Stop ruining my childhood movies with your terrible remakes

IS HOLLYWOOD running out of ideas? Jo Stanley wants them to stop pillaging her memories by making ridiculous reboots. Point Break is just the beginning.

29/11/1994 PIRATE: 29/11/1994 PIRATE: Attitude Top Ten 16: JULY, 1991. Actor Keanu Reeves in scene from film Point Break.

IT sounds ridiculous, but when I was doing my Bachelor of Arts, some time in the 20th Century, I studied the film Point Break in Cinema Studies. From memory it had something to do with the representation of macho culture in the arts, and how men who fight in water are hotter than on dry land.

Anyway, because of that subject, which I believe I got an HD for, I had an obsession with Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze that was close to certifiable, and I seriously believed the movie’s killer one-liners were Shakespearean in their poetry. I mean, to demonstrate:

Angry Boss FBI Dude, yelling: “NOW FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, DOES EITHER ONE OF YOU HAVE ANYTHING EVEN REMOTELY INTERESTING TO TELL ME?”

Super hot Keanu, deadpan, some would say to the degree of rigor mortis: “I caught my first tube today …. Sir.”

Keanu Reeves: Understated, brooding, wet.

See? Understated, brooding, simple but so complex in it’s anti-establishment subtext. It’s BRILLIANT. And any Hollywood studio who thinks they can re-create that with some whiz bang, new generation, jammed full of CGI stunts remake is, well, breaking my heart.

The new Point Break, the trailer for which has caused a bit of noise this week, is just one in a long line of movies that have had a reboot, as the Hollywood studios innocuously call it. I call it cultural pillaging and a complete appropriation of MY YOUTH.

I feel like it started with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory about 10 years ago, then we had Nightmare on Elm Street, the Karate Kid (a travesty), and only last year, Annie. It’s like they rounded up the Ghosts of Slumber Parties Past and Ghostbusted them.

Okay, maybe it would be cool if these guys were girls. Columbia Pictures

While I’m on that, full hypocrite alert, I actually love the idea of the upcoming Ghostbusters remake with it’s incredible all-female cast. Changing gender does change the dynamic sufficiently for it to be a totally different film. I’d say the same for an all male remake of Steel Magnolias (which, now that I say it, would be amazing. Zac Efron could replace Julia Roberts as Shelby — he’d look so pretty in a coma.)

But in the case of Point Break, and other exact replicas, I have one question. WHY? I watched the new Point Break trailer. Sure the stunts are breathtaking, particularly for the vertigo inducing 3D screenings it’s been shot for. Who doesn’t love skydiving, snow boarding, free-climbing up sheer cliff faces, and big wave surfing?

I just feel like I could see that in a Rip Curl commercial. And does it have Patrick Swayze in a blonde tipped spiral perm? Or Keanu Reeves shooting his gun into the sky because UNPROCESSED MACHO FEELINGS? Or a very young Peter Phelps, the only genuinely Australian part of the finale supposedly set in Bells Beach, Victoria, delivering the line of a lifetime: “it’s death on a stick out there, mate.”

Nothing will live up to the original. NOTHING.

I know I’m sounding curmudgeonly. Really, I think I’m envious. Some days I wouldn’t mind a reboot into a younger and faster version of me, with CGI to make me fly and a stunt driver to do the school drop off in the morning. I fear I might become an old VHS tape at the back of the cupboard, with no technology in existence that can play me. And I hate living in a world where newer is assumed to be better.

But mostly, as rumours abound about further remakes in development, from Gremlins to The Bodyguard to a Dirty Dancing TV Series (sacrilege!!) I wonder has Hollywood run out of ideas? Or are the ideas there, but none of the people with the money is willing to take the risk to make them? Instead we’re swamped with remakes, reboots, sequels, prequels, adaptations and about 15 different Liam Neeson films in which he plays exactly the same character.

It’s a shame. Younger film goers deserve better. They need their own original stories that might become as important to them as the Breakfast Club or Pretty Woman or Ghost was for me. But until that happens, BACK OFF MY MEMORIES.