“Should studios continue bringing back the ‘80s?”
From the always excellent Steve Zeitchik at LA Times “24 Frames,” this question: Should studios continue bringing back the 80's?:
If this movie-going summer was to yield nothing else, it was at least bring us this: clarity about Hollywood’s investment in reviving the 1980s.
And no weekend would throw more light on that question than this one, with its unlikely coincidence of two major ’80s properties hitting the screen at the same time. All we needed to feel more like we were back in Reaganville were Billy Joel and Madonna solving a Rubik’s Cube while “Knight Rider” and “The Cosby Show” played in the background.
And yet as the weekend wound down, we were left with little clarity at all. The verdict was as split as opinions on “Twin Peaks” — one movie, “The Karate Kid,” overachieved at the box office, and the other, “The A-Team,” sputtered behind it ($30 million behind it).
That would seem to give no indication of anything, except for maybe Hollywood’s go-to trope: The movie has to deliver, regardless of its era of origin. Conceived under the hand of could-his-stock-drop-any-faster Joe Carnahan, “The A-Team” was a fusillade of nonsensical noise, and audiences saw right through it. On the other hand, “The Karate Kid,” while hardly representing a breakthrough in cinematic accomplishment (or a narrative or emotional triumph over the original), did what Hollywood arguably does best: produce a competent entertainment that offers few surprises but succeeds completely as a crowd-pleaser.
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By chance, we happened to catch on cable this weekend two truly great pop classics from the ’80s, “Field of Dreams” and “Back to the Future.” (It’s almost as if cable programmers, aware of how the ’80s were being tortured on the big screen, decided to slip in a little reminder of how it’s really done).
Obviously the Me Decade had more than its share of stinkers and mass-marketed schlock too. But what struck us from watching these two films, which existed not in the art house ghetto but as broad hits at the multiplex, is how different they feel from the current crop in one key respect: their fundamental grasp of storytelling, which in both films came off as effortless and intuitive in a way that few movies do these days [emphasis added].
We’ve been on the whole 80s trend for a long time:
Film studios ramping up remakes
Patting ourselves on the back aside, the point Zeitchik makes re Field of Dreams and Back to the Future is instructive. Both movies were written by top screenwriters, the former by Phil Alden Robinson who adapted W.P. Kinsella’s novel “Shoeless Joe,” the latter by the writing team of Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale. Also it’s undoubtedly helpful that Robinson and Zemeckis directed both movies, providing more coherence between the written word and what finally appeared on screen. Bottom line: Both are good stories.
Re The Karate Kid and The A-Team, there’s this: The former was based on a movie that already worked as a good story; the latter was a based on a series concept and a set of characters — no underlying story.
But wait, maybe the 80s thing is getting played out. Word yesterday that producer Mark Gordon has set out to remake Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. That movie was released in 1991!
So now it’s time for a slew of 90s remakes!
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