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seriousficSometimes, we Americans are silly. We'll remake a movie just because it's in a foreign language and has subtitles, even though foreign movies have stuff like casual nudity and ultraviolence that we haven't had since Reagan was in the Oval Office. Thanks Obama. But sometimes we Americans are really silly and remake a movie that's already in English, like Death At A Funeral.
Think about that a second. Funerals are pretty much the same on both sides of the ocean. Dead guy, box, ground. It's not like they set this movie at an Irish wake or did anything to examine how Americans cope with mortality as opposed to the British. It just has American accents. It's like if Hollywood made an Americanized Casino Royale where CIA agent Jim Bond goes to Las Vegas to beat the terrorist The Number at cards. Silly.
Well, in this case, they actually did something interesting and remade the movie with a mostly black cast, like Zoe Saldena, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock, that one guy who for some reason really makes me think of TBS, you know, the little dude? I kinda wish more unnecessary remakes, if they had to be made, would take that tack. Like the new Total Recall, which actually has less black people than the original movie (made when Reagan was President, natch). Would, say, Anthony Mackie, Zoe Saldena, and Halle Berry really have less starpower than Colin Farrell, Jessica Biel, and Kate Beckinsale? Maybe you could do something there with black identity and cultural politics and erasure, like this black guy has his shit recalled by white people and there's a metaphor in there and we can think about it when things aren't blowing up.
Here, though, it didn't really work out. One of the things the British version did was that it just presented a scenario and trusted that it was funny. It's England, everyone's reserved and solemn because it's a funeral, now there's a midget who's the dead guy's gay lover and he wants a pay-off. That's funny on its own. The American version adds more one-liners and mugging; like in the first scene, the funeral home accidentally sends the wrong body to the funeral.
In the original, it's funny because everyone's trying to be polite in this ridiculous situation. In the new one, Chris Rock gets angry because it's a Chinese corpse, so he says "You've got Jackie Chan in there!" because Jackie Chan is a Chinese man and so, uh... hunh. That actually seems a little offensive. Would he like it if the Chinese funeral looked at his dead father and said "It's Michael Jordan"? Maybe if it were a white guy and he said "That's Mike Huckabee!" I don't know, not that important.
Also, in the original, you have a guy creeping on a girl he had a one-night stand with and her telling him she's in a relationship. It's not an offensive thing, just something awkward and funny that's happening at the funeral. In the remake, they make him a bit nicer by having the girl's father pushing him into it so he's not such a creep. Okay. But also in the remake, this is the one interracial relationship, between Zoe Saldena and James Marsden, so maybe they're going to take the opportunity to say something about interracial relationships? But, no, the guy who Zoe Saldena's father approves of is also white, so...
(This also takes us to the weird situation where the father is disapproving of James Marsden, real-life Disney prince. In the original, it makes a bit more sense because it's Alan Tudyk and he's this awkward American guy in the middle of a British setting, but in the remake. C'mon. James Marsden.)
Peter Dinklage plays the gay midget lover in both versions. You know, it occurs to me that midget actors (I'm probably offending them by calling them that, I'm sorry, I never got what the proper term was? "Don't call us dwarves, we're midgets! Don't call us midgets, we're little people!" I just don't see where one is rude and another is polite...) have it rough. Lord of the Rings came out and we accepted them doing all these camera tricks to make Elijah Wood smaller instead of just hiring someone who's small, and that was okay because Hobbits aren't supposed to be midgets, they're just people with normal proportions who happen to be really short. But then you have Snow White And The Huntsman, where the dwarves are barely in it and they use camera tricks to make it look like Al Swearengen is a midget... why not just hire a midget?
And here, Dinklage has to play the same role twice. Like, they can find a white guy to replace Alan Tudyk, no problem, but the midget, they have to go back to the well. Maybe there are so few roles for midgets, maybe he just wanted to work with Chris Rock, I don't know. But it's like when it comes to black lead actors, there's really only Will Smith and Denzel Washington, everyone else has to do Tyler Perry movies. So the Dinklage thing is bad at both ends, because he has to do the same thing twice instead of moving on to play the friend in a romantic comedy or something, and because the studio won't take a chance on another midget actor. "We only need this one midget actor, he can play all the midget character, and if he's not available, we'll just make the normal people midgets with CGI." Something to think about.
Also, the remake adds a subplot where Martin Lawrence is trying to fuck a girl who recently turned eighteen, but it's the British one that invented the scene where an old man pooped on someone's hand. The remake just had it be Tracy Morgan that got pooped on, which I guess is an improvement.
Think about that a second. Funerals are pretty much the same on both sides of the ocean. Dead guy, box, ground. It's not like they set this movie at an Irish wake or did anything to examine how Americans cope with mortality as opposed to the British. It just has American accents. It's like if Hollywood made an Americanized Casino Royale where CIA agent Jim Bond goes to Las Vegas to beat the terrorist The Number at cards. Silly.
Well, in this case, they actually did something interesting and remade the movie with a mostly black cast, like Zoe Saldena, Martin Lawrence, Chris Rock, that one guy who for some reason really makes me think of TBS, you know, the little dude? I kinda wish more unnecessary remakes, if they had to be made, would take that tack. Like the new Total Recall, which actually has less black people than the original movie (made when Reagan was President, natch). Would, say, Anthony Mackie, Zoe Saldena, and Halle Berry really have less starpower than Colin Farrell, Jessica Biel, and Kate Beckinsale? Maybe you could do something there with black identity and cultural politics and erasure, like this black guy has his shit recalled by white people and there's a metaphor in there and we can think about it when things aren't blowing up.
Here, though, it didn't really work out. One of the things the British version did was that it just presented a scenario and trusted that it was funny. It's England, everyone's reserved and solemn because it's a funeral, now there's a midget who's the dead guy's gay lover and he wants a pay-off. That's funny on its own. The American version adds more one-liners and mugging; like in the first scene, the funeral home accidentally sends the wrong body to the funeral.
In the original, it's funny because everyone's trying to be polite in this ridiculous situation. In the new one, Chris Rock gets angry because it's a Chinese corpse, so he says "You've got Jackie Chan in there!" because Jackie Chan is a Chinese man and so, uh... hunh. That actually seems a little offensive. Would he like it if the Chinese funeral looked at his dead father and said "It's Michael Jordan"? Maybe if it were a white guy and he said "That's Mike Huckabee!" I don't know, not that important.
Also, in the original, you have a guy creeping on a girl he had a one-night stand with and her telling him she's in a relationship. It's not an offensive thing, just something awkward and funny that's happening at the funeral. In the remake, they make him a bit nicer by having the girl's father pushing him into it so he's not such a creep. Okay. But also in the remake, this is the one interracial relationship, between Zoe Saldena and James Marsden, so maybe they're going to take the opportunity to say something about interracial relationships? But, no, the guy who Zoe Saldena's father approves of is also white, so...
(This also takes us to the weird situation where the father is disapproving of James Marsden, real-life Disney prince. In the original, it makes a bit more sense because it's Alan Tudyk and he's this awkward American guy in the middle of a British setting, but in the remake. C'mon. James Marsden.)
Peter Dinklage plays the gay midget lover in both versions. You know, it occurs to me that midget actors (I'm probably offending them by calling them that, I'm sorry, I never got what the proper term was? "Don't call us dwarves, we're midgets! Don't call us midgets, we're little people!" I just don't see where one is rude and another is polite...) have it rough. Lord of the Rings came out and we accepted them doing all these camera tricks to make Elijah Wood smaller instead of just hiring someone who's small, and that was okay because Hobbits aren't supposed to be midgets, they're just people with normal proportions who happen to be really short. But then you have Snow White And The Huntsman, where the dwarves are barely in it and they use camera tricks to make it look like Al Swearengen is a midget... why not just hire a midget?
And here, Dinklage has to play the same role twice. Like, they can find a white guy to replace Alan Tudyk, no problem, but the midget, they have to go back to the well. Maybe there are so few roles for midgets, maybe he just wanted to work with Chris Rock, I don't know. But it's like when it comes to black lead actors, there's really only Will Smith and Denzel Washington, everyone else has to do Tyler Perry movies. So the Dinklage thing is bad at both ends, because he has to do the same thing twice instead of moving on to play the friend in a romantic comedy or something, and because the studio won't take a chance on another midget actor. "We only need this one midget actor, he can play all the midget character, and if he's not available, we'll just make the normal people midgets with CGI." Something to think about.
Also, the remake adds a subplot where Martin Lawrence is trying to fuck a girl who recently turned eighteen, but it's the British one that invented the scene where an old man pooped on someone's hand. The remake just had it be Tracy Morgan that got pooped on, which I guess is an improvement.
