Ever wanted to be The Terminator or Tyler from “Fight Club”? Or just recreate the scene in the boat at the end of “Some Like It Hot”?
Directors with access to millions of dollars of funding like Nikita Mikhalkov can remake Hollywood classics like “12 Angry Men,” but now ordinary viewers are getting in on the act as they make use of cheaper, more accessible cameras and web sites like YouTube.
“Nonprofessional remakes are easy to shoot,” said Stanislav Akimov, who set up the project “Art of Remake” (www.artofremake.ru), a creative experiment and web site that encourages people to remake films.
The competition partly took its inspiration from “Be Kind Rewind,” a Hollywood movie starring Jack Black and Mos Def where video store clerks recreate films that have been erased by accident. They say the remakes have been “Sweded,” a lie that they make up explaining that the remakes come from Sweden as a way to get higher rental fees, and the term has caught on.
“The ‘Sweded’ movement is spreading around Russia and the CIS,” Akimov said.
More than 300 entries were sent in for the first “Art of Remake” award earlier this year.
“We were told to pick five remakes for each nomination, but as we got involved with the picking process, we actually liked almost all of them, so we got about 20 remakes for each nomination,” said Pyotr Fyodorov, an actor who appeared in the recent blockbuster “The Inhabited Island” and was on the jury for the awards. “There is a group of gutsy people among the participants. They are boldly creative when using this new movie language. It’s a totally different mentality.”
The prize for the best remake went to a copy of “Fight Club,” a popular film for remakes, which was turned into “The Checkers Fight Club,” transporting the setting from an underground club in the United States where people hit one another to to a school gym in a clever parody of the Soviet tradition of gatherings in public areas to play chess and checkers.
Other films include a parody of “Ghostbusters,” where the film morphs into “The Blair Witch Project,” and a 29-minute version of “The Terminator,” which has acting almost as wooden as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s.
But not everyone is impressed with amateurs remaking films.
“There’s no way I will go into looking through an unfiltered flow of YouTube ‘masterpieces.’ If it wasn’t for the craziness inside the heads of these self-proclaimed directors, the movies wouldn’t see the light of day,” movie critic Alexandra Sukhostat said.
Akimov is keen to carry on the project and hopes to have open air showings of the best remakes next summer. The “Art of Remake-2” has just begun, and the competition will accept entries until March 2010. The web site is currently calling for remakes of “Star Wars.”
A Message from The Moscow Times:
Dear readers,
We are facing unprecedented challenges. Russia's Prosecutor General's Office has designated The Moscow Times as an "undesirable" organization, criminalizing our work and putting our staff at risk of prosecution. This follows our earlier unjust labeling as a "foreign agent."
These actions are direct attempts to silence independent journalism in Russia. The authorities claim our work "discredits the decisions of the Russian leadership." We see things differently: we strive to provide accurate, unbiased reporting on Russia.
We, the journalists of The Moscow Times, refuse to be silenced. But to continue our work, we need your help.
Your support, no matter how small, makes a world of difference. If you can, please support us monthly starting from just $2. It's quick to set up, and every contribution makes a significant impact.
By supporting The Moscow Times, you're defending open, independent journalism in the face of repression. Thank you for standing with us.
Remind me later.