Fear of a subtitled planet: On remaking foreign language films

Kristofer Hivju and Johannes Kuhnke star in Ruben Ӧstlund's Force Majeure.

If you follow the site at all, you know I am a stickler for seeing movies the way they are meant to be seen. If it is shot on film, I want to see it on film. If it is shot in IMAX, I want to see it in IMAX – proper IMAX. Black and white? For god’s sake, do not see it colorized. So what of foreign films and those folks averse to subtitles? Well, there is the great tradition of the American remake.

News broke late last week that Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Seinfeld, Veep) is in talks to star in an English-language remake of last year’s Force Majeure, a film we are pretty high on here at Last Cinema Standing. Louis-Dreyfus is an undoubtedly talented actress, if not particularly known for her film work, and director Ruben Ӧstlund’s blackly comic story of a family vacation gone wrong is nothing if not universal. It deserves to be seen by the widest possible audience; however, it is Ӧstlund’s film that deserves to be seen, not simply the plot.

Force Majeure is not only its story of a husband who abandons his family in the face of disaster and the ramifications that has on his marriage. It is the magnificent central performances of Johannes Kuhnke and Lisa Loven Kongsli. It is the idiosyncratic use of montage and music. It is that gorgeous cinematography and that vaguely alien – to Americans, anyway – art direction. These things exist outside the story and would be impossible to replicate.

In truth, this is all a bit of a knee-jerk reaction on my part. Hypothetical films get pitched with stars attached all the time. Most of these never get made. It is a long way from casting rumor to roll cameras to roll credits. Sometimes, however, they do get made. For instance, set for release later this year is an American remake of the brilliant Argentine thriller The Secret in Their Eyes, which won Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards in 2009.

The remake stars Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, and Chiwetel Ejiofor and has been written and directed by Billy Ray, writer of such classics as Volcano, Hart’s War, and Flightplan. Okay, that is a bit unfair. I like Volcano, and his last script was the fantastic Captain Phillips, for which Ray was nominated for a well-deserved Oscar. These people are talented and will be shepherding a great story to the screen.

There is no way to know if the remake of The Secret in Their Eyes will be good until we see it, and there will be no way to know if the Force Majeure remake will succeed until it is made. Yet, all this got me thinking about some other great foreign films remade for English-speaking audiences and wondering how they stack up against each other. For instance:

The Departed, remade from Infernal Affairs (Hong Kong)

Infernal Affairs

Most of the films we talk about will be familiar to most movie-goers, but this one stands out for a couple reasons. First, it is directed by Martin Scorsese. Second, it was a Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. It is one of Scorsese’s most successful box office hits as well. Few will debate the merit of The Departed, but Infernal Affairs is a great piece of filmmaking as well.

Directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, Infernal Affairs is a tightly scripted, wonderfully acted, and superbly made thriller that like its American counterpart, swept its country’s major awards, winning seven Hong Kong Film Awards, including best picture. Was The Departed great? Sure. Was it strictly necessary? Probably not, particularly as the plots are so similar that if you have seen one, you have seen the other. But, do yourself a favor and see Infernal Affairs.

Oldboy, remade from Oldboy (South Korea)

Maybe the most high-profile recent example is Spike Lee’s execrable reworking of Chan-wook Park’s cult hit Oldboy. Lee’s film lacks any of the energy, wit, or social investigation of its forbear and falls almost completely flat. Lee hits the same beats but has no feel for the rhythm of the material.

On top of not being very good, the worse crime may be that it seems to exist for no reason other than to make money off an already-done concept with no care for the quality of the project. The upshot is that it did not make any money, failing to crack $5 million worldwide off a $30 million budget. Hopefully, this will spare us remakes of the other two films in Park’s masterful vengeance trilogy.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, remade from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Sweden)

This is a bit of a different case since both films are adapted from the same worldwide bestselling novel. There is essentially no difference – except the dreaded subtitles – between Niels Arden Oplev’s sexy, slick, stylish original and David Fincher’s sexy, slick, stylish rehash. If one works for you, the other should, which is to say, Fincher’s film is redundant.

Funny Games, remade from Funny Games (Austria)

Michael Haneke, the great German director who gave us such harrowing chamber dramas as Cache and Amour, wrote and directed both the original and the remake of this film. In fact, the 2007 English-language remake is a shot-for-shot retelling of the 1997 original. Both feature fantastic, disturbing performances from excellent casts and impeccable technical work from the craftspeople. It is an instance in which exacting replication is precisely the point, and I would strongly recommend seeing both – just maybe give yourself a break in between viewings. Once you see it, you will know why.

The Magnificent Seven, remade from Seven Samurai (Japan)

Seven Samurai

Even the classics are subject to such scrutiny. John Sturges’ beloved western is a fairly faithful adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s samurai tale. Both are great and worth your time. This also does not represent the last time one of Kurosawa’s samurai pictures was transposed to the American West. Kurosawa was often criticized in his home country for making films with too much of a Western (read: European/American) sensibility, so it makes sense that Western filmmakers would revere and emulate him.

Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars (the first film in the popular Man with No Name trilogy) is a western remake of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Where it gets interesting is that some scholars believe Yojimbo is based on the 1929 American gangster novel Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett. Other film historians have disputed this assertion, while Kurosawa said he was primarily inspired by the American gangster film The Glass Key, itself an adaptation of a different Hammett novel.

Ultimately, each of these film is rewarding in different ways, and by shifting the action to the American West, Sturges and Leone ensured that though their films were remakes, they introduced vital new ideas into the cultural conversation.

A final thought

The point here is not to bash any of these films – except Lee’s Oldboy; don’t bother with that – or to chastise anyone for not liking subtitles. It is not even to carp about remakes, which have been a part of the film landscape since the medium’s inception. The goal is simply to encourage you to seek out the films that perhaps inspired or influenced the movies you like, in English or not. After all, we all know there is no substitute for the real thing.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Foreign Language Film

The Polish film Ida is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

Best Foreign Language Film

The nominees are:

Ida

Leviathan

Tangerines

Timbuktu

Wild Tales

Not that anybody asked me, but I think Federico Fellini is the greatest film director of all time. If you would like to discuss that ranking, I am happy to have that conversation another time, but for now, all that matters is that the greatest director of all time never won a competitive Oscar (if your loyalties lie elsewhere, feel free to insert Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa in place of Fellini). He was nominated in the screenplay categories eight times and four times for best director, but he never won, though he did receive a lifetime achievement award in 1993.

Fellini died later that year after receiving his honorary award, so you may be wondering why I would bring up a director who has been dead more than 20 years. Well, I will tell you. Despite never winning an Oscar in his unparalleled career, Fellini directed four films that were nominated for and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. However, since its inception at the 1956 ceremony, the award has officially gone to the country of origin and not the filmmaker. No longer.

Beginning with this year’s ceremony, the Oscar statuette for Best Foreign Language Film will have the director’s name engraved on it along with the country of origin. The change has been a long time coming. Though the Academy of course will not be retroactively awarding the directors of past winners in this category, future winners will have the privilege of not succumbing to the same Oscar fate as some of the medium’s greats. It is impossible to say if any of this year’s nominees is the next Fellini or Kurosawa, but if they are, the Academy can take pride in having rewarded them here.

Ida (directed by Pawel Pawlikowski) – In spite of a tremendous cinematic heritage that includes greats such as Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, no Polish film has ever won the award for Best Foreign Language Film. Pawlikowski’s small but potent Ida seems set to break that streak. Concerning an orphan raised to be a Catholic nun who finds out her true heritage just days before she is to take her final vows, Ida is a story of faith and forgiveness in a world where both of those qualities are seen as weaknesses.

Gorgeously shot – the film is also nominated for Best Cinematography – and stunningly told, Ida is one of the true gems of the year. Pawlikowski’s film is tiny in scope but big on ideas and has a clear moral center that is never muddied thanks to the straightforward plot and no-frills filmmaking. It is a true testament to the power of a good story well told.

Leviathan (directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev) – I do not know that there is much more I can say about Leviathan, my No. 1 film of the year. It is a dark, brooding masterpiece that is filled to the brim with pitch-black humor, hardline political commentary, and riveting drama. Zvyagintsev speaks for a generation of Russians who came of age under communist rule and who are now watching the country slip back into extremism and antagonism. Zyviagintsev and his cast and crew take all the anger they feel over the current governmental situation and spew it back out as bile onto the screen.

The film follows Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), who simply by living his life runs afoul of the local mayor. He compounds his problems by attempting to fight back against the crushing behemoth that is the Russian governmental bureaucracy. He winds up in a downward spiral of despair, from which he seeks solace in religion. He finds none. Zyagintsev’s film is an uncompromising descent into the bleakness of a country ruled by a power structure that sees no citizens, just enemies. He provides no easy answers and no happy endings because when you come face to face with the leviathan, your best hope is a quick end.

Timbuktu (directed by Abderrahmane Sissako) – Kidane (Ibrahim Ahmed) is a cattle herder who lives with his family outside the city of Timbuktu. The city is controlled by a strict Muslim regime that imposes its will on the citizens of the town in increasingly draconian and absurd ways. Living among the dunes, Kidane and his family have mostly been sheltered from the violence and oppression of the city, but such peace cannot last long in this place.

Timbuktu has already had a good week. The first film from Mauritania to be nominated for an Academy Award, Sissako’s critically beloved drama about faith and freedom just won seven Caesar Awards, the French equivalent of the Oscars, including best feature and best director. This is the kind of important, hard-hitting film voters like to reward in this category for bringing a faraway struggle to light for the world to see.

Wild Tales (directed by Damián Szifrón) – Argentina has had the most success in this category of any of this year’s nominated countries with two previous wins, including as recently as 2009 for The Secret in Their Eyes. Szifrón’s odd, darkly comic anthology film had been tapped by some as the film to beat this year before the nominations were even released, but against this set of this set of films, Wild Tales seems perhaps the slightest and least likely winner.

Composed of six standalone stories, any one of which would have made an intriguing Best Live Action Short nominee, Wild Tales is a simultaneously thought-provoking and humorous meditation on violence and vengeance. Despite its often dark subject matter, Szifrón’s film is easily the most enjoyable sit of the five nominated pictures just from an entertainment standpoint, and that cannot be underestimated when it comes to guessing what Academy voters may choose.

Tangerines (directed by Zaza Urushadze) – Tangerines reminds more than a little of 2001 Best Foreign Language Film winner No Man’s Land, which also concerns soldiers from opposing sides of a conflict trapped together in the middle of a battlefield. Writer-director Urushadze throws in the added twist that the combatants are being housed by a neutral third party, raising questions about the nature of war and the reality of collateral damage.

An Estonian village is caught in the middle of an uprising against the Georgian government. The village is deserted, except for two men, one of whom will leave as soon as he has harvested his tangerine crops. After a particularly bloody battle, the wounded are left behind in the village, and Ivo (Lembit Ulfsak) takes them into his home. It is a classic story about two sides of a conflict finding they have more in common than they would have thought, helped along by someone caught in the middle who sees the absurdity of it all. Tangerines is the first film from Estonia nominated in this category and certainly fits on this list.

The final analysis

Though Wild Tales is the most outright enjoyable of the nominees just for delivering the wild ride its title promises, voters tend not to be swayed by such considerations when making their choices. Plenty of popular films from well known directors have been nominated in this category but went home empty-handed because voters opted for more challenging or esoteric choices. If any film is going to surprise in this group, Timbuktu is the most likely candidate.

Ida is the frontrunner here, having picked up the majority of the early season awards, though Leviathan earned the Golden Globe for best foreign language film. Leviathan’s Golden Globe triumph stands as my single favorite moment of the Oscar season thus far, and if it pulls off the mild upset with the Academy, it would be easily my favorite win of the night. Ultimately, the low-key charms of Ida should rule the day.

Will win: Ida

Should win: Leviathan

Wish it had been here: Force Majeure

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing

Chris Kyle, played by Bradley Cooper, calls home in American Sniper.

Each day as we make our way to the Academy Awards ceremony Feb. 22, Last Cinema Standing will take an in-depth look at each of the categories, sorting out the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Check back right here for analysis, predictions, and gripes as we inch toward the Dolby Theater and that world-famous red carpet.

The two most important questions to answer are: What is sound mixing, and what is sound editing? Here is the quick version. Sound mixing is easy to understand and pretty self-explanatory if you are at all familiar with how music or a radio broadcast or anything else is recorded. Sound mixers take all of the sounds that go into making a movie – the dialogue, the music, the sound effects, the ambient noise, etc. – and adjust the levels at which they play over each other.

Fairly simple, right? The hero is returning home, so let’s have the music get a little louder here. Suspense sequence? Well, let’s drop the noise out so all we hear is breathing and a heartbeat. Courtroom scene? Make sure the dialogue is crisp, clear, and loud, but remember to leave enough ambient noise in the background so it sounds like the real world and not some set on a soundstage. That is it. Bring it up, take it down, and try to match the intensity or the emotion being played on screen. Yet, as simple as it may seem, it takes a master to get it right.

What about sound editing? The award used to be called Best Sound Effects Editing, which I feel is more explicative, but here we are. Basically, this is the sound effects award. It goes to the person or team creating all the little noises that must be pieced together to create the sonic environment of a film. From the clicks, clacks, and clanks of a factory to the gunfire and explosions on a battlefield, sound editors are the ones who make it happen.

When it comes to the Oscars, conventional wisdom will tell you that the same film will likely win both categories. This makes a certain amount of sense if you assume voters do not know the difference between the two and check off a film they like for both awards, but history does not necessarily bear this out. Six times in the last 14 years, a film has won in both categories, so a little less than half the time. It helps to remember that voters are professionals in the film industry. They are savvy enough to know what sound editors and sound mixers do.

With that in mind, the Academy does have tendencies in each category. Musicals do exceedingly well in the Sound Mixing category, as evidenced by wins for Les Miserables, Dreamgirls, Ray, and Chicago since 2002. No musical has ever won Best Sound Editing in the current incarnation of the award. In Sound Editing, the winners tend to be war films, action films, and epics, really anything with a hell of a lot of noise going on. Luckily for voters, there is no shortage of noisy movies in the running.

Best Sound Mixing

The nominees are

American Sniper

Birdman

Interstellar

Unbroken

Whiplash

Whiplash – Here is your sort-of musical in the category this year, and just to drive my point home from above, note that it is also the only one in this group not also nominated for Sound Editing. My best guess for why that is and why no musical has won Sound Editing is that in a musical – or pseudo-musicals such as this or Ray – the music is the star. The sound editors do not create anything there. But, just like on a pop record, the mixing is paramount.

Production sound mixer Thomas Curley and sound re-recording mixers Craig Mann and Ben Wilkins, all first-time nominees, do a phenomenal job making the jazzy soundtrack pop against the more hushed and ambient tones of the rest of the film. It is not an easy task as the music has a very staccato vibe even when allowed to play through, let alone with all the starts and stops of the practice sessions. Music drives this film, and the sound team seems to have an innate feel for when to push it and when to dial it back.

American Sniper – As well as musicals often do in this category, however, war films are right there in the thick of it always. For the most part, I think this has to do with the modulation of sound and the building of suspense. While Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) spends a good deal of American Sniper embroiled in fire fights, he spends as much time staking out his targets and patiently waiting in silence for the his moment to strike.

Sound department heads John T. Reitz and Gregg Rudloff are both six-time nominees who shared in the win for The Matrix, while Rudloff also earned this award for the Civil War drama Glory. Sound mixer Walt Martin, who died in July and earned this nomination posthumously, had been nominated once before and worked on every one of Clint Eastwood’s films since 1999. The team was tasked with balancing the extreme violence and noise of the war scenes with the quieter moments back home in the states, and they do so expertly.

Birdman – The least conventional of these nominees, Birdman is a talky showbiz satire that moves at a mile a minute. It reminds of the late director Robert Altman’s best work such as M*A*S*H or Nashville in its constantly overlapping dialogue, hyper-witty characters, and unceasing forward momentum. Sound re-recording mixers Jon Taylor and Frank A. Montaño are double nominees this year for this and Unbroken, while production sound mixer Thomas Varga is enjoying his first nomination.

In addition to the rapid-fire dialogue, the sound mixing team must also contend with a loopy, arrhythmic percussion score and voiceovers that drop in and out at will. Through the work of Taylor, Montaño, and Varga, all these disparate elements coalesce into an appropriately unsettling sonic environment for the film.

Unbroken – This is Taylor’s first pair of nominations, but Montaño has a total of seven nominations to his credit, and most of those came for films more similar to Unbroken than to Birdman such as Wanted, Under Siege, and The Fugitive. By the way, how great is it that Under Siege is an Oscar-nominated film? While Taylor and Montaño are looking for their first wins in this category, their Unbroken collaborator, David Lee, won previously for his work with Reitz and Rudloff on The Matrix.

Unbroken is a more traditional war picture than American Sniper, possibly because World War II was a more conventional war than the current conflict in the Middle East. There is some great aerial sound work amid a dog fight and plane crash, but often, the mixing team allows the score to intrude too much on the story in a blatant attempt to force emotion on the audience. The mix is classic war film work, but I can think of a few other more deserving nominees than this one. If you are looking for another action-war flick, there is Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, or if you want to step outside the box a bit, there is the great work done on Ruben Ӧstlund’s Force Majeure.

Interstellar – The most controversial nominee on the list, the sound mix of Interstellar was criticized heavily upon the film’s release. Some complained the score was too loud or that the dialogue was too muddy. The problem seems to have been the detail and micromanaging that director Christopher Nolan and team put into the sound mix, meaning that if the cinema conditions were not set up just right, the film could sound bad.

I viewed the film in an IMAX theater personally vetted by the film’s composer, Hans Zimmer, and I thought the mix was fantastic. For transitions back and forth between quiet moments of character reflection and epic, large-scale action sequences, little can match Interstellar. The music is loud, but it is immersive, an integral part of the landscape of the film.

Re-recording mixer Gregg Landaker is a giant in the field and has three Oscars to his name for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back, and Speed. Re-recording mixer Gary Rizzo has four nominations and a win for Inception, and sound mixer Mark Weingarten is a three-time nominee. If you are going to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, I would say it should be this group of craftsmen.

The final analysis

American Sniper is a popular war picture with a solid mix that hits all the right beats and keeps the film humming along nicely. It would by no means be an undeserving winner. Whiplash will have its fans, but the scale of the film may be too small to compete. Previous musical winners, in addition to simply being musicals, also had a sense of scale and grandiosity that Whiplash lacks by design. Interstellar could be a threat for the win simply because of the attention drawn by the controversy. All publicity is good publicity. Still, American Sniper is probably in the driver’s seat for this one.

Will win: American Sniper

Should win: Birdman

Wish it had been here: Force Majeure

Best Sound Editing

The nominees are:

American Sniper

Birdman

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Interstellar

Unbroken

American Sniper – If American Sniper is a prohibitive favorite for Sound Mixing, it is the clear frontrunner for the Sound Editing award. Bullets, explosions, crashes, and bangs – these are the hallmarks of a war picture and of an Oscar winner in this category. Its candidacy is helped along by the fact that so much of the sound drops out around Kyle taking sniper shots. What that means is that the sound effects work that goes into each shot is crystal clear and instantly memorable.

Supervising sound editors Alan Robert Murray and Bub Asman have shared in five nominations together and won the Oscar the last time director Clint Eastwood brought a war picture to the big show, Letters from Iwo Jima. Murray also has two other nominations with previous partner Robert G. Henderson. A popular Best Picture nominee with a clearly defined sound design is like catnip to Oscar voters, and Murray and Asman should be well on their way to collecting their second awards.

Interstellar – If its mix is controversial, there should be no question about the quality of the sound effects editing on Interstellar. Credited to five-time nominee and three-time Academy Award winner Richard King, the environment of Interstellar is a perfect melding of visual effects, production design, and sound editing. While I found the former two elements lackluster, the sound effects work is impeccable.

The movie practically howls at the audience as the winds of distant worlds swirl around the characters. They explode through space, slosh through a water planet, and crunch their way across frozen tundra, endeavors that feel real because we can hear them and experience them along with our intrepid heroes. Just based on the number of different environments King is asked to recreate or invent, we are unlikely ever to hear another feat of sound editing quite like this.

Birdman – If you have never been backstage during a theater production, I urge you to seize the opportunity, should it arise. Nothing else can compare. While the actors play calm, cool, and collected in front of the audience, chaos reigns behind the scenes. During rehearsals, the chaos is multiplied 10-fold as cast and crew alike shuffle about, slam doors, shift sets, and generally run around like the sky is falling.

Sound designers Aaron Glascock and Martín Hernández capture the environment perfectly. Together, they create the rich tapestry of production sounds and city noise that make up the unforgettable experience of Birdman. It is a film that surrounds you, envelopes you, and immerses you in its world until you feel like you are part of the crew and your life depends on the success of the production.

Unbroken – It is definitely possible the craftspeople are seeing something in Unbroken that I simply cannot see. After all, they are the experts in their field, and I am a humble observer. To my eyes, Unbroken is a serviceable war drama that feels overly familiar in nearly every regard. If the crafts are solid, they are let down by a sappy, melodramatic storyline that is hard to look past.

Supervising sound editors Andrew DeCristofaro and Becky Sullivan are sharing in their first Academy Awards nomination for their work on the film. Sullivan notably is the only woman nominated in either sound category this year, a depressing reflection of the realities of the industry. The pair’s work here is fine, but it is overshadowed by a mediocre project.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies – “Battle of the Five Armies.” Doesn’t that just scream noisy? Sad to say, I have not seen the latest Hobbit film. Truth be told, Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy really did nothing for me, and thus far, the Hobbit films have been a step down from that. Someone who has seen the film could probably give you a more thorough analysis, but allow me to posit a few guesses.

The film almost certainly delivers on the promise of its title and features a tremendous climactic battle, as well as several smaller battles before and during that, no doubt. Swords clank off one another, structures crumble to the ground, and many fantastical creatures make barely recognizable noises that resemble a combination of things we know from the real world. It honestly seems like a sound editor’s dream. It probably is, but as this is the film’s only nomination and the love for Jackson’s ventures to Middle Earth has dwindled considerably, sound editors Brent Burge and Jason Canovas will probably have to content themselves with the nomination.

The final analysis

I recognize that I spent the entire introduction to this piece differentiating between the two sound categories and making the case that the Academy can and will split these awards between two deserving movies. I stand by that, but this year feels a lot like last year, when Gravity was head and shoulders above rest of the field and rightly took home both awards. If American Sniper is not quite the tech juggernaut that Gravity was, it makes up for it by being the kind of down and dirty action picture that thrills and engages all kinds of viewers. Interstellar is a definite threat, but at the end of the day, American Sniper just makes sense for this award.

Will win: American Sniper

Should win: Interstellar

Wish it had been here: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes