Ouroboros Culture Wars #2 - "My childhood wasn't raped, just molested for years.”

A couple quick egregious examples of self-plagiarism to illustrate a point: 

1. Michael Bay, who continues to remake the same movie over and over (military helicopters at sunset + explosions + highway chases + explosions + soldiers screaming and/or dying in slow-motion + explosions = money. Multiplied by robots? = BIG money). In previous films, he's ripped off his own helicopter-at-dusk shots and battleships-at-midday shots (for Pearl Harbor, Transformers, etc). But for Transformers 3, he reused car-crash shots from The Island chase scene and just added robots (nobody saw that movie anyway and every Bay movie follows the same blueprint so who cares?). Still, it's lazy.

2. I saw this SNL sketch called 'Rehearsal Scene' from 2001 with Amy Poehler, Will Ferrell, and Kirsten Dunst. It was pretty funny. They played background extras in a scene who overact and ruin every take. I thought, 'Pretty funny...but it's weird that it took the show 25+ years to think up such a simple sketch.' Then I saw on Youtube a sketch from the New Show (Lorne Michaels' shortlived failed primetime sketch show) with Catherine O'Hara, Buck Henry, and Steve Martin....performing almost the exact same sketch but 20 years earlier (slightly different writing but the same premise and beats).

The moral? It's okay to steal from yourself if nobody notices. 

That's why the best remakes are movies that had a great idea but mediocre execution, either due to the constraints of the era or simply purposeful underachievement (Ocean's Eleven, True Grit, Scarface, etc) or movies that don't so much remake the same material but take it and extrapolate it into new directions until it becomes something completely different (The Magnificent Seven, Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, Star Wars, Reservoir Dogs, etc).

Why is this important? Because nothing feels new anymore. And worse, even the stuff that wasn't that good to begin with...somehow manages to seem superior next to the new 'updated-and-improved' version.

The 1980’s has become the new go-to decade for a quickie childhood-raping cash-in. It started with stuff like The Karate Kid and Tron 2 and Clash of the Titans and pretty much every single horror movie franchise reboot (Friday the 13^th, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Prom Night, My Bloody Valentine, etc). But just this past year, we had Arthur, Fright Night, Conan the Barbarian, Footloose, The Thing (the Red Dawn remake was pushed into 2012), with Total Recall and 21 Jump Street and a new Clash of the Titans sequel due out this year and with many more in development (Aliens, Robocop, Romancing the Stone, even fucking Short Circuit, for chrissakes). All nice bland Xeroxes of the originals, everything shinier and CGIer without being different or better. More namebrand repackagings. Set in the past or the present, doesn’t matter, it’s still more of the same shit.

Stuff like The Muppets or The Smurfs and the unslayable atrocity that is the Transformers franchise (yes, I just lumped those three together, they’re the same in my book - new remixes of an old favorite) is aimed at young parents. People in their 30’s or 40’s who were kids or teens when this stuff first came out. And now they’re parents. With little kids. Who will literally watch anything. So they all go to the movies. The parents watch the movie through rose-tinted nostalgia goggles, the kids watch the movie on a cracked-out sugar-high, and everyone convinces themselves that they enjoyed themselves. It’s fun, it’s safe, you don’t have to think for 100 minutes as Hollywood preps your vein, prepares the hypodermic, and injects a syringe full of pure nostalgia-euphoria into your waiting bloodstream.

However, the new rule for movies (as seen by the numerous franchises that refuse to die and unnecessary sequels and prequels and reboots and retreads and remakes and reimaginings and resuscitations and resurrections of 'shit from your childhood that we adapted to film because we like to profit off your memories' - well it's not going away.

The fear of new ideas (oh no, it's new, it's unexpected, it's an unknown entity that might actually entertain people, kill it, kill it!') has permeated the Hollywood studio system to the point where even the new movies feel like stale rehashed & reheated remakes. (see – Safe House – when I read the script, I thought, 'Great title, good premise, horrible execution.' And the finished film is even less than that).

For movies, it’s always better to be bad than to be boring.

So many dull, predictable, safe, obvious generic movie studios make the same boringly dull, predictable, obvious generic choices. Why? Laziness? Extreme CYA? Fear of alienating audiences who want the same recycled garbage slop spoon-fed into their glutinous waiting mouths? All of the above? Fuck it, who knows, all I know is that...we used to go to the movies to be entertained. Now we go to eat popcorn and fall asleep. I know why movies have to be this slick and commercial and dumbed-down...but I don't understand why they have to be so bland and boring too.

This summer's Green Lantern wasn't the odd one out, it was the nadir of a pattern. All the comic book movies were bad, just in different ways (from watchable to generic to coma-inducing). Big budget doesn't have to be so fucking horrible. But for some reason, it almost always is (see: Battleship, GI Joe: Retaliation, Men in Black III aka ‘Who Needs a Script, This is a Will Smith Sequel,’ every movie which features famous historical figures fighting zombies or vampires, et all).

And 2012 looks to bring us more of the same. And we love it, scarfing it down and throwing it up and gobbling it back down again like the Monty Python Mr. Creosote scene. We’re the Nostalgia Critic generation, pop-culture regurgitation, "Hey, look at this stuff from our childhoods, lets mock it and revere it at the same time." All these remakes and reboots and re-adaptations. They're doing a new Spiderman, no surprise there -10 years later, it's time to reboot it again. We're ouroboros culture, the land of redos all summer long and reruns all year round.

And worse…we don’t seem to care.