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There are no ideas left.
No better an illustration came yesterday, in the form of the first trailer for the remake of Point Break.
Kathryn Bigelow’s original is a cult classic; an explosive paean to machismo and brotherhood between men whose punches sound like gunshots. The new version looks at first sight like a predictable and cliché-ridden bore.
Point Break is by no means the first solid flick to take a Hollywood reboot to the face. Total Recall, Halloween, Robocop, Poltergeist and Carrie have suffered recently, and – much to this writer’s horror and disgust – Cube is next. (It’s a low-budget masterpiece, and you ought to see it.)
But it isn’t just tinsel town that’s guilty; lack of imagination runs through all veins of mainstream thinking – even politics.
Also yesterday was the state opening of parliament, during which the Conservative party promised a “British bill of rights”. It’s the same vague and unworkable notion posited by the Tories in 2006, 2010, 2012 and 2014.
So, it’s in that spirit of lazy social and cultural recycling that I submit my five suggestions for July’s Budget sequel...
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10p starting rate of income tax. It was last instigated in 1999, around the time Julia Donaldson published The Gruffalo. That book sold more than 13m copies and has since been turned into an audiobook, a theatre show and a film – but not yet a first-person shooter. Your move, id Software!
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Top level of income tax to 83% and an investment income surcharge – which will give good reason for a band of ex-public schoolies to record Taxman in acoustic-ballad stylee.
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Window tax on property. In the year of its previous introduction, 1707, Dirk Valkenburg painted A Plantation in Suriname, an ironic, Hirst-esque reproduction of which is long overdue.
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Carucage, because it was levied by Richard I, and what TV really needs right now is yet another Robin Hood show.
- Higher rate of VAT, which the UK first experienced in 1974, year of The Godfather Part II. Time for a remake and the revival of Eddie Murphy’s career.
