The Wicker Man (original v remake)
bamboozled by my daughter into going to see this latest Hollywood offering of unoriginality, i didn't expect very much, and I wasn't wrong. Truly, the trailer is the best thing about it. Cage does a competent job although he's very much reprising his roles in (better) films like 8mm, but the film relies on a b*st*rdised style of Japanese supernatural horror (which is fine in its' indigineous genre) and it just doesn't work. Can't fault the production values, well shot certainly, good use of colour, but far too much emphasis placed on the shock-horrror let's make the audience jump out of their seats. Even if I hadn't seen the original many times, I'd still have found this dull fare and utterly predictable. Sadly it's an unsophisticated tale of straighforward good v. evil, lacking any real depth and replacing substance with style and not doing it well enough to make a satisfying experience.
The 1973 original is a truly suspenseful drama which, apart from the fashions of the time, hasn't dated. Woodward and Lee are perfectly cast, with all sorts of delightful little performances from supporting characters. The film contrasts the self-denying puritanism of the policeman with the hedonistic indulgence of the pagan islanders, who, despite their conspiracy, don't come out of it as being necessarily "evil," certainly not by the values they espouse in the film, whilst the policeman, despite representing not just law and order, but civilised "Christian" values, comes across as a prig and equally self-indulgent in his denial of his "baser" nature. As Lord Summerisle declares to him, at the final denoument of the mystery, the islanders have given him a rare gift these days, a martyrdom, and he will sit with the elect at the right-hand of the Lord. The film is full of wonderful symbolism and is perhaps the only musical, if you can call it that, where it seems quite natural for the characters to burst into song spontaneously.
I watched it again when we got back and the only thing I found to dislike in it was Britt Ekland's performance - not that it wasn't necessary for the character she played, but I don't think she really carried it off well. I'd also quite forgotten that Ingrid Pitt and a host of other Hammer stars were in it, ias well as Christopher Lee, all of them putting in quality performances far above their usual Hammer fare.
And I'm quite convinced that the landlord of the Green Man Inn was the inspiration for the mad Scottish hotelier in Little Britain...
the spate of remakes over the last few years has truly been dreadful, I haven't seen a good one yet. Anyone think of one that's been ok?