Hollywood loves a remake. But why take a film that already works and make it all over again? Host Laura Gommans sits down with LAB111’s Head of Cinema, Tom Ooms, to dig into Hollywood’s habit of reworking films from around the world and what happens when it gets its hands on someone else’s story.
From Masayuki Suô’s Shall We Dance? and its Richard Gere-starring remake to Funny Games, The Vanishing and Force Majeure, they look at the changes that can turn a film into something completely different. There are American happy endings, cultural misunderstandings and the occasional remake that becomes a classic in its own right, as with Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, adapted from Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs.
With Odyssey Classics re-releasing the original Japanese Shall We Dance?, it’s a good moment to consider Hollywood’s never-ending impulse to remake the world in its own image.
Get tickets to Shall We Dance? @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: Under The Skin @ LAB111
A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.
We’re constantly told to slow down and be present, but what does it actually mean to pay attention when so much of modern life is designed to scatter it?
This summer, French auteur Jacques Tati returns to LAB111 in six newly restored 4K classics, including his magnum opus PlayTime. Few filmmakers have looked at modern life with Tati’s comic precision: traffic becomes choreography, bureaucracy becomes absurd theatre and the city itself becomes a machine for distraction.
Producer Elliot Bloom and filmmaker Kiriko Mechanicus explore attention, bureaucracy and urban life through Tati’s PlayTime, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Scorsese’s After Hours, looking at what happens when the structures of modern life become so consuming that we stop noticing the lives we’re actually living.
But if paying attention has become something we increasingly struggle to do, what should we make of films that turn it into a virtue? In Perfect Days, is noticing the world a genuine alternative to modern life — or are we fetishising attention itself?
Get tickets to It’s Cinema! The Films of Jacques Tati @ LAB111
Get tickets to After Hours @ LAB111
Get tickets to Cine Of The Times: No Country For Old Men @ LAB111
A LAB111 production. Edited and produced by Elliot Bloom, co-produced by Laura Gommans. Music by Hugo Emmerzael. Artwork by Studio FFF.
The American New Wave, or New Hollywood, launched the careers of some of the United States’ most iconic filmmakers, from Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. But what was this era, when studios granted directors unprecedented creative freedom, really about, and what did it reveal about 1970s America?
Hosts Elliot Bloom and Tom Ooms dive into this transformative period, discussing the quintessential elements of the movement while spotlighting cult heroes like Robert Altman and John Cassavetes and overlooked filmmakers such as Barbara Loden and Elaine May. They also ask whether today’s social and political climate in the United States could spark a new wave of radical cinema.
Get tickets to New Hollywood: The Films of The American New Wave @ LAB111
Widely regarded as one of the most influential directors of our time, Martin Scorsese has made some of the most exciting cinema classics of the past 50 years.
Moving through Scorsese's filmography, we reflect on how his own existential inquiries on faith, redemption, obsession and cinema itself lie at the heart of his kinetic films. Why does he return time and time again to the same narrative of the self-absorbed, Jesus-complex man come from?
A true lover film film, championing cinema’s rich history, and a tireless supporter of film preservation, we also discuss how his the boy who once wanted to become a priest, is now a missionary of the gospel of cinema.
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