Getting the Hollywood treatment

Despite often caustic reviews and calamitous box-office, Hollywood shows no signs of ending its long-standing fascination with turning acclaimed world cinema releases into generic domestic product. So with Jim Sheridan's Brothers just out in the UK, a remake of the Susanne Bier-directed Danish film of the same name, we today take a look at some other English-language refits of types both past and upcoming.

It must seem so easy at the time. Foreign-language film is released into American theatres. Critics drool. Metropolitan movie-going types lap it up. And eventually, with the buzz having reached a nicely simmering degree of heat, the movie exec slinks off to see the darn thing. Yes, they don't really get it. But what the hell, it seems to play okay with the crowd. So the cogs start turning and grinding inside the exec's noggin - an unavoidable, inescapable conclusion formulating in their brain: If everyone loves this movie so much now, then imagine how much more they'd love it if they didn't have to spend the whole runtime reading subtitles off the screen? And before you can say “I am the very model of a modern major-general, I've information vegetable, animal and mineral”, a US remake has got the green light. With one filmic version already in existence, it is doubly simple to pull the script together (obviously with any controversial or downbeat elements excised), which means the production can thunder right on ahead. Delighted with their cleverness, the movie exec sits back in their huge leather chair, big smile on their face, just imagining all the glorious green that will surely come rolling in once The Assassin/The Vanishing/Vanilla Sky opens.

Yes, it seems fair to say that Hollywood does not always appear to know how to react when asked to deal with piping hot foreign-language movie product. Often those directors being eulogised as visionary new cinematic talents will be signed up and promptly expected to toe the company line on some ill-conceived studio mess. Such has previously been the fate of Matthieu Kassovitz (from Vincent Cassel star-maker with La Haine to Vin Diesel turkey-stuffer with Babylon A.D.), Jean-Pierre Jeunet (from The City of Lost Children to franchise of lost quality on Alien: Resurrection), and Oliver Hirschbiegel (from Downfall, chronicling the last days of Hitler as leader of Germany, to The Invasion, chronicling the last days of Nicole Kidman as a bankable star). Even everyone's favourite Mexican movie brand-name Guillermo Del Toro got chewed up and spat out by the Tinseltown machine back in the 90s on Mimic, forcing him to retreat into Spanish-language releases and lick his wounds for several years, before coming back to the mainstream with Hellboy.

However, as already noted, taking gifted film-makers and smashing their confidence/love of cinema/motivation for getting out of bed in the morning as nonchalantly as that emerald-skinned angry-pants the Hulk smashes New York city blocks is only one way in which the muddy funsters of Hollywood like to manhandle the cream of the world movie crop. Because they also have a passion for remakes. Remakes that supplant those weirdy beardy foreign folk for shiny-toothed, snazzily-coiffured movie stars. Remakes that steamroller over any subtler nuances in the source film. Remakes that miss the almost imperceptible moments of alchemical magic that make the original work for an audience. Those kind of remakes. The bad kind of remakes.

Whether it will ultimately be remembered as a lousy remake or not, there can be little question that Brothers has failed to perform to expectations thus far. Released in Britain last Friday and out in the US just before Christmas, Brothers is based on an excellent 2004 Danish offering (which, by the way, you can watch for free right here on Indie Movies Online) written and directed by Susanne Bier, and starring Festen's Ulrich Thomsen and Gladiator's Connie Nielsen. On the face of it, the American version of Brothers appeared to have all the attributes to succeed, with Maguire, Gyllenhaal, and Portman taking the lead roles, direction coming from In the Name of the Father's Jim Sheridan, and a screenplay adapted by David Benioff (one of the top-paid scribblers in Hollywood, despite turds like Troy and X-Men Origins: Wolverine floating on his CV). This stellar configuration of big names, coupled to dramatic subject matter (Maguire's marine goes missing, presumed dead in Afghanistan, allowing black sheep sibling Gyllenhaal to fill the Spider-Man shaped-void in the family unit), ensured that Brothers was being tipped as a potential awards season heavyweight in the weeks prior to its release. Yet no sooner had Sheridan's movie hit theatres than it swiftly transmuted from Oscar hopeful to Oscar no-hoper, with numerous reviewers noting its inferiority to the Danish movie that had inspired it.

One of the real curiosities to emerge from these US remakes is when the directors of the original are subsequently rehired to helm another version of a film they just spent two to three years of life making first time round. Michael Haneke might be thought of as one of the pre-eminent film-making artists currently operating in the world today, but even he got his brainiac ass suckered in by the bright lights of Hollywood when he agreed to deliver a shot-for-shot remake of his superb 1997 movie violence-satire Funny Games. Sensing that this was perhaps not the best employment of his prodigious gifts, critics promptly gave Haneke the kind of drubbing that school yard bullies reserve for acne-addled asthmatics, while audiences steered clear of the new Naomi Watts-starring Funny Games like superstitious medieval villagers steer clear of old women with big noses and large cat menageries.

Odder still is when the original director or directors are once again engaged to shoot the remake, before being lumbered with major story alterations that need to be accommodated. Dutch film-maker George Sluizer famously ruined the chilling ending of his own The Vanishing by appending new scenes for the remake in which hero Kiefer Sutherland escapes from his coffin prison and bumps off villain Jeff Bridges with the shovel he used to dig the grave in the first place. What majestic irony. Similarly, when the Pang Brothers came to re-jig their scintillating Thai actioner Bangkok Dangerous, they realised that their original conceit of a deaf-mute hitman would have to be jettisoned so that that new star - and reigning sultan of nuttiness - Nicolas Cage could actually have some lines and therefore not disappoint his adoring public (Incidentally, users of Indie Movies Online in the US can now watch the original, Cageless, version of Bangkok Dangerous on the site for free).

And if we momentarily gaze into the swirling mists of the future then which US remakes of foreign-language favourites can we see drifting into focus? Well, looking back at the oeuvre of our man Oliver Hirschbiegel, we find a little 2001 number entitled Das Experiment; a drama derived from the real-life Stanford prison experiment of 1971, which saw an academic attempt to study a penitential scenario being prematurely curtailed when those participants designated as guards began to live their roles a little too deeply. Now being remade under the cunning title of The Experiment, the new movie represents the feature writing-directing debut of Paul Scheuring, the man behind successful TV show Prison Break (prison-obsessed the man is. He is to prisons what George A. Romero is to the living dead), and stars Oscar-winners Adrien Brody as the head of the nominal captives and Forest Whitaker as leader of the guards. Clifton Collins Jr. (who also featured in the Jim Sheridan-directed Brothers) crops up in a supporting role, while 2010's answer to Josh Hartnett, Channing Tatum, also features. The Experiment is due to be released by Sony Pictures some time later this year.

Also due out later in 2010, specifically on 1 October, is Let Me In, the English-language remake of critically-revered Swedish vampire flick Let the Right One In. Transposed from snowy Stockholm to rugged New Mexico, Let Me In still focuses on a bullied 12-year-old boy (now played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, young Logan in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Viggo Mortensen's son in The Road), who sparks up a friendship with an enigmatic girl (Chloë Moretz, currently slaying fanboys and criminals alike with her show-stopping turn as Hit-Girl in the Kick-Ass trailer), who it transpires is a centuries-old blood-sucker. Direction is being handled by Cloverfield man Matt Reeves, and intriguingly the film is the one of the first to be delivered by Hammer Films since that famous old name of British horror cinema was bought up by Dutch media tycoon John de Mol. He's the man who invented the Big Brother TV show, don't you know. So thanks for that, John.

Looking even further ahead though and we can discern what could yet prove to be the It, the Living Colossus of US foreign-language remakes, in the shape of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Already filmed in their native Sweden and released in much of Europe to bumper box-office, the triple-whammy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest are being lined up for an American makeover by producer Scott Rudin, with Kristen Stewart the current favourite to snare the role of Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual computer hacker with Asperger syndrome. Sure, an American version of Dragon Tattoo might not please everyone when it finally surfaces. But it could be one of the very few world cinema remakes to actually deliver the glorious green of which our movie exec dreams.