This is the time when we look eagerly – or cautiously – towards the entertainments that are coming our way over the next year. It hardly needs to be said that a fair few remakes are moving inexorably towards cinemas. More than one stars the man who used to be known as The Rock.
Mr Dwayne Johnson (for it is he) will be appearing in retreads of the TV series Baywatch and the film Jumanji. “Who’s going to see those?” you snort contemptuously. I’ll tell you who, imaginary interlocutor: bleeding everybody. The former wrestler is cinema’s biggest money-earner and there are millions of people who remember those entertainments with affection.
Okay, even the biggest fans of Baywatch – even Pamela Anderson and David Hasselhoff, I'm betting – accept that cheese and camp were part of that show's appeal. If it were a little less terrible it would have been entirely unwatchable.
The following for Jumanji thinks differently. Let us sample some of the comments at the Internet Movie Database. “They’re so desperate to make more money that they remake true beauty of the cinema and timeless classics,” muffinsmom-86558 writes. “I mean if they remake The Godfather or Psycho or something like that I am SO out.”
Petition
Do you have the heart to tell muffinsmom that they remade Psycho in 1998? I don’t. Somebody called “cweier” is setting up a petition to have the production halted. “Hollywood has become a swamp of sellout joke artists who have no originality by taking the amazing movies of our childhood and ruining them for the future generations with substandard scripts, bad directing, and horrible casting decisions,” he says.
You tell them, cweier.
The good news is that, if your petition fails to sway Sony Pictures, N_e_g_a_n is arranging a boycott. You know? Like those civil rights activists who bravely defied the racist bus authority in Birmingham, Alabama.
What the hell is going on here? Has the world gone mad? The original Jumanji was completely terrible. Everyone thought it was terrible at the time and there was no great urge to make a sequel.
The suggestion that Jumanji – a crackpot 1995 family fantasy starring the late Robin Williams at his most agitated – is a "timeless classic" would be funny if that suggestion hadn't depressed me by planting Jumanji in my brain. God forbid the reboot should have a "substandard script".
There is a lot of this cultural amnesia about the place. When David Bowie died, enthusiasts quite correctly praised (calm down, I haven't gone totally barmy) the saucy glam-era rock, the gorgeous plastic soul and the innovations of the Berlin era. There were also deserved tributes for his performance in Nicolas Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth. And, of course, cinemas swelled with sold-out screenings of Jim Henson's Labyrinth.
Appalling
Hang on. Let’s step back a moment. Labyrinth was useless and David Bowie was appalling in it: Widow Twankey attempting an impersonation of Kajagoogoo. The film got iffy reviews and tanked at the box office. Remembering Bowie for Labyrinth is akin to remembering
Brad Pitt
for that notorious early Pringle’s commercial.
Recall when, in late 2015, we reached the day that, in Back to the Future II, Michael J Fox visits the film’s imagined future. The news channels had great fun discussing what the “1980s classic” predicted we’d be eating and wearing.
I’ll tell you one thing Back to the Future didn’t predict. It didn’t predict that, a quarter of a century hence, we’d be so pathetically in thrall to nostalgia that we’d redefine a chaotic placeholder as some sort of beloved masterpiece.
Back to the Future II was the one where, in state of panic between the excellent opening episode and the perfectly satisfactory last part, Robert Zemeckis throws everything at the screen and prays that it sticks. It was lazy. It was boring. And it made no sense whatsoever.
Did you watch that Stranger Things on Netflix? It was all right, I suppose. The kids were good and the mystery was interesting until they were forced to boringly solve it.
Then there were the continuing tributes to The Goonies. That just didn’t work. After all, Stranger Things was reasonably diverting. The Goonies was a turgid, derivative bore that struggled to justify its far from enormous running time.
Maybe it was ever thus. Maybe my generation pretends that stuff we grew up with in the 1970s was better than any objective analysis would now conclude. George Lucas, born in the 1940s, made Star Wars under the influence of the original Flash Gordon and it was unforgivably atrocious.
We simply can’t trust ourselves to responsibly assess the popular culture we sucked in as children. You’d want to hear my lot on the Singing Ringing Tree. All is forgiven.
