Then It's The Bomb That'll Bring Us Together

Carmine reports that there is a remake in the works of the 1984 cold-war epic Red Dawn. It seems to me that the only reason to remake such a film is to resituate it in the post-cold-war era of global terrorism. Quite a few movies from the last eight years have utilized the spectacle of 9/11 for purposes of creating gripping visuals or story-lines.

The Dark Knight already did this of course, recasting the Joker as a sociopathic urban terrorist. As with movies, comics books often attempt to be adult by incorporating "realism," usually in the form the kind of extreme and shocking violence. The Joker, ridiculous and purple in early Batman comics, had previously been re-imagined as a psychopathic cold-blooded killer and probably rapist in Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, and re-imagined again as aging Hollywood letch Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton's 1989 movie. Okay, so there are thirteen ways of looking at the Batman -- my current favorite is the stodgy and rather goofy Batman, almost a 60's throwback, as seen in Batman: The Brave And The Bold, which I've watched with my three-year-old son.

So now I'm pretty sure that all awesome (and by "awesome," I mean "appeared often on cable television in the 80's") movies will be remade to reflect our nation's post-9/11 obsession with terror-as-spectacle:

• Red Dawn: "Oh my god, they've fire-bombed the VFW Hall!"
• JAWS: "Oh my god, a shark just flew into that building!"
• Beverly Hills Cop: "Oh my god, they've fire-bombed the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre!"
• Valley Girl: "Oh my god, Nic Cage has weird chest hair!"
• Back To The Future: "Forget global terrorism, Marty! Your own middle-class bourgeois family has minor emotional problems stemming from privilege and apathy!"
• Predator: "Oh my god, Malcolm Jamal Warner just flew into that building!"
• Say Anything: "Oh my god, there's a trench-coated hoodlum on the lawn holding a Peter Gabriel bomb!"
• Footloose: "Oh my god, they're going to bomb dancing!"
• E.T.: "Oh my god, that alien has got a cell-phone bomb in his glowing chest. That's right, the E.T. has an I.E.D.!"
• Fletch: "Oh my god, Tim Matheson looks EXACTLY like Jay McInerney!"
• Wall Street: "Outsourced no-bid military contracting, for lack of a better term, is good."
• The Terminator: "Is your name Mohammed Atta?"
• Trading Places: "Oh my god, they've just flown a plane into Dan Ackroyd!"
• The Goonies: "Oh my god, Chunk just flew into that building!"