ENOUGH With The Remakes

you know the older I get the more I've come to realize how [ __ ] lucky I was to grow up in the 1990s it was a simpler more optimistic more innocent decade when movies were still awesome Britannia was still cool people didn't get [ __ ] offended by everything Lara Croft was an awesome ass-kicking Adventurer with a fantastic pair of uh guns instead of a miserable waste of polygons that constantly apologizes for existing it was a time when going online was a once a week treat that cost 10 pounds an hour and required a trip to a special Cafe instead of an all-consuming dystopian nightmare where people spend millions of man hours arguing with 12 year old Edge Lords on the other side of the worlds it was also the era of the Disney Renaissance a roughly 10-year period of unbridled creativity and Commercial Success when Disney's Animation Studios cranked out classic movies like Beauty and the Beast The Little Mermaid Pocahontas The Lion King Hercules Mulan and Tarzan they were fun exciting heartwarming Adventures that dealt with Timeless themes and ideas and if you were a young kid in the mid 90s like me then I can pretty much guarantee you knew the soundtracks to these films off by horror truly it seemed like Disney could do no wrong oh how times have changed the wide-eyed kids of the 90s are now cynical 30-somethings weighed down by the responsibilities of adult life probably with [ __ ] kids of their own and quietly pining for the simple Carefree days of their childhoods meanwhile the once family friendly and patriotic Disney has mutated into a horrifyingly monstrous parody of its former self an insatiable franchise gobbling monster relentlessly consuming good ideas and beloved characters to churn out an endless conveyor belt of bland mediocre sludge and since original creative thinking is for them what Innovation and risk-taking is for NASA it was only natural that they'd inevitably turn their eyes towards the past instead of the future sure and truly what better pass to pilfer than the Golden Age of animated movies I mean they certainly got off to a strong start with Beauty and the Beast a live-action remake of the 1991 original which basically replicated the entire movie shot for shots sure you could probably argue how lazy it was to basically make the same exact film again and sell it to a whole new generation but who the [ __ ] cares Disney certainly didn't especially when it made a [ __ ] zillion dollars for them talk about money for old rope why take the chance on new unproven ideas when you can basically dust off old scripts and sell people's childhoods back to them at an inflated price the floodgates were well and truly open and before you knew it we were getting bombarded with modern day remakes of classic animated movies the only problem is that with each new installment they got progressively more shits but hey they made the company [ __ ] tons of money so who cares well all of that changed with the release of Mulan A couple of years ago a film that went wrong in basically everywhere way possible for a start it released in the middle of a global pandemic when the prospect of going to the cinema was about as appealing as a colonic irrigation using habanero chiles attempts to Pander to the Chinese market backfired spectacularly since it [ __ ] up most aspects of Chinese culture and history and for rather obvious reasons Western audiences weren't exactly thrilled by all things Chinese at that time either as a result the film bombed and it wasn't the only one to attract negative attention the first teaser trailer for the upcoming remake of The Little Mermaid has got one of the most brutal YouTube ratios since Frost decided to public like torpedo her own company live on air and to be honest it's not entirely hard to see why because this movie basically exemplifies everything that's bad about these [ __ ] remakes and no I'm not talking about the fact that the actor playing a mythical sea monster has got slightly different melanin levels in her skin Disney baited the fans with that one because they knew they could use the resulting backlash to silence any actual criticism of the movie and they fell for it hook line and sinker okay that's enough nautical references for now the bigger issues are more fundamental ones that you can apply to basically all of the Disney remake movies I mean for a start take a look at the color pilot of this thing look how dark and muted and subdued everything is and then compare it to the original animated movie you see how much more bright and vibrant and interesting that world looks yeah it's completely unrealistic that the deep ocean would look this way but it doesn't really matter because it's an animated movie with its own visual style and that style allows the artist to set their own rules for how you engage with it as the audience but the moment you bring live action into the equation you immediately constrain yourself with the limitations of what people expect to see in the Real Worlds that means the deep ocean is now a dark and foreboding place where area was framed like some kind of terrifying monster instead of a Plucky heroine longing to experience the world above Jesus if you swap out the soundtrack for a horror theme the face reveal feels like it should be more like this this particular problem was especially noticeable in The Lion King where the animators had been given the almost impossible task of anthropods anthropomorphic anthropologies [ __ ] humanizing the animal characters while also keeping them looking photorealistic and the results were uh take a look at the original movie you see how expressive and compelling the performances are yeah obviously real animals can't move talking gesticularly anything like this but it doesn't matter because just like The Little Mermaid movie it's an animated film with its own rules about how these things work so it becomes very easy to suspend your disbelief supposedly realistic CGI on the other hand doesn't have that luxury and Jesus Christ don't even get me started about Will Smith and Aladdin got a Miss traditional cell animation yeah I know it's more labor intensive and I know it can't deliver anything like the detail you get in Pixar movies but holy [ __ ] there's just something so much more satisfying about it knowing that actual artists had to draw and animate this stuff frame by frame instead of pre-built character models run in a series of program movements it's just so much more human and Charming every [ __ ] Pixar movie nowadays looks exactly like the one that came before it they all have the same Bland generic Solace look about them like you're eating a meal from the same basic ingredients only arranged in a slightly different way I mean would it kill movie studios to release the occasional film using traditional animation for once another issue that's been coming up more and more with these remakes is the alteration of characters and storylines to appeal to Modern audiences it started out with little things like Emma Watson insisting that Bell be an inventor an engineer in Beauty and the Beast because I guess being a fun-loving intelligent young woman desperate to get out into the wider world and escaping vicariously through the medium of books just wasn't enough for her she had to make her into Elon [ __ ] musk as well but whatever it was just a minor change that didn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things but what it did do was set the precedent the problems however became more severe in Mulan which basically reworked to the protagonist's entire character Arc to Pander to the insufferable modern convention that female characters have to be fundamentally great at everything right off the bat no inspiring lessons about the value of hard work and perseverance here it was all about appealing to female empowerment in the laziest most superficial way possible speaking of which here's a little hint from a January 2022 interview with star Halle Bailey about the direction The Little Mermaid is going to take I think everyone will be pleasantly surprised by some updates of the themes of the film more so on Ariel's site of women empowerment and her taking her power back I mean I thought the original aerial was pretty empowered already considering she saves Prince Eric's life on more than one occasion and her decisions Drive the entire course of the story but whatever I guess because she occasionally needs help from other people she's just not modern enough can't wait for Eric to be transformed into the same useless bumbling buffoon template that Disney used for every single male character in their movies these days and Ariel to be an Unstoppable Kick-Ass girl boss who fixes everything all by herself modern writing everyone [ __ ] knows what it must be like to be a little boy growing up in the 2020s the sad thing though is that actresses like Halle Bailey are going to get unfairly caught up in the crossfire here I mean I'm sure she's a perfectly nice person that will do a great job with the role but none of that really matters because all people are talking about now is the backlash against her Casting and for what if the real objective here was to create more lead roles for diverse actors which is absolutely a good thing then why not come up with new stories specifically for them instead of deliberately stirring up controversy by crowbar and them into stories that have already been told there's an entire world of Rich cultural Traditions Legends and folklore from every conceivable country race and Creed just waiting for you to try out so why keep retreading the same ground over and over again why keep retelling stories that have already been told far better by previous generations [Music] oh yeah of course and I guess that's what this really comes down to a quick easy and reliable way of making money that requires minimal investment of risk or Creative Energy it's the same reason that lucasfilm keeps digging at the hollowed out core of Star Wars why Paramount subjects us to endless Star Trek prequels like Amazon are trying to launch their very own Game of Thrones using tolkien's Legacy as a billion dollar canvas to finger paint on and it all just feels so Hollow and meaningless like these stories were generated by some AI in a lab somewhere in order to generate the highest return possible on investments I mean I'm under no illusions that big movie studios were ever particularly invested in artistic expression but holy [ __ ] there was at least a pretense of trying to tell a worthwhile story along the way the movies of the Disney Renaissance are so fondly remembered now because they struck the perfect balance between Timeless ideas likable characters contemporary humor creative talent and vibrant colorful anime they sold themselves on their own merits instead of resorting to member berries or cheap manufacturer controversy to drum up interest and as a result they had to be really [ __ ] good in order to work and that's the problem what we're producing Now isn't it's like last night's stale dinner quickly reheated in a microwave and plonked on your plate but Drinker you magnanimous Maestro of media mastication I hear you say why worry about this stuff when the original movies are always going to exist no matter how bad things get now we can always fire up the classic originals and make sure that the next generation gets to enjoy the kind of Timeless entertainment we did as kids oh you sweet summer child you the problem is that fewer and fewer people bother to invest in physical media these days because I guess the effort of heaving their Fat Sweaty asses off the couch and shoving our disc into a player it's just too big of a Time sink in their busy lives instead they resort to doing what pretty much everyone else does these days and download their movies from a streaming service but the big problem problem with digital media is that you don't really own the thing that you're watching all you've got is a license to download the source file and if that source file should ever be removed or altered well then you're [ __ ] out of luck we've already seen the little edits and tweaks that companies have started making to older movies that are now considered problematic how long do you really think it's going to be before it starts happening to newer stuff movies that contain scenes or depictions or story beats that someone somewhere in some miserable corner of Twitter finds offensive characters that don't quite align with the rules of modern writing storylines that go against the message the fact is the past is no longer sacred and it definitely isn't safe because there are fewer and fewer people who care about preserving it it's more vulnerable than ever to the Insidious grasping manipulations of the presents little by little scene by scene movie by movie the stories that once captivated and inspired us are being quietly removed and supplanted by Cheap cynical soulless reproductions and if we're not careful if we don't push back against this [ __ ] while there's still time then we may just find ourselves in a world where there's nothing left to protect anyway that's all I've got for today go away now

Channel: The Critical Drinker

Views: 2,814,281

Keywords: critical drinker, review, funny, feminism, feminist, reboot, remake, reimagining

Id: ZU453ZDqTG4

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 20 2022