remaking hollywood

[mjraine at uchicago.edu]

---- Original message ----
>________________
>Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 13:02:55 -0500
>From: "Jerry Turner" <jdturner1 at gmail.com>  
>Subject: Re: Japan remaking Hollywood?  
>To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
>
>   It'll be funny if remaking American movies becomes a
>   trend in Japan---and they turn out better than the
>   originals.
>

Depending on how you define "remake" I'd say that Japanese
films have been doing this for almost a century.... Citation
and intertextuality, if not outright remakes, seem to have
been part of a cinephilic "operational aesthetic" in Japanese
cinema, especially during the period when the geopolitical
incline between Japan and the West was steep. Ozu was one of
the most active practitioners, but was far from alone. His
film titles often hint at the release titles of foreign films
and it's hard to ignore the references to French, German, and
US cinema, especially in his prewar films. Maybe this Sideways
remake is actually a good thing ... OK, maybe not! It does
seem a strange film to fuel a wine boom though: isn't the wine
obsession a sign of the character's narcissism, or something?
Cinephiles beware ...

Michael