I’ve been thinking. (Shut up!)

Yesterday evening while looking for a bit of inspiration, I stopped by one of my favorite non-movie blogs Cover Me: a site dedicated to the art of the cover song. Last night I got a smile as I listened to an evocative arrangement of one of my least favorite Springsteen songs.

This got me curious – what if there was such thing as cinematic cover songs?

Now I understand that what I’m suggesting sounds a lot like the remake phenomenon we have to endure…or worse, Gus Van Sant’s PSYCHO. But follow me on this for a moment. It’s entirely possible that if you handed a lauded project over to another director, you’d get something like this. But is it possible that that second director could come back with something else?

On a recent /Filmcast, SPLICE director Vincenzo Natali spoke about a film school exercise where a dozen directors were all given the same script and they came back with six very different takes on it. You hear it all the time: “I envisioned that differently”. So what’s to stop…let’s say Natali…from taking a crack at something left a little wanting. Like SALT?

On the one hand, perhaps a fresh perspective could correct some of the things that went wrong. Give someone a mulligan and they could rearrange some chords, pick up the tempo, and create a catchy ditty. Then again, they might come back with something even worse. On top of that, i suppose it’s unlikely that any sort of audience would fork out to see the same story a second time. The toughest part of all would be for the director ignoring what’s already been done (which, while I love it, is what holds back LET ME IN).

Still, on some sort of an experimental level, I’d love to see this…even just a scene or two. How would that kiss in the rain in THE NOTEBOOK go if it was directed by Lars von Trier? Or how’s about Baz Luhrman taking a hack at EDWARD SCISSORHANDS?

Who knows, you could end up with something classic.