Lives of OTHER Others

Hot on the heels of winning an Oscar for best foreign language film of 2006, Germany's "The Lives of Others" is getting the English-language remake treatment from the Weinstein brothers and Mirage Productions, the partnership of filmmakers Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella. Reuters reports a Variety story that the Weinstein company has renewed its deal with Mirage to get first distribution dibs on a number of the latter's future productions, but "Lives of Others" is the big news, with Pollack telling Variety, "We would just desperately love for that film to be something that reaches more people (via remake)."

Fair enough, if you view the world through a tiny slit labelled "Hollywood". If you don't, it's enough to make you bang your head on the table in frustration. A remake? Why don't distributors and exhibitors have the balls to get the German-language original -- the one that won the Oscar, after all -- into more than 58 theaters, where it made a muscular $7,600 per screen last weekend? Why not show it in the 2,759 theaters that "Number 23" is playing in? Because audiences might hurt their poor little heads reading subtitles rather than suffering through a lousy Jim Carrey horror retread?

Spare me. If a movie's good enough, audiences will read it (witness the success of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"). And, anyway, the only way to get U.S. moviegoers used to subtitles is to give them movies with subtitles. A little tough love, please, and you in the seats, quit your whining.

Whatever happens, we can pretty much guarantee this: an English-language "Lives of Others" will have big stars -- Clooney as the playwright! Winslet as the actress-girlfriend! Malkovich as the surveillance creep! -- and it will make more money in American moviehouses. It might even make for a decent photocopy. (It worked with "The Departed," although that's a story that can be taken out of its specific historical context without breaking it; not true of "Lives"). But a photocopy it will be, without the freshness that makes it work as entertainment and as art. But Hollywood has never been shy about imitating originality.