When I'm not going into too much detail about my love life or prattling on about the cats or extolling the greatness of Vincente Minnelli or posting clips of Richard Thompson and Marshall Crenshaw or making random Star Wars references or bemoaning another sorry season for the Yankees (though they've actually won two games in a row, so there's that) or reminding you that Boston sports fans are a force of evil in the world and must be stopped at all costs, I often use this space to complain about the decline of creativity in the popular arts.
And so I will again: They're planning to remake The Fury.
Largely forgotten now, 1978's would-be blockbuster The Fury existed almost entirely as a showcase for Brian DePalma's awesome directorial skills. Despite a dumb premise (Carrie-styled telepathic teens mixed up with the sort of anti-government paranoia popular in the seventies) and a mixed bag of a cast (John Cassavetes and Andrew Stevens shouldn't even share the same planet, much less the screen) DePalma's relentless look-what-I-can-do sense of style, abetted by Paul Hirsch's furious editing and a particularly lovely John Williams score, manages to make this overbaked piece of pure studio product into something hugely entertaining. I was twelve when it opened, and it blew me away; it's a textbook example of how a great filmmaker can use all the resources at his disposal to make something out of nothing.
No, I suppose, it's not a deathless work of cinema. Heck, it's not even as high in the DePalma canon as Sisters or Carrie, both of which suffered pointless do-overs. But at least those titles were well-remembered. What I don't understand is taking a movie nobody cares about, that wasn't even a hit at the time, that didn't have a particularly original premise, and remaking it.
You want to "re-imagine" Halloween, I can understand. The original was a huge hit, with a brilliantly simple premise. Everyone knows it, even if they've never seen it. I can understand thinking there's a potential audience. I even understand, in a mercenary sense, the urge to redo The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Prom Night. It has nothing to do with the movies themselves--when the titles are as familiar are those, you could show ninety minutes of unprocessed film and audiences will still show up, at least for opening weekend.
And I'm not entirely opposed to the concept of remakes. They'd filmed The Maltese Falcon twice before John Huston finally did it right. That makes sense, too--a redo of a movie that had huge potential but didn't deliver. Plenty of those out there; if somebody decided to take another pass at Logan's Run, I'd understand.
But again, The Fury isn't an iconic title, and it didn't have a great premise that went somehow unfulfilled. It was a bad movie executed with such brilliant flair it somehow transcended itself, a work of crazy genius. Made today, with some Michael Bay-wannabe directing, it would look and feel exactly like every other thriller out there, Avid-edited, CGI-enhanced, and it would just be bad.
