Bollywood Fight Club Remake

I tell you, the open-mindedness of human beings never ceases to amaze me. Everybody clings so tightly to their opinions, without stopping to ask themselves how they came to those opinions, that they aren't willing to let anything get in the way of expressing them. Even with the opinion they are expressing turns out to have nothing at all to do with the reality of a situation.

I recently came across a message forum at an internet site called TwitchFilm.net. I'll be honest with you, I don't really even know what the site is necessarily about. I think it's mostly about movies, but I wouldn't want to place a bet on that assumption. At any rate, I don't really even know how it came about that I landed on this particular site, but the subject of the forum had to do with a Bollywood Fight Club remake.

Yeah, that's right. Bollywood, know for their lavish musicals, apparently had in mind the idea to redo Fight Club. Well, as you can well imagine, this didn't sit well with some apparently hardcore fans. The headline of this particular forum was: Bollywood's Riding the Remake Train Again…This Time It's Fight Club. Much of the posting took Bollywood to task for daring to remake American films, though admittedly there were some responses pointing out that American filmmakers have been raiding the vaults of Asian moviemakers for decades.

The center of complaint, however, was this particular choice of a remake. I admire Fight Club as much as anyone. In fact, as of February 2006, I consider it to be the last truly great American fictional film. Yes, I realize that the subtext and the real issues of the film have been overlooked by probably the majority of its fans, but that's not the filmmakers' fault. At least, it's not the fault of the makers of Fight Club; rather it's the fault of all these hacks that have been producing easily digested pablum that requires no critical engagement. You can blame a person for not "getting it" when they're rarely required to do much more than open their eyes to "get it."

But back to the issue at hand. While I am a huge fan of the movie Fight Club, I also like to think I've got an open enough mind to allow for a remake of it. Especially if that remake might provide a completely different and unusual take on the subject matter. There aren't a lot of movies crying out for a remake, and most of the movies that could be interesting if remade were made before the 1960s and the collapse of censorship issues.

While Fight Club wouldn't be anywhere on my list of movies that should be remade, I think it would be interesting if remade in the style of a Bollywood extravaganza. It's kind of the same idea of taking Sunset Blvd and turning it into a Broadway musical. Maybe the execution isn't great, but the idea has interest.

Not so for these guys. You would have thought they were rewriting the Bible! From the bizarre worry that the people responsible for Bollywood Fight Club remake hadn't actually obtained the necessary legal rights to the novel through the unwillingness to believe that any actors other than Pitt and Norton could play the roles to the absolute refusal to entertain the idea that the Bollywood version could possibly retain the social commentary at the heart of the film's theme, the attacks against this film bordered on religious fervor.

Indeed, my first reaction was to flash back to 1988 and the furor surrounding the release of The Last Temptation of Christ. In case you don't remember or weren't around, when Martin Scorsese's film based on a novel about Jesus was in the process of being released, protestors took to the streets, clergymen beat their pulpits in condemnation and, most disgusting of all, the making and release of the film was attributed to a Jewish plot because one of the studio heads was of that faith.

The main problem with the attacks being made against the film was that, well, nobody doing the complaining had actually seen it! People took to the street to protest a movie they hadn't seen. Imagine if we transfer that rage and willingness to protest when the subject was something like, oh I don't know, poverty, health care or unnecessary wars that a President lied about. But no, instead of people taking to the streets in the name of ending poverty, we had people taking to the streets in the name of burning the First Amendment and not allowing people to choose for themselves what kind of move they wanted to see.

Some of the posts on this forum are truly amazing. Jaw-droppingly amazing. One guy would send the filmmakers to hell, for instance. Many others vowed (I could just picture them with their hands over their heart) to not only never watch this film, but any Bollywood film ever made. The general consensus seemed to be that even attempting to remake Fight Club was a worse offense than lying about WMDs in order to gain support for a war.

It sounds like a joke, right? And every joke needs a punchline. So here's the punchline: Fight Club is the name of a movie made in Bollywood, but it is NOT a remake and has NOTHING to do with either the novel or American film of the same name.

As near as I can figure out, this topic went on for at least fifty or so posts and at least a week or so before the first message that indicated maybe this wasn't actually a remake, but merely a movie with the same name. Lest you think that ended the discussion and outrage, let me enlighten you. Some two weeks after the first posting and I don't know how many messages, people are still referring to this as a remake. I've been to the official web site and I've examined the information available on IMDB, and there is nothing to suggest that this movie is going to have anything even remotely to do with the Pitt/Norton film. Now, it is completely possible that it really is a remake, but for legal reasons they cannot market it as such.

For all those close-minded souls who expressed their outrage so eloquently (and profanely) at TwitchFilm.net, I can only say I truly hope that this is the case. For one thing, it would validate their concerns, and for another I have to admit that I would really like to see what a Bollywood remake of Fight Club would look like.