For years, maybe decades, the complaint about Broadway is that most shows are revivals or adaptations.  In Hollywood, it's remakes and sequels.

But apparently this is true in the book world as well, to a greater extent than I had thought: " Star Characters, Spun Anew, May Live Well More Than Twice "

Of course, like the "whitewashing" I talked about last time, this endless rehashing of old characters and stories is a commercial decision, not an artistic one.

I read an interview with Len Wiseman, the director of the Total Recall remake, and he said he had been trying to make an original big-budget science-fiction picture, but he couldn't get the money. Studios weren't willing to pay for that, but they were willing to pay for him to remake Total Recall. So, that's what he did.

Which is why we have a movie series and at least two TV shows about Sherlock Holmes.  And, in addition to hundreds of other TV shows about vampires, there is now a show called "Dracula" (though, based on what I've read, it seems only tenuously connected to the book that Bram Stoker wrote).

And, because the Ironside remake was so successful (sarcasm – it's already canceled), now they're doing a remake of Murder She Wrote.

So, what do you think of all of these remakes and sequels? And, if you don't like them, are there any exceptions? For example, I do intend to see Les Miserables when it comes back to Broadway next year. 🙂

I read an interesting blog post over at Maggie Madly Writing called, "Race and Ethnicity in Fiction." (I borrowed her title, too, because I couldn't think of a better one.)

The thing about "whitewashing" in a movie (casting nonwhite characters as white) is that it's a commercial decision. Let's pander to the lowest common denominator and maybe we'll get a few more people into the theater. As a friend of mine said when people complained that a Hunger Games character, who was Black, was played by a Black actress, because they hadn't figured out she was Black when they were reading the book: "I don't know what's more upsetting, the racism or the lack of basic reading comprehension."

But it can be interesting to go the other way, to cast a traditionally white character as non-white. Because, in a lot of cases, the default choice is for all characters to be white (and straight, and in some genres, male) unless the plot demands they be something else. The fact is that for some characters it matters and for some it doesn't. Nick Fury and Alicia Masters were white in the comic books, but there's nothing about the characters that demands that they be white (unlike, for example, Bruce Wayne).

Chris Claremont, a seminal writer for the X-Men comic book early on (back when there was only one X-Men title 🙂 ), used to get mocked because, whenever there was an idea for a new character he would aways ask,"Is there any reason this character couldn't be a woman?" Which is rather mechanical solution, but when pretty much all solo books had male heroes, and superhero teams were all either all male or male with a token female, sometimes you have to hammer at things to loosen them up a bit.

There's a book nowadays called simply "X-Men," and team it's about is all women (and, so far, none of the characters has even commented on this). Comic books these days, in general, are pretty evenly balanced on this question (and, as I said before, it's interesting that the title which carries the tag "Earth's Mightiest Hero" is about a woman).

Of course, if you want to revisit the old days for some reason, you can see the Avengers movie. 🙂

As I said on Maggie 's blog: "...I do think that you can’t just take a character and change his or her race (or, for that matter, change their sex or preference, or their religion). I’ve tried this with some of my characters, as a mental exercise, and it’s been interesting. You start to see what defines characters (and what doesn’t — the areas where the flexibility is). You also come up against the fact that not everybody has access to the same types of life experiences. Which is not an argument against diversity, just against the idea that characters can simply be flipped in one direction or another."

The Hollywood remake of Let the Right One In (Let Me In) was pretty good, but it as nowhere near the original, and one very particular annoyance was that [spoilers!] the sex of one of the characters was changed, making it a pre-teen straight romance (with vampires), instead of what it was in the original (and the book), which was a pre-teen trans love story (with vampires). A lot of people saw the original without picking up on that, which is fine, but for those who did get it, it added a whole additional layer of meaning to some of the scenes. The filmmaker tried to pass this off as a detail, but I don't think a character's sex (or race, etc.) is just a detail, especially when that "detail" is being changed because of the danger that somebody, somewhere, might be offended.

Theater, being a less literal medium, has more flexibility than TV or movies. Lea Salonga can play Eponine in Les Miserables without Eponine being Asian (which she clearly isn't, since we see her parents and it wouldn't make sense in terms of the story anyway). She's just an actress from the Philippines playing a French girl. Many actresses have played Hamlet, and I was just reading about a production of Julius Caesar with all the roles being played by women (and one of Orson Welles' earliest successes was an all-Black "voodoo" production of Macbeth).

In books you have a flexibility that you don't have in movies, television, or even theater: to simply not say what race a character is, or to introduce a character and to delay the information, as I talked about here. You can even, as Sarah Caudwell did in her excellent mysteries, not reveal the sex of your narrator.

I've watched some of Hemingway & Gellhorn – I guess about half. It was okay. I may or may not watch the rest. I sometimes think I know more than enough about Hemingway's life anyway.

Nicole Kidman was excellent (of course) as Gellhorn (wife #3, if you're keeping track). At the beginning, she addresses the camera, as Gellhorn much older (attention, Ridley Scott: this is how you do old age makeup).

But this intro ends with her (referring to love), saying, "I'm a war correspondent." Kidman paused, and I said, "But of course, there are wars and there are wars." And then she said, "Of course, there are wars and there are wars."

This is usually a bad sign. This level of predictability can work in some situations, but mostly it doesn't.

Also, Clive Owen is not a good fit as Hemingway. My mental image of Hemingway was set by Stacy Keach, who played him in a TV miniseries a long time ago. Owen is a very good actor (he's great in Gosford Park), but I'm not buying him as Hemingway.

An example of when predictability does work? The movie LA Confidential, where Exley (Guy Pearce) and Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) are talking, and Exley tells the story of why he became a cop, and then he asks Vincennes the same question.

We've seen that Vincennes is corrupt, and a cop celebrity, and a guy who floats through life without working very hard because he's smarter than everybody else, and his only possible (honest) response to the question of why he became a cop is: "I don't remember." The entire movie has been leading up to him saying those three words.

But Spacey, working at his absolute best, shows us every slow step of Vincennes realizing this, and it's magnificent.

Hemingway & Gellhorn is not operating at anywhere near that level, so the predictability is the other kind, the kind you don't want.

Have you ever had that happen – that one clunky moment early on made you wary of an entire novel or movie?