Review of Blow Out (1981) by Sebastián Tapia V — 29 Oct 2012

It Loses Something in the Translation.

I have said for years that I have no problem with remakes per se. Remakes, like covers of great songs, are perfectly acceptable if you have something new to say. If you are just repeating something exactly, it's not worth it, like that version of [i]Little Women[/i] that even used the same script. Or, of course, the infamous remake of [i]Psycho[/i] that added things, but they were all bad. However, the James Whale was not the first [i]Frankenstein[/i] on the big screen, and the 1939 was not the first [i]Wizard of Oz[/i]. I own a few remakes. (Though I do believe the Coens' insistence that their [i]True Grit[/i] is a readaptation of the original work, not really a remake!) Today's film is rather along the lines of [i]The Magnificent Seven[/i] and [i]The Seven Samurai[/i]--it's the same story, but certain things have been changed in the telling. However, today's film is no [i]Magnificent Seven[/i].

Instead of a hip fashion photographer in Swinging London, John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a sound man for much worse movies than the one he's appearing in. Sam (Peter Boyden), who I think is the director, is complaining about the sound effects, and he insists that Jack go out and get a [i]new[/i] wind sound, because the one he's using is old hat. So Jack is out late at night in a park by a river with recording equipment, and he records the traffic accident which kills Presidential hopeful Governor McRyan (John Hoffmeister). There is a girl in the car, Sally (Nancy Allen), and while Jack saves her, the governor is killed. Jack has an audio recording of the whole thing, and he hears a bang that was distinctly not a tire blowing out. Jack knows that the governor was murdered, but no one believes him--except for Burke (John Lithgow), who knows perfectly well the governor was killed because Burke was the one who fired that shot into the tire.

It has been several years since I saw the original Antonioni [i]Blowup[/i]. It was good, but it hasn't been something I've felt the need to watch a second time. However, what I recall was that it was more circumspect. The original was about how the story unfolded; this one pretty much seemed to be about John Travolta. Even with wicked and evil John Lithgow garroting women as an over-complicated cover-up for his over-complicated plot to get McRyan out of the race, we never feel that Jack Terry himself is in danger. What's more, he is never in doubt that he witnessed a murder. The whole point of the original was that Thomas wasn't sure. It could have been a struggle, or it could have been an embrace. By removing that, we remove the element of madness that created suspense. Jack's tapes are erased, but we [i]know[/i] it was by a shadowy cabal as personified by Burke. We know he isn't delusional, and it makes the story less interesting. The whole thing is so straightforward that it doesn't really have a point.

While the original didn't exactly have progressive feminist politics, I find it displeasing that the only character in danger after about the first ten minutes of the film is a woman. What's more, Burke kills other women to set it up so that Sally will appear to have been murdered by a serial killer, not killed because of what she knew or might have known. I haven't watched a lot of Brian De Palma movies, but he doesn't seem, from what I've seen, to like women very much. Sally is dumb, so dumb that she doesn't even realize how much danger he's in. She is not actually a prostitute, but what she does for a living is break up marriages, basically. She lures married men into bed, where Manny Karp (Dennis Franz) takes pictures of them to use as blackmail or grounds in a divorce or whatever. What's more, Jack is working on a really awful horror movie as far as I can tell for the express purpose of having female nudity in it as a coed gets killed in a shower.

It's not that the original couldn't have been improved on. It's that this movie didn't do it. Yes, it removed the stupid excesses of the Swinging London thing. Yeah, okay. However, I think the whole movie can by symbolized quite nicely by its own stupid gimmick. In the movie, Philadelphia is making a big fuss over the replica Liberty Bell the city has acquired, one which can actually ring. This is, I think we can all agree, both needless and seriously missing something. The point of the real Liberty Bell is not that it is still able to ring. It's about continuity, after all. It's about a thing that was there in an important time of our past and is still here now. A replica is all well and good if it's in the replica of Constitution Hall at Knott's Berry Farm. But a replica in actual Philadelphia? That's just silly and pointless. The fact that this is the role that got Travolta cast in [i]Pulp Fiction[/i], that it is Tarantino's favourite of Travolta's old roles, tells you a great deal about Quentin Tarantino and his interest in cheap copies.