Only lately did I notice that the flood of remakes and reboots nobody asked for being dumped on us by the manure truck that is contemporary Hollywood includes a remake of 1988's hit comedy
The Naked Gun.
As is usually the case with Hollywood's remakes the idea completely misses the factors relevant to the original's success.
The Naked Gun, one should remember, was
part of that great wave of gag-based comedy emergent in the 1960s through the work of people like Richard Lester and Charles Feldman and Woody Allen, which had a heyday in the 1970s and 1980s in the hands of people like Mel Brooks and the ZAZ team (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker), before entering terminal decline in the '90s, identifiable with the era of the much-maligned Jason Friedburg and Aaron Seltzer.
In those earlier, more productive years, the gag-based comedy was a new way of making a film significantly connected with and complementing the contemporaneous rise of the
action movie with James Bond--the two, similarly elevating images presented at an accelerated pace above dramatic conventions, though in the case of the comedy with comedic gags rather than adrenaline-pumping "shocks" or
"bumps." (Indeed, it is indicative of the closeness of the two forms that many critics looking at the first Bond movies seem to have thought they were looking at a comedy of this type.)
And just as with the action movie, filmmakers eventually exhausted this genre's possibilities. (Just as the action movie got to a point where the range of set pieces and the things that could be done in and with them was pretty well established, and there was not much to do but repeat them, and there was no going "faster" or "bigger" to any useful effect, there was only so much worth doing with this form--with even a Brooks or ZAZ in the view of most peaking early in their careers, the former with 1974's
Young Frankenstein and
Blazing Saddles, ZAZ with
Airplane!)
The Naked Gun was one of the most memorable of the wave's later films--but a remake seems to me exceedingly unlikely to add to anything but what we already know well, namely Hollywood's utter unhinged determination to keep giving the public the same thing over and over and over again, even as it loses money at the game.
2 comments:
Have you heard of yet-another remake of Oldboy? I'm so fed up with all this.
No, I'd missed the Oldboy plans until you mentioned them. Looking now I notice that while the original movie was a "loose" adaptation of a Japanese manga they are remaking the movie rather than going to the source material and working with that (which might at least have offered something different and comparatively original). That too is becoming familiar--that even when they go back to adaptations, they insist on remaking the adaptation rather than adapting the original material themselves--and it seems to me a sign of just how deep the "remake" obsession runs.
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