Rick Koster offers weekly lists of ideas, notions and things that must be seen to be believed
Were you one of the 23 American citizens who actually saw the recent remake of “Point Break”?
The original sucked so much that it became one of the greatest films of all time. There’s almost no way to top that seeming contradiction — and, as such, that the remake sucked at sucking doesn’t mean it, too, was a great film, but instead that it just sucked with relentless suck-ocity.
I predicted this in a Rick’s List almost a year ago, lamenting in general about film remakes — and of course I was right. I’ve decided that the next fertile exercise in artistic stinkery will be to re-write already-published novels. Here’s what my first few rewritten novels will be: 1 “The Old Man and the Sea” — The titular Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman, catches what he thinks must be, based on sheer weight, a huge fish — possibly the sort of beast with which a protracted struggle would become a multi-day metaphor for Life Itself. Instead, Santiago heroically pulls his fishing line to the surface — and discovers he’s hooked the corpse of Ernest Hemingway. The book ends on page nine.
2 “Infinite Jest” — At the heart of David Foster Wallace’s maddening and complex masterpiece is a film by Jim Incandenza. It’s a work so damnably irresistible that anyone who sees it must watch it over and over again until he or she dies. In my version of the book, Incandenza’s film is the original “Point Break,” and characters watch it over and over again to see if, indeed Keanu Reeves sucks as much as first suspected. Yep. He does.
3 “In Search of Lost Time” — The first six of this seven-volume novel by Marcel Proust will be exactly the same as the originals. Number, seven, though — instead of tying up thousands of pages of loose ends — is, inexplicably, the Hardy Boys’ “Secret of the Old Mill.”
4 “Pride and Prejudice With Zombies” — Yes, this is already a (really stupid) rewrite. My twist will be that the story won’t have any zombies in it, but it’s still different than the original because Lizzy Bennett is a steel mill welder who harbors secret dreams of becoming a member of an elite dance conservatory. And, boy, is she a maniac (maniac!) on the floor.