Remake

Capital Pictures, a successful Hollywood film studio, is having a production meeting. The president of the studio sleeps while the VP runs the meeting. Department heads from the studio’s varied development departments (originals, sequels, animated, animated sequels, and remakes) present their ideas. The remake guys are noticeably absent; they’re rooting through the $5 DVD bin at Shop-Mart. They arrive at the meeting, and announce that Capital Pictures’ latest remake should be The Other World, a noir-inspired time travel movie that premiered on DVD three years ago. This decision was, of course, based on which DVD they grabbed out of the bag first.

Quiet and introverted Rick Moore is begrudgingly teaching his high school film production class. On the way home, he gets a call from Capital Pictures. They explain their desire to remake the film he wrote and directed, and ask him to come by for a meeting. Rick visits Vince, an old friend who helped him write the original film. Vince is a very un-PC character who loves profanity and runs TheFilmDick.com, a website that unabashedly mocks Hollywood and movies. Rick explains the remake situation, and tells Vince he’s hesitant. He says that all he ever wanted to do was make movies, but after the original fizzled out, he was really broken up. He’s afraid of it happening again. Vince convinces him to go the meeting.

As Rick goes to the meeting, we flashback to six years ago. Rick was an assistant director in Hollywood, working on big blockbuster movies. Capital Pictures contacted him and asked if he’d like to write and direct his own film. It’d be released under the indie film division, Capital Spotlight, and would have a small budget and no-name actors. Regardless, Rick was optimistic, and brought high school friend and college roommate Vince along for the ride. In the present, after much debate, Rick finally agrees to help produce the remake, on the sole condition that Vince comes along too.

Throughout the rest of the film, we follow the filmmaking process for both the remake and, via flashbacks, the original film. From casting to filming, we see the similarities and differences between the two, i.e. untalented unknown actors in the original vs. untalented well-known actors in the remake. Rick and Vince traverse the weird world of Hollywood equipped with jokes, irreverence, and a genuine love of cinema. We see Vince square off against uptight industry insiders and we see Rick try to woo the most beautiful actress in the world, Marissa Ford. Marissa was an old high school friend of Rick and Vince, and Rick’s longtime secret love, who happened to screen-test for the original film. She was an unknown at the time, but has since become a world famous movie star. Surprisingly, she asked the studio if she could reprise her role in the remake.

We ultimately come to find that Rick cares more about his friends than about the remake. He loves movies for their ability to bring people together, and his involvement in the remake was really just an excuse to be close with the people he’s drifted away from. On the surface, this film is a satirical and humorous jab at modern Hollywood and the stranger-than-fiction characters that inhabit it. At its heart, though, “Remake” is a crude, funny, and poignant look at a man reconnecting with the dreams and friends he thought he lost years ago.