Write about film long enough, and you come to understand that nothing is truly sacred. Any property can be remade, no matter how distinctive, definitive or beloved.
I still maintain Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho was a subversive attempt to show people the folly of remaking Psycho, but the message didn’t make it all the way across it’s only a matter of time before somebody tries to remake Citizen Kane for the Internet.
Sometimes, though, you come across an idea for a remake that just boggles the mind.
Yesterday, Variety’s Mike Fleming broke the news that Robert Zemeckis and Disney are negotiating to produce a new version of the trippy Beatles ‘toon Yellow Submarine.
Yes, I know.
And it gets dumber: Zemeckis wants to make the movie with the motion-capture technology he’s used on The Polar Express, Monster House and Beowulf. Actors in special suits deliver physical performances, which are then rendered in the digital realm as CG characters it’s what allows Jim Carrey to play both Ebenezer Scrooge and all three of the ghosts in Zemeckis’s upcoming version of A Christmas Carol.
There’s only one reason to use motion-capture on a Yellow Submarine movie – Zemeckis wants to remake the movie with the “real” Beatles, rather than the pop-art caricatures of the original version – which were voiced by impersonators when the Fab Four declined to involve themselves beyond a brief cameo.
But a photo-realistic Yellow Submarine would defeat its own purpose the movie’s a fantasy, and doubly so for having the Beatles in it their whimsical personalities match up perfectly with the eccentric animation.
There’s also the sad truth that John and George are no longer with us even if Paul and Ringo were to voice themselves, which seems highly unlikely, watching the group’s youthenized likenesses stiffly wandering around an artificial landscape – as is inevitably the case with Zemeckis’s CG movies, no matter how much the director loves his tech – would be a sad reminder of that fact, rather than a time-capsule celebration of them at their artistic peak.
And if your kid’s scared of the Blue Meanies now, imagine what they’ll look like in the remake.
Seriously, though why remake Yellow Submarine at all? Who looks at that movie, which is so much a product of its time, and thinks we need a new one? In the town where I was born, we call bollocks on that sort of thing.[rssbreak]
