Remake

Remake is captivating. Imagine moviemaking of the future where technology allows you to alter endings to your favorite movies. Don't like Johnny Depp starring in What's Eating Gilbert Grape? Want to see Ryan Reynolds as the lead instead? With just a keystroke, you can change any detail you want. Live-action filming is a thing of the past. Every little detail can be turned upside-down with a little techno-photoshopping. Nothing is real anymore. Which is unfortunate for one naïve young woman named Alis. All she desires is a dance with Fred Astaire up on the silver screen. She knows all of Ginger's moves and like Alice in Wonderland, believes the right combination of eat-me and drink-me drugs will get her there. Caught up in love with show more Alis, Tom muddles his way through fixing bad alterations, all the while offering Alis her face on all the great dancers who danced with Fred. Alis doesn't want a photoshopped image of herself on Ginger's body. She wants the real deal.
As an aside, I loved how Willis thought. Here's a twist: when bona fide actors are maliciously altered into snuff films, litigation ensues. Either that, or the wronged actor becomes a popular porn star. show less

Call this Hugo-nominated novella a real tinsel dystopia. Hollywood no longer produces movies with live actors—it’s all CGI and sampling. Our cynical, drug-addicted narrator is a computer tech whose job it is to go through digitized Hollywood classics frame by frame to replace non-pc language and references to alcohol, drugs, and smoking with blander alternatives. Things change when he falls for a girl who wants to really dance in a musical, not just have her face pasted on Ginger Rogers’s body. Remake is a Rom-Com with a deus-ex move at the end, so it is not as dark as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust, but it is dark enough.

Connie Willis deserves credit for some sharp prognostication. In 1995, web browsers and CGI were still show more toddlers, and the Cray supercomputers she mentions stood like alien obelisks in university computer centers. Her vision of them pillaging and debasing our cinematic heritage was not far off the mark. show less

This is a tale of the near-future, where Hollywood no longer makes new creative movies, but just recycles what it already has. Did I say "near" future? Sounds like the present to me.

Overall, a very enjoyable read, especially for a fan of the golden era of Hollywood, like me. It had Connie Willis's usual obsessive and sleep-deprived hero, somehow missing the clue, falling for the girl, and all with a thick layer of Hollywood movie references. Perfect!

I liked when he was trying to remove all instances of AS ("addictive substances") from movies like "The Thin Man", and "The Philadelphia Story". How to explain the hangovers and drunkenness?? And Rick's Cafe Americaine without bottles of alcohol?? Tell me it isn't so!

Reminds me of when show more Spielberg recently redid "E.T." and made all the guns into walkie talkies instead. And that meant it had to be reclassified here in Australia because of the content changes, and we bumped it up a grade (from G - General - to PG - parental guidance) because since it first came out in the 1980s the christian right wing decided that stuff with "supernatural" themes (think: Harry Potter) needed a tougher classification.

Funnily enough though, this was written well before all the current fad for re-imaging movies. I think Connie Willis was being highly predictive! And it's a great satire on Hollywood as well, with the casting couch, the drugs, the lack of creativity in the modern money-making behemoth. show less

In Hollywood of the future, new movies are composed from recycled bits of old movies, with “faces” of aspiring actors and actresses digitally pasted in. Tom makes a living editing old movie content to order: inserting his boss’s girlfriend-du-jour, purging references to AS (addictive substances). At a party, he meets Alis, who wants to dance in musicals. She doesn’t want her face pasted in, she wants to dance for real. Frustrated by his incomprehension, she disappears. And then, as he is editing a movie, he notices her in the chorus line... How did she get there?

The fun of this was the commentary about musicals, Fred Astaire vs. Gene Kelly, etc., which I’ll suppose echoes the author’s opinions, and the amusing struggle to show more retain a coherent story in classic movies when the alcohol is removed (though in a future of ubiquitous AS in the form of pills, this task doesn’t quite make sense). Short and light, and that’s about the extent of it.

(read 16 Nov 2013) show less

This tightly written novella creates a future Hollywood where everything is digitized, and creativity involves what is essentially super photoshopping- removing from or adding to the originals. Willis' prose and the viewpoint character she uses evoke the futuristic atmosphere in the context of an unusual love story, or is it the same old story? Here's looking at you, kid.

This short novel (really a novella) displays Willis' usual wit and facility with language, making it enjoyable to read no matter what the topic. Unfortunately (for me), the topic here is classic song-and-dance musical films (think Fred Astaire). I really quite strongly dislike such films, probably more than any other genre I can think of. And a good portion of this book is a pure nostalgia-fest - which, if were for something else, might have convinced me, but, as it was, didn't. (It would be a hopeless cause, no matter what.)
Still, I did enjoy the sci-fi elements of the story: in the (near?) future, actors are all computer-generated: images 'licensed' from the classics, or 'scans' of existing people, who don't actually have to act (or show more dance, etc). An angst-ridden film buff, who's currently working bowdlerizing old films by censoring them (cutting out all reference to 'Addictive Substances,' all the while drinking to excess and doing drugs himself), meets a naive young woman who desperately wants to be an actual performer in musicals...
Not bad, but my least favorite of Willis' that I've read thus far. show less

Meh. I simply do not seem to get on well with her short novels (with the exception of _Lincoln's Dreams_). Here, the concept was interesting -- the terrifying all-CGI future of the movie business -- but the characterization was so thin I just didn't care that much. I might well not have finished it if I weren't an old movie fan myself and enjoyed the references. Like _Uncharted Territory_, I feel that this would have been better either as a short story or as a longer novel