Pinch Punch, First Day Of The Month

Following on from the last post: Stylus Magazine has closed it's doors this week also, I have learned. Not as much of a blow to me as DavisDVD, but a loss all the same.

I was having a lesson about 'Negotiated Meanings' this morning, with my student James. We came around to talking primarily about two films - Blade Runner and The Matrix. One he loved and one he didn't like at all. Much to my dismay, it was The Matrix he loved. After we went back and forth about it for ten or fifteen minutes, with me pulling up all kinds of issues with the film, or all manner of defenses or new avenues of understanding Blade Runner, we finally got to the heart of what the lesson was supposed to be about, just not in the way I anticipated. James was now accepting that the plot of The Matrix appeared to make little or no sense, but still asked "Maybe we're missing something. I don't believe they'd make a film that makes no sense at all".

Well, they did. And they will continue to make such films. And people will continue to passively sit back and have them shovelled into their open mouths. But I hope James has come one step closer to believing that he shouldn't simply assume the filmmakers know better than he does. Thinking that the Wachowskis actually know entirely what they're talking about might be sweetly naive but it's just one example of why we're constantly peddled half-conceived, tangled and ludicrous guff.

Definitely not talking of which: the production of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is now officially official in a mentioned-in-Variety kind of way. They have no new information to share, sadly, but at least word of a new Gilliam film is spreading.

Other Variety stories from today tell us that the comic book Hyperactive is to become a film courtesy of MTV and Benmderspink; Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control is to star Isaach de Bankole and will film in Spain next spring with an 'internationally appealing' cast; Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are reteaming in Tony Gilroy's corporate caper-flick Duplicity, which sounds to me like a cross between The Water Engine and The Spanish Prisoner though, most likely, will be very little like either; Meryl Streep is to play julia Child for Nora Ephron, with Amy Adams in a supporting role; Richard Curtis has described The Boat That Rocks like this: Eight of the most extreme disc jockeys you've ever imagined having to live in a corridor, and a corridor that moved. And with no girls." I can't wait to hear the casting for this one.

I know there's a huge amount of fuss across the web at the moment because Spaced is to get remade for US TV. Here's the bad news: neither Edgar Wrigtht or Simon Pegg have been consulted which is, at the very least, rude; that Adam Barr, the scriptwriter hardly has a sterling resume with Will and Grace being his highest profile gig; that it's being remade for Fox, who are likely to be less willing tot ake risks or field esoteric material than the UK's Channel 4, home of the original.

And now here's the good news: Adam Barr is untested enough that, actually, he might have the right stuff. Who saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer lurking in the scripts Joss Whedon wrote for Roseanne? Nobody. And Greg Garcia's Yes, Dear fell far, far short of My Name is Earl - at least the good episodes of My Name is Earl. There's no way I'm coming down on McG, either - I think the Charlies Angels films are just fine, thankyou. Indeed, they're really rather good examples of their subgenre and show a wide bunch of capabilities, skills and sensitivities that get overlooked. And, in many ways, he shows a failry suitable outlook for a project like Spaced.

The original Spaced isn't going to go away and a remake can't actually taint it in any real way. What it could do, however, is be its own thing, a new series that takes Edgar, Simon and Jessica Hynes' work as a starting point before developing an identity of it's own. Let's wait and see how good or bad it is before we deem it (as some online voices have) the worst UK-to-US sitcom transfer ever. Surely it has every chance of being much better than Damon Wayans in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em? Of course, that one isn't geek treasure, is it? Frank Spencer isn't going to get the spod army up in arms.

Despite being one of the best sitcoms of all time Spaced was nowhere nearly as good as people pretend, having several cop-outs, weak jokes and indulgent passages scattered amongst all of the really great stuff; Shaun of the Dead is probably even better than its reputation; Hot Fuzz was very good but had enough frustrating loose ends, distancing stylistic tics and confused elements to disappoint hugely. My point is: reamking Spaced should be considerably less controversial than remaking, say, Halloween. More controversial than remaking ET, perhaps - but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed.

Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg are two of the best writers at work today and Edgar is one of the better directors but neither of them is so unfathomably masterful that I can't conceive of their work being untouchable. Like Whedon, Tarantino and Rodriguez before them, it seems like they have been elevated to godly status by a horde of geeks desperate for representation and identification, irrrespective of the quality of their work. When the backlash comes, I fear it is going to be cruel and harsh and utterly without rationale - but it is going to come, for sure. Just like it came for the others.

And, while we're still sort of on the subject, the US version of The Office is much, much better than the often tiresome UK original and I'll never back down over that argument.

This whole fuss reminds me of the age-old tussle about cover versions. For my money, I'd like the cover to be markedly different from the original - otherwise, why bother in the first place? A straight-up rehash is only one step away from overdubbing a foreign language film, in truth - it only gets done to serve up a castrated version to the lazy, ignorant or bigoted folk who won't bother with or are frightened of the different cultural phasing of the first version. Actually remaking something is like creating a sibling, a side version, a new beastie with new cultural roots of its own and while this often fails spectacularly, or is often an utterly pointless enterprise to begin with (*cough* Rob Zombie *cough*) , it certainly doesn't deny anybody a chance to see the original.

And before you complain that Spaced isn't available on R1 DVD, let me remind you that there's no excuse for not owning a multi-region player.

Postscript: I'd love to remake ET.