Thursday, March 06, 2008

Artists remake movies, comics without the annoying parts

Some enterprising artists are taking to heart the adage “less is more” by remaking the works of others — and improving on them.

In a Web comic called “Garfield Minus Garfield,” for example, an anonymous guerrilla artist takes “Garfield” comic strips and removes the title character. Without its eponymous fat, orange cat, “Garfield” ceases being an unfunny funny-animal strip and becomes something far deeper.

Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, is a ticking time bomb of existential angst. He talks to himself and hatches crackpot schemes that serve only to punctuate his loneliness. The empty space where Garfield used to be becomes symbolic of the emptiness of Jon’s pitiful existence. It’s so sad it’s funny — or funnier, at least, than most real “Garfield” strips.

Here’s an example.
Panel 1: Jon enters an empty room carrying an armful of shampoo bottles. “I’m going to spend the evening trying out different kinds of shampoo!” he excitedly tells no one.
Panel 2: Jon walks out of the room.
Panel 3: A silent, empty room.
In the original version, I assume Garfield delivered some sort of put-down at Jon’s expense. But in the “Garfield Minus Garfield” version, Garfield’s lame jokes aren’t necessary. The silence says it all: Jon is a sad little man who is just one bad day away from sticking his head in an oven.

A better-known example of someone applying the less-is-more aesthetic to an existing work is Mike J. Nichols’ “phantom edit” reworking of “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.”

By eliminating repetitive dialogue, as well as most everything the hated Jar Jar Binks says or does, Nichols produces a version of the first “Star Wars” prequel that many fans regard as being superior to George Lucas’ original.

Lucas has mostly taken a hands-off attitude to amateur filmmakers who try to improve on his movies, so long as they don’t try to make money from it. If anything, he seems genuinely impressed by their ingenuity. But not everyone is as charitable.

At TheForce.Net, “Star Wars” fan Sean Gates writes, “I often wonder at what point it was that we stopped respecting art; or the artist’s right to make their product their own way.”

Really? Is someone stopping Lucas from making whatever movies he wants to make, however he wants to make them? In fact, is anyone stopping him from going back years later and altering his movies himself?

Whatever anyone else does to “The Phantom Menace,” Lucas’ original is still available, for better or worse — at least until he decides to make his “special edition” and seal the original away in a vault forever.

Anyway, all of this has me asking, what other works of art could be improved by eliminating annoying characters like Garfield and Jar Jar?

I can imagine a version of “Home Alone” without Macaulay Culkin, in which a family’s house comes alive to defend itself against a pair of inept burglars.

Maybe someone could re-edit all of Eddie Murphy’s most recent movies so that he plays only one character.

Or how about a version of “Superman Returns” without any mention of Superman and Lois Lane having had a love child?

Yes, that would be a definite improvement.

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