American Movie Redux

Borrowing artistic material from an earlier, financially proven source is a venerable tradition in the entertainment industry. The Cary Grant-Jimmy Stewart-Katherine Hepburn romantic comedy of 1940, The Philadelphia Story, was rehashed, the second time with music, in the 1956 fluffy remake High Society. Both films were successes in the Hollywood Golden Age, and perhaps because of the luminosity of the remake's cast, which included Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and a cheerful, if somewhat bemusing, Louis Armstrong, few critics, if any, seemed overly concerned with its patent lack of originality.

In a time when Hollywood was little more than a factory town, albeit one in which streets seemed paved with gold, audiences rarely minded the similarity of the two pictures at a matinee double feature, so long as the movies provided what the audience had paid for: wall-to-wall stars.

If the '40s and '50s were the decades of star power, then the '70s was the decade of director power. Moviegoers were no longer satisfied by the movies of the previous generation, which amounted to little more than animated versions of People, just a collection of glossy superstar after glossy superstar. Directors became auteurs, agents of aesthetic prophecy, and the actors who starred in the classics of this period were not luminous and radiant, but dark and smoldering.

The '80s saw an atavistic response to the psychological exploration of the '70s, and returned to the formulaic, star-centered productions. John Hughes assumed the mantle of Busby Berkeley, creating formulaic but well-loved movies that featured the same cast in every release. Yet these films were successful because, just like the '80s themselves, no one demanded artistic treatises but rather mere entertainment. Perhaps tired from the pontification of the previous decade, there was a gentle relief in watching the madcap adventures of the Lovable Everyman, a position for which the plucky Michael J. Fox and the even more plucky Matthew Broderick competed throughout the decade.

In recent years, the times have changed but the movies have not. This summer's supposed blockbusters had the appeal of the back of a cereal box, and the proof of this was in their dismal box office records. Time after time, movies would open to enormous ticket sales, only to disappear from the marquee the following weekend. The tried and true movie-making methods that catapulted first the Rat Pack and then the Brat Pack to stardom are employed once again, but now with the wrongheaded sanctimony that is the distorted inheritance left by the auteurs of the '70s.

Movies are once again meant to have transformative power and are anticipated with a sacerdotal attentiveness, but, upon a single viewing, are revealed to be nothing more than numbing remakes of the same formulae. The otherwordly piety accompanying today's releases throttles the glee seen in the '40s, '50s, and '80s, rendering them impotent.

Movies such as Cast Away, Pearl Harbor, and A.I. proported to be sweeping epics capable of fundamentally altering how we viewed the epic blockbuster. Following the lead of Schindler's List, these movies attempted to investigate thorny metaphysical and moral issues while still having plenty of titillating onscreen action. By and large, they failed; one left the theater with the feeling that three hours had been wasted on a movie which was the same as one which had been released a decade earlier and an hour shorter.

Cast Away demonstrated the strength in solitude, the triumph of the lone hero whose greatest foe is himself. Hollywood was abuzz with the brio of Tom Hanks, who would appear by himself for a majority of the picture. No one, it seems, remembers Aidan Quinn doing the same in 1988's Crusoe, or even L'Ours of the following year, which not only starred a bear, but also contained only a few spoken words during its entire running time.

Pearl Harbor was intended as a war epic fashioned after The Bridge Over the River Kwai, meant to honestly commemorate a real-life moment of heroism but not to be blindly fawning of it. Pearl Harbor failed miserably, fabricating events and characters, yielding to the pressure of featuring heartthrobs whether or not their heroic roles were actually present, and generally denegrating the event by covering it in a coat of sugary schlock.

A.I., the supposed masterwork of two celebrated directors, became the insipid work of just one. The trope of a robotic child was dealt with many times before; Anna to the Infinite Power, though aimed at a younger crowd, in fact handled the issue of artificial beings coexisting with the beings who created them much more deftly and without relying on the narrative crutch of fairytale allegories.

Theaters witnessed a spate of sequels this summer, from American Pie 2 to Dr. Dolittle 2 to The Mummy Returns. The most surprising aspect of these movies is that The Mummy Returns, in the tradition of the Look Who's Talking saga, managed to come up with a title that didn't incorporate the number "two." Bravo. These sequels, though centered not on morality but on levity, suffered nonetheless from being nothing more than just straight remakes of the originals. In fact, they were much like Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes: remakes which were foisted as something altogether different. The characters were not developed, but that's forgivable; but the jokes were nearly exactly the same as before, and the audience was stonefaced with familiarity.

Luckily, there is a shimmer of hope. Several movies this summer broke the mold of being insulting remakes of better movies and could actually be considered original. Memento, Moulin Rouge (despite spawning the hideous single Lady Marmalade), and Bubble Boy tried to do something onscreen that had never been done before. Though they were of greatly varying success, these movies speak of a promise which one day will actually create rather than recreate.