Attack of the Movie Remakes
I'm all for rebooting certain franchises (such as Star Trek or V), reimagining famous stories (as with the forthcoming Sherlock Holmes film or the Dark Knight films. I'm even a fan of Bollywood homage films, such as Bride and Prejudice. But the recent onslaught of remade films (many of which aren't that old anyway), is irritating me. Can't writers come up with...NEW stories? Besides, a lot of the remakes pretty much bastardize the originals.
Case in point: Madonna Wants to Remake Casablanca and Set it in War-Torn Iraq. WTF?!?!?!?! That's just not funny. Today at work, we all wondered if Madonna knows that Casablanca is a place that is, quite frankly, not in Iraq. The whole point of that film was for cynical Rick to realize the importance of sacrificing his own happiness for a greater purpose. It was one of the finest examples of WWII propaganda, and I often use it in my classes to demonstrate the types of films the Office of War Information approved.
Other remakes we have to "look forward to" include:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (apparently with all new music)
Footloose (which, according to rumor, is going to be a full-fledge musical in the tradition of High School Musical)
Nightmare on Elm Street (with no Robert Englund)
Stephen King's It (which might not suck, but what was wrong with the first one?)
It would be different if all of these were quality projects that rebooted a fandom or paid proper homage to the original. But most of them seem to reek of laziness and greed.
Case in point: Madonna Wants to Remake Casablanca and Set it in War-Torn Iraq. WTF?!?!?!?! That's just not funny. Today at work, we all wondered if Madonna knows that Casablanca is a place that is, quite frankly, not in Iraq. The whole point of that film was for cynical Rick to realize the importance of sacrificing his own happiness for a greater purpose. It was one of the finest examples of WWII propaganda, and I often use it in my classes to demonstrate the types of films the Office of War Information approved.
Other remakes we have to "look forward to" include:
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (apparently with all new music)
Footloose (which, according to rumor, is going to be a full-fledge musical in the tradition of High School Musical)
Nightmare on Elm Street (with no Robert Englund)
Stephen King's It (which might not suck, but what was wrong with the first one?)
It would be different if all of these were quality projects that rebooted a fandom or paid proper homage to the original. But most of them seem to reek of laziness and greed.