movie in a Guy Ritch-ish-ish way (more like Mamet actually but how many people have heard of him?) and because no-one would watch such a film unless it was in English they could do so.
My problem is one of respect. Time and time again foreign directors have their films bastardised by some talentless Hollywood hack, who gets kudos for doing so and the foreign director - often the author of the film as well - gets no credit at all. In fact he gets shafted every which way. Cameron Crowe pretended in interviews that "Vanilla Sky" was his baby and even had the audacity to give himself prominence as the scriptwriter. "Vanilla Sky" sucked. "Wicker Park" will suck. "Kingdom Hospital" will suck. "Nine Queens Remake" will suck. For me, that is, because I have seen the originals. For other people they will be fair to middling, maybe even good because they will have no basis for comparison. So do yourself a favour and have the individuality to go and watch "L'Appartement" or "the Kingdom" before the trashy American versions come out. I'll promise you more nudity, more flair and more individuality.
The problem with current cinema releases is that anyone whose films will not pull in audiences is suffering. David Lynch couldn't get "Mulholland Dr." commissioned as a TV series, despite the success of "Twin Peaks", Sam Raimi had to fight tooth and nail to make "Spider-man" his way and not the studio's. Instead films with Vin Diesel grunting and blowing things up get ludicrous budgets at the expense of more worthwhile films. So do what I do and take solace in the dusty foreign section of blockbuster, or the awkwardly-placed world cinema section in MVC. Because there, along with the poncy films, you'll find some damn good films which you would only watch otherwise when they get re-made.
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Actually, 51st State is only being released in the U.S next month, under the title of "formula51". Unless there's a sequel....
Stryke wrote:
Two DVD versions of Amelie were
> released within about 2 months of each other. How cash in is that?
They first released just the second one in France, but released it two months late in England as some features hadn't been translated into English.
It would have much more of a cash-in with a wider time spread. 2 months isn't much.
Two DVD versions of Amelie were
> released within about 2 months of each other. How cash in is that?
They first released just the second one in France, but released it two months late in England as some features hadn't been translated into English.
It would have much more of a cash-in with a wider time spread. 2 months isn't much.
But what is the reason a director makes a film? Each time he's got to be thinking about how much it's going to put in his pocket. I don't think someone can make a film on a big enough scale to be released in cinemas and not think about the money it's going to make.
No I don't think they were. Not by their respective directors anyway. Maybe you can argue that ultimately all films are made for money, but the films I would classify as being "made for money" are the formulaic blockbusters, whose sole purpose to appeal across a wide spectrum and bring in millions. Amelie was an extension of a short film by Jean-Pierre Jeunet called "Foutaises"; it was a personal film and while I'm sure it made him millions, I don't think that was his motivation. Conversely when Joel Schumacher decided to take up the Batman series he knew that the sole objective was to cash in on the franchise.
Yeah, Amelie WAS good. But it was made for money. It doesn't matter if the film is homegrown or foreign, it will have been made for money.
Usual Suspects was made for money. So was Sexy Beast, Heathers, Groundhog Day, Mallrats, Ghost World e.t.c
Usual Suspects was made for money. So was Sexy Beast, Heathers, Groundhog Day, Mallrats, Ghost World e.t.c
Goatboy wrote:
> Granted that had Robery Carlsyle in it
--
??? I need some sleep.
And coffee
> Granted that had Robery Carlsyle in it
--
??? I need some sleep.
And coffee
Amelie rocked. Sure someone tried to cash in by releasing two seperate DVD's, but that doesn't mean that the film was a cash in. The film was outstandingly good in all respects. It is also true that a film like that would never have been made anywhere else in the world.
Granted that had Robery Carlsyle in it and was written by a Brit, and set in Liverpool.
But the money was American, the director was American and some other stuff.
Actually, I'm not sure because my head is full.
Bloody good film though
But the money was American, the director was American and some other stuff.
Actually, I'm not sure because my head is full.
Bloody good film though
Oh yeah, and in defence of the British Film Industry : 51st State.
The foreign film industry is still all about money. Just look at the French industry. The two biggest films from there recently have The Brotherhood of the Wolf and Amelie, right? I enjoyed both of them. But they're still both about money. Two DVD versions of Amelie were released within about 2 months of each other. How cash in is that?
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