The remake that shouldn't have

They really shouldn't have made a remake of Ben-Hur.

Not because the material is so sacrosanct that it should never be remade. As a matter of fact, the Ben-Hur you think of as BEN-HUR -- the 1959 version directed by William Wyler -- is actually the third version, after a short in 1907 and a feature in 1925. I'd say the weirder thing, within the spectrum of film history, is how long it took to make another version, except there was actually a 2003 version, and also a miniseries in 2010. I guess the Hur-less period between 1959 and 2003 was the really weird period.

No, it shouldn't have been remade just because it just doesn't feel all that relevant to today.

We don't need to get into a discussion of religion. I'll concede that any story in which Christ appears as a character has a kind of eternal timeliness. There's always a way to tie in the themes to things happening today.

Rather, it just feels like a bit of a cinematic outlier. Like, "Where the hell did this new version of Ben-Hur come from?"

Learning that Timur Bekmambetov was the director, I had high hopes. Or rather, I knew there was at least a possibility there would be something cartoonishly stupendous about it. Bekmambetov's cartoonish stupendousness cuts both ways, but when it's on, it's on. It's not on in Wanted, but boy is it ever on in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

So that was the most disappointing thing about this new Ben-Hur. It actually doesn't have a lot of the outrageous awesomeness of AL: VH. In fact, it's played completely straight.

The next most disappointing thing?

Not a lot, actually.

If you want me to complete the thought in the subject of this post, it would be "The remake that shouldn't have ... worked. But somehow did."

That's right, I actually sort of liked this movie, and not even for the only reasons I figured I could like it.

Is it necessary? Hardly. Is it memorable? No, not really.

Is it sort of fun in the moment, and sort of poignant, and sort of good?

Yes, all those things.

The natural resistances anyone would feel toward a 2016 version of Ben-Hur kind of fell away as I was watching it, and I found myself liking the performances, and the grandiose production design, and the story itself.

I even liked Morgan Freeman and his awesome/ridiculous dreadlocks.

One nice thing about Ben-Hur was that it was not obviously the product of someone's digital playground. I'm sure there were plenty of digital effects in it -- one doesn't make a period appropriate epic set in the Roman Empire without some digital help -- but they were pretty seamless. And part of that comes from the fact that there was not some monstrous hydra or other creature that escaped from Clash of the Titans and into this movie. It was just a fairly straightforward telling of the story, with some changes to the plot to give it a happier ending. (But, spoiler alert: Jesus still dies.)

I don't know, maybe there's no good reason to like this movie. But I did sort of like it. And I don't really see a reason to talk myself out of that.

Does that mean you should go out and see it?

Nah.

To see how outraged I should be

We all complain about remakes and reboots and long-delayed sequels. I mean, everyone. The trend has gotten so ridiculous that even that mythical Dumbest Member of the Viewing Public probably has some sacred cow whose legacy has been just watered down enough through an uninspired remake that it's made him grumpy.

Yet many of us continue to see them anyway. Even when we know better. Even when there are plenty of other options to watch at our fingertips at any given moment of the day.

Why?

It's not enough to assume they fucked it up. We want to know how badly they fucked it up.

Which was pretty much my reason for watching the Poltergeist remake last night.

Since I still cite the original Poltergeist as perhaps the scariest movie I've ever seen -- and I'm speaking purely of my capacity to handle it at the age I saw it, not objectively the most disturbing -- I was perhaps even more curious about what kind of sacrilege they put up on screen in the 2015 remake. And part of that curiosity was, of course, a dim hope that it was worthwhile. Some of the basic elements of that film still bother me enough that a smart update of them could have had the same effect.

Gil Kenan's 2015 version of Poltergeist does not have smart updates of anything. As perhaps a single symbol of what grounds a timeless concept thuddingly in our present tense, the paranormal investigators send a drone into that ectoplasmic void in the upstairs closet. I tell you now from having seen it -- nothing I can think of is less scary than a drone. (Unless you're a terrorist or a civilian scampering around on the ground in a Middle Eastern country, of course.)

The new Poltergeist tries to hit the same story beats as the original, but it hits them with such a lethargy that it highlights just how perfunctory the whole affair is. For example, screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire decides he has to give a shout out to the clown scene from the original and the tree scene from the original, so he puts them both in the same scene. Both sequences are directed by Kenan with such little flair that what makes a living tree and a living clown so frightening are almost completely lost. Which is a real shame, because Kenan directed the clever and scary animated film Monster House (which my son calls "Spooky House"), making him an obvious candidate for this job, and Lindsay-Abaire wrote a movie I absolutely love, Rabbit Hole ... making him not such an obvious candidate for this job, but also making him someone who should be able to write a better script.

Then there are the very minor alterations of things that happen in the original. The absolutely terrifying scene in the original in which that paranormal investigator sees maggots in his chicken and then starts tearing off his face is handled this time with Sam Rockwell's paterfamilias having the episode instead. But instead of the practical effect biological realism of the face-tearing incident, it's a predictably CG affair where he spews black tar-like liquid into a sink and sees CG worms in it. Bo-ring.

I will grant that even a PG-13 rating today is not what a PG rating was back then, so that accounts for some of the toned-down nature of that incident. Another way this Poltergeist is sanitized for the 21st century is that the parents, played in the original so memorably with such mutual affection and joie de vivre by Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, don't of course smoke weed in their bedroom after the kids go to sleep. No one is getting away with that shit in 2015. However, we need to know that Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt are cool, so instead they drink wine out of coffee mugs. Bo-ring.

CG really does this movie in, putting too fine a point on things that were scary for their minimalism back in the original. Of course we get Carol Anne at the TV again (she's called Madison this time), but where we thought we heard distant whispering in that static originally, we couldn't really be sure. The thing that was creepy about it was that Carol Anne was talking to the TV, validating those sounds we heard as the sounds of ghostly whispers. This time, however, Kenan thinks it's a good idea to have the girl touch the TV and have a hand come back from the other side. Then the screen fills up with hands. Might I find this scary if I hadn't seen the original? No way to tell, but I don't think so. She also repeats the line "They're here," but without wanting to directly imitate Heather O'Rourke saying "They're heeEEEEeere," she just spits out the words dully. As if everyone involved just knows this is a soulless enterprise, and going through the motions is the best approach they can imagine.

Don't even get me started on all the CGI ghouls they see when they send the drone into the void. I'd say I'd seen it in a thousand films before, but I actually think it's been thousands, plural.

In short, Poltergeist is exactly what a person would expect, and to even enumerate its sins as I've just done suggests I was expecting it to be something else. I shouldn't have been, and if I was, I was a fool.

So maybe I've enumerated its sins just to save you the trouble of watching it yourself in order to determine how badly they fucked it up.

The folly of remaking something unique

I'm away for the weekend and supposed to be taking a small break from blogging, but the wifi is strong where I'm staying, and I've got a moment alone with my computer and my morning coffee on a balcony, so ... instinct took over.

Last night at this resort where we're staying near Phillip Island (about 120 k from Melbourne), I finally got started on some personal viewing at around 11 p.m., so I sought out the shortest thing I'd brought with me -- which happened to be the original 1973 version of The Wicker Man, borrowed from the library. It clocked in at a brisk 84 minutes, so it was easily the winner.

Having seen the Nicolas Cage/Neil Labute remake almost exactly eight years ago -- to honor the 366th day of 2008, February 29th, with something notably awful -- I'd always harbored a curiosity about the original, and whether the seeds for what went so wrong in the Cage/Labute version were visible there.

They were, but not in the ways I had expected.

It wasn't that the original was so deliciously campy and that Labute had either deliberately or accidentally brought the same tone to his remake. Rather, what was wrong was the decision to remake it in the first place.

I was riveted by this odd movie, directed by a guy I'd never heard of named Robin Hardy. I'd never heard of him because he didn't make another movie for 13 years after The Wicker Man, and then it was 25 more years before his next (and most recent) directorial effort ... though he's still going at age 86, and has a project on wikipedia whose release date is listed as TBA.

Well, if I'd been a film industry person who'd seen The Wicker Man in 1973 (which would have been tricky as I was being born that year), I would have given Hardy his next job right away. It's strange and mysterious and discomfiting, while also being kitschy in just the right ways -- and while also sort of being a musical.

A musical? Yes, there are about five different songs in this movie, sung by the actors. They're front-loaded, as that kind of thing drops away in the second half, but they are honest-to-goodness songs, some sung diagetically, some sung as apparent commentaries on the action. Some are gloriously cheeky early 70s flower children songs, and some are gloriously cheeky early 70s flower children songs with a sinister undertone. All work perfectly in terms of orienting us in the film's time period and all make the action a bit more chilling than it would be on its own.

The action? It's like the plot of Labute's remake in many ways, if I remember correctly, which is certainly to be expected. But so different from it in key ways.

One difference that I found unaccountable, and even more damning of Labute's project once I know about it, is that Labute chose to make the central pagan group (religious sect? cult?) into an entirely distaff affair. This key choice to have it an organization composed entirely of women is simply not present in Hardy's film. There are certainly powerful women who appear here, but no more centrally then some powerful men, notably Christopher Lee as the group's leader (called Lord Summerisle, named after the very beautiful Scottish isle on which this movie was shot). There's also one chilling scene where a female teacher is instructing a class of entirely girls on the phallic symbolism of the maypole, a scene that was recreated in the remake (as I was reminded by watching an awesome five-minute "best (worst?) moments of The Wicker Man" video on youtube). There's definitely something provocative about the fact that they are all female in that class. But Hardy's movie does not go on to suggest that the women have a dominant position in this society, and that makes Labute's choice to extrapolate that reading all the more problematic ... especially when their ungodly sacrificial tendencies are so feral, so unambiguously evil. This also majorly complicates the gender dynamics in any scene where Cage is forced to punch one of them out (this happens multiple times) and even, in one case, fell one with a karate kick. These scenes are simultaneously comical, which gets at exactly the moral complexity of what goes wrong in Labute's film, which certainly invites charges of misogyny when taken in comparison to the original.

The other thing that humorously weighs Labute down is his decision to fixate on bees. Some of the moments of greatest humor from that five-minute youtube video involve Cage's reaction to having a mesh chamber that resembles a fencing helmet placed over his head, and having bees poured into that helmet, which attack Cage's face and inspire some of his most outrageous acting. (Though I'll be damned if I remember that actually appearing in the film version -- I wonder if it was a deleted scene.) Labute incorporates bee imagery into some other allegedly disturbing images he includes in his film. That's not in the original either. Although this pagan group wants to make a sacrifice to return its harvest to its former glory, it's a harvest of produce, particularly apples. Maybe Labute just thought Hardy would have made his movie about bees if it were possible to create digital bees in 1973.

Another thing I found particularly striking about the original is that Edward Woodward's police detective is a man of strong Christian faith, which sets him up in opposition to the pagans (and makes him an ideal candidate for sacrifice in their view). That may have been present in Labute's film as well (eight years and more than two thousand films has a way of clouding the memory), but it didn't register much to me at the time, or if it did it was also in that realm of the unintentionally comical that suffuses the whole movie. Woodward seems like a true believer, which lends extra conviction to everything and makes the contrast all the more powerful.

In a way, it was a stroke of cinematic good taste for someone to have seen a film like Hardy's The Wicker Man and imagined that its eerie goodness should be brought to a modern audience. But especially with the film's indispensable flower child quality, it isn't really translatable to 2006 without losing a good portion of the mood that gives it its power. Also, it should have been perfectly evident to this person of good taste that this is a singular movie, one that maybe never should have existed in the first place, and certainly shouldn't exist twice. The same good taste that served them in recognizing the greatness of Hardy's movie abandoned them in informing their judgment about a possible remake.

As I am trying to be a bit more measured in my praise of films in terms of their star ratings, I gave The Wicker Man four stars on Letterboxd, though I toyed with that additional half star. It's a treat for anyone who likes those niche horrors that seemed to have jumped out of the 1970s and escaped our universe altogether. That sense of being untethered from what we know and have seen before is absolutely a good thing.

And absolutely something they never could have captured in a remake.

Though I probably shouldn't close this piece without acknowledging that Labute did give us something completely out there, in the sense that his Wicker Man has become something of a modern classic in terms of movies that are so bad they're good. I shouldn't close this piece without acknowledging that there's some value in having done that -- in fact, great value. I'm glad I live in a world where this awful version of The Wicker Man exists, a version we can all laugh about together.

And without that awful version, I might never have discovered the chilling original.

I prefer the candy bar

Last Friday on my drive home from work, I was listening to a piece by NPR film critic Bob Mondelo that was timed in conjunction with the release of two remakes: Footloose and The Thing. The thrust of his piece, which was quite well researched and entertaining (both typical for Mondelo), was that we shouldn't be so quick to grouse about remakes, since they've been with us throughout the history of cinema.

In the course of his discussion Mondelo looked ahead to this Friday's release of The Three Musketeers, which isn't exactly a remake in the sense those other two films are -- it's more rightly considered as yet another adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' (heh heh, you said "dumbass") famous source material.

How famous, and what do I mean when I say "yet another"?

Mondelo concluded that today's Three Musketeers would be the twenty-ninth -- that's 2-9 -- version of the story to hit the silver screen. I'm not going delve into what methods he used to make that determination, whether the movie had to be the full story in order to qualify, or whether it could just be some of the characters; whether it had to be feature length, or if shorts were counted. (If you want to get some sense of the breadth of this phenomenon, wikipedia has a page devoted to versions of the story on film.) The point is, The Three Musketeers is one of the most popular properties in the history of cinema, if not the most popular. Choosing, according to his math, 1895 as the beginning of cinema history, Mondelo noted that one version of Dumas' story has come out on the average of every four years.

Having not had one in about ten, I suppose we were due for another.

Suffice it to say that this is going to be one of those Friday morning posts where Vance is not giving the movie the benefit of the doubt. I hardly think I should, and if I did so, it would only be out of deference to the candy bar.

That's right, the candy bar. That bland, nougat-based bar that makes up for its blandness by tacking on an extra inch or so of length from standard candy bar size. In fact, so bland is this candy bar that I once posited a theory that it's at the earliest stage of evolution among three similar candy bars that should also be familiar to you. You start with your Three Musketeers, with just nougat and a thin layer of chocolate around it. Then you graduate to Milky Way, which keeps the nougat (I believe) but adds a layer of caramel and gives you a thicker chocolate coating. The most fully evolved candy bar in this species is Snickers, which is chock full of peanuts and caramel and may do away with the nougat altogether. (I'm picturing these candy bars cut into cross sections and I think I've got their ingredients right.)

The thing is, I've decided sometime in the last five to ten years that I actually love the Three Musketeers in all its simplicity. Having thought of it as some rudimentary confection that should have been five to ten cents less than the others, for probably over a decade in my life, I've come around on its pleasures in recent years. In fact, if looking for a treat, I'd probably opt for a Three Musketeers over either of the others. Oddly, Snickers would then come second and Milky Way would come third. (Why the aforementioned evolutionary order gets all jumbled up here, I could not really say without giving it some further thought.)

In fact, I'm almost bummed that this candy bar has to be affiliated with a fictional property that has never done anything for me.

Maybe I just haven't seen the right Three Musketeers movies -- in fact, I'm sure I haven't -- but this swashbuckling quartet has never gotten me very excited. Maybe that's because there's this maddening numerical discrepancy right to start out with. The actual three are Athos, Porthos and Aramis. But then you've got D'Artagnan as a fourth, I guess because he was not originally part of their trio, joining them only near the beginning of Dumas' story. I'm exaggerating if I say that this is why I don't care about The Three Musketeers, but it doesn't help.

It's probably that the two Musketeers movies I have seen were such inferior films. The first was 1998's The Man in the Iron Mask, directed by Randall Wallace -- the film expected to get a boost from the fact that it was Leonardo DiCaprio's first release after Titanic made him a megastar. This story involves the musketeers at a point after the chronology of Dumas' original novel. The second was Peter Hyams' The Musketeer (2001), which stars Justin Chambers. If this is any indication of Chambers' charisma, I refer to him as a "blander Chris O'Donnell."

I don't want to go into detail about the strengths (few) or weaknesses (many) of these movies, but I do want to say that they probably suffered from a bit of musketeer overload. See, it was only 1993 when we'd gotten what is probably the most recent completely straightforward adaptation of Dumas' novel, The Three Musketeers, which starred several members of the cast of Young Guns as well as the actual Chris O'Donnell. Didn't see that one -- even then, I was not interested. I guess the 1993, 1998 and 2001 releases of these three films is about in keeping with Mondelo's estimate of one new Musketeers movie every four years.

Even with a ten-year gap since the last one, the movie releasing today still strikes a person with an overwhelming sense of "Why???" Mondelo noted that the new thing this film offers over its predecessors is that it's in 3D. And that may be the only thing, because the wire-work action stunts you see in the trailer were the actual supposed justification for Hyams' 2001 adaptation of the story -- a muddy, murky affair that I ranked as the worst movie I saw in 2001. Hyams' film wanted to capitalize on such phenomena as The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Who knows, maybe that's still what the version releasing today is trying to do.

I guess one perennial justification for more versions of The Three Musketeers is to put that generation's young people in the lead roles. That's why we were fed the likes of Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland in the 1993 version, and why the female lead in The Musketeer was the consummately modern-day actress Mena Suvari from the American Pie movies. The names in the cast of today's movie are less familiar to me, but maybe that's because I'm no longer a member of the younger generation. I've heard of Logan Lerman, who plays D'Artagnan. Milla Jovovich, Orlando Bloom and Christophe Waltz are also around for good measure, though none of them plays a musketeer. (I'm not really qualified to discuss how the older Musketeers films may have been doing the same thing, whether Douglas Fairbanks, Gene Kelly or Michael York were being marketed to the youth in the same way.)

In general, though, the footage I've seen seems pretty unexciting. The film's fascination with visual techniques that seem a decade old -- like the slow-mo spin of Jovovich's character during a sword fight, and her sliding under a bunch of firing guns -- is inauspicious to say the least. (Director Paul W.S. Anderson worked with Jovovich on the Resident Evil movies, which I suppose is why she gets all the "best" action shots in the trailer. His credentials as a director don't make a person any more hopeful about the prospects for this movie -- however, his Resident Evil experience could work as a metaphor for why his Three Musketeers has the feel of a reanimated corpse.)

Maybe they'll get it right when the next Musketeers movie comes out in 2016. When the number of Musketeers movies hits the big 3-0.

In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the heck out of that candy bar.

Why we're so upset about remakes

Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood.

We act as though Hollywood is completely out of ideas, but the truth is, Hollywood was always out of ideas. At least, you have to reach that conclusion about Hollywood's past if you want to reach that same conclusion about Hollywood's present.

Did bloggers scream and yell when The Jazz Singer (1927) was remade 27 years later in 1954? (And then, again, 26 years later in 1980?) Were there conniptions when Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1931 and again in 1941? The length of time between an original and a remake has even been much shorter -- the classic Marx brothers comedy Duck Soup (1927) was remade only three years later as a movie called Another Fine Mess (1930). Numerous films had multiple remakes before anyone reading this post was even born. (In fact, for a handy and close-to-complete list of film remakes, check out this page on the ever useful wikipedia.)

I think there are two reasons we consider the current spate of remakes to particularly offend our sensibilities:

1) The people with the loudest opinions on the topic -- people of my generation -- are finally getting to the point where the originals of these movies were made in our lifetime. You notice we don't get nearly so upset about remakes of movies we've never heard of.

2) The movies being remade don't really seem like classics, the way we've come to define "classic."

The remake of Point Break -- which has a screenwriter attached (Kurt Wimmer), and which everyone has been fretting about lately -- seems like a perfect example of both.

For those who can't believe they're remaking Point Break, it seems like all too recently to us that the original came out. Twenty years goes by in a flash, I guess.

But more than anything, it doesn't seem like a "classic" -- it seems like a guilty pleasure, a B movie people embrace as more of a cult film than anything else.

But who says you can't remake cult films? There are numerous examples of that phenomenon, too.

There are two schools of thought on when a film should be remade:

1) When the original was so great that it simply begs to be introduced to a new generation;

2) When the original was a good idea that was slightly botched, and someone wants to get it right.

Of course, this tends to open up the potential field of remakes to almost anything.

However, the difference these days may be that there's a third reason to remake a film: to reintroduce it to the same generation. With films like the new versions of Point Break and Total Recall in particular, the smart money is on the fans of the original films flocking to the remakes in droves. That's consistent with the general Hollywood mentality to reboot, repackage and rebrand.

I think Total Recall has caught some of us by surprise in part because, like Point Break, we don't really consider it a classic. Even though Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall is a film I love, I'd be hard-pressed to define it as a "classic." It may be one of the smartest films Arnold Schwarzenegger has ever appeared in, but it's certainly a lesser film in his canon in terms of sheer name recognition. Or maybe it's just that straight remakes of Arnold Schwarzenegger films -- rather than reboots, of which there have been many (The Terminator, Predator) -- make us feel old. First Conan the Barbarian, now this.

I think the reason these films make us despair about the state of Hollywood is that they make us ask this question: "What won't they remake?" There's an implication that if you remake Point Break and Total Recall, it's because you've gotten to the bottom of the barrel and already remade the more obvious, credible choices.

But thankfully, that's not the case. Back to the Future has not been remade, and has in fact not even had a new installment since 1989. (Let's not ponder the role of Michael J. Fox's health in that particular decision.) Ditto Ghostbusters, whose last (and, modestly, only its second) entry was also in 1989. (I'm well aware that Ghostbuster 3 is moving forward, but at least it's not a remake.) And we can even go back to older movies. Citizen Kane turns 70 this year, and has yet to be remade.

And some of the movies being remade actually do seem like obvious choices. The remake of Footloose, which comes out next month, is one such movie. I guess that means it qualifies as a "classic" in the way Point Break and Total Recall do not. While the appeal of those movies was somewhat selective, simply everyone saw Footloose. And especially with Glee doing as well as it has, Footloose meets the classic definition of needing to be introduced to a generation that hungers for it. Likewise, it does not surprise me that a Dirty Dancing remake has been greenlit.

And if it's really an issue of considering it blasphemy to remake the movies in question, consider it a compliment. Nothing commits a movie to the annals of film history more than to be revisited down through the years with new versions. With any luck, it'll actually introduce fans of the new films to the films that inspired them.

So as you are bemoaning the decision to remake films from your childhood, consider where you'd be without the remakes you grew up on: Little Shop of Horrors, The Fly, Scarface, Three Men and a Baby and The Thing.

Oh yeah, stay tuned for the second Thing remake, also coming out this fall. Actually, it's a prequel, and actually, John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing may not have been an actual remake of The Thing From Another World (1951), since both films were different interpretations of John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There?

It gets messy. So let's just take the movies on a case-by-case basis, and see how they go.

Lord knows, we'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.

The original version got it wrong

My wife and I attended a performance of the musical Hair on Saturday night at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Since that's her favorite show, I got us a pair of tickets as a Christmas present for her. (Always love the Christmas presents where the giver gets to be an equal beneficiary.)

We really enjoyed ourselves, especially at the very end. After the bows, the cast waved us up on stage, and anyone who wanted to could go up and dance to a reprise of "Let the Sunshine In." (Incidentally, we had a debate about the lyrics of this song -- is it "Let the Sunshine In" or "Let the Sun Shine In"? I actually like the second one better, but the first one is correct. However, the poster you see above lists it the second way. It's a mystery.) Not only was it glorious just to be on the stage, in among the sets and actors, singing this epic song, but we also happened to be dancing next to Kate Beckinsale and Columbus Short, with their respective spouses.

However, just before the very end was perhaps our most puzzling moment.

See, my wife and I are both most familiar with Milos Forman's 1979 film version of Hair, not the stage version, which debuted on Broadway in 1968. I've only seen the film once, about five years ago, whereas she's seen it countless times, enough to know the songs by heart. Neither of us had seen any other version.

And you know what, the original stage version does not have the dramatic punch at the end that the movie has. Nor does it have as strong a narrative spine as the film version, though we're speaking in relative terms here, since neither version is particularly heavy on plot.

Now, this could clearly be an instance of liking the first version of something you're exposed to better than other versions. I discussed that phenomenon at length here. But in most instances of remakes -- or in this case, film adaptations of Broadway musicals -- the essential plot elements are virtually identical. In Michael Weller's adaptation of Gerome Ragni and James Rado's book, there are some big differences -- differences Ragni and Rado were not pleased about, but that's their problem.

From all my previous understanding of Hair, the main character/protagonist is George Berger, played in the film by Treat Williams. He's the first hippie you're introduced to, and he's a touchpoint throughout, kind of like the gravitational pull at the center of all the hippies we meet along the way. The other primary character is Claude Hooper Bukowski, played in the film by John Savage. Claude is also a hippie, and he's got his own song about himself, imagining himself from Manchester, England -- even though he was raised in Flushing, NY. (A sample lyric from the song: "I believe in God, and I believe that God, believes in Claude, and that's me.") In the film version, however, Claude is a country bumpkin just awakening to the hippie movement, fresh into New York City from Oklahoma. Claude and Berger both have feelings for Sheila (Beverly D'Angelo), but keeping with the free love themes of the play, they aren't rivals for her affections, but rather, share each other. (Now that I've seen the stage version more recently, I can't tell you if there's an edge to their relationships in the movie.)

Throughout the course of an admittedly minimal narrative, Claude gets drafted to go to Vietnam. He attends a ceremony in which a lot of other young hippies are burning their draft cards, but he can't do it. In the film, however, when he's right about to show up to the military induction center, Berger takes his place at the last minute, leaving an innocent Claude to explore the new zest for life he's discovered, and possibly his feelings for Sheila. It seems that Berger believes he'd be able to survive Vietnam whereas Claude wouldn't, but that's beside the point, because Berger thinks he'll be able to get "Claude" disqualified from having to go. When it doesn't work out that way, the last thing we see, during the rousing reprise of "Manchester, England," is Berger in uniform, marching onto a plane for his deployment to Vietnam -- where he either actually dies, or where it's understood that he'll die. I don't remember exactly how the film ends, I just remember Treat Williams' scared but stolid face as he marches onto the plane, accepting the sacrifice he's made for Claude. It's a classic hero's sacrifice, one that I'm sure appears in many films -- it's too bad the only one I can think of right now is Armageddon, where Bruce Willis takes Ben Affleck's place at the last minute, as the guy who has to stay behind for the suicide mission of detonating the nukes they drilled into the asteroid.

But Berger doesn't have his Armageddon moment in the original stage play. In the original, Claude is the one who goes off to war. In fact, the last image in the show we saw on Saturday is Claude's still body, in uniform and perfectly straight, lying on an American flag. He went to Vietnam and he died.

It's a striking image, but it doesn't have the same impact as the end of the film. For starters, it means that Berger is basically a glorified bystander. He never makes a sacrifice for Claude, so why is he even picked out as the "main character," the guy we meet first? Berger's role as the main character is only important if he gets to make his sacrifice for Claude. Other than that, he's just another hippie who failed to convince Claude he should burn his draft card.

This is certainly a strange indictment to be making. Hair was a popular musical for 11 years before it made it to the screen, so for those 11 years, the only Hair anyone knew was Claude going to Vietnam and dying. I can understand why Gerome Ragni and James Rado were pissed off about the film version, which essentially says, "The original musical that everyone loves is not good enough as is. It needs to have more dramatic conflict and more of a heroic sacrifice in the third act."

But you know what? It's true. It may have been highly presumptuous for Michael Weller and Milos Forman to come along and change the musical, but their changes work.

But that could just be because a film and a stage show have different needs. On stage, you can get away with going light on plot. You can loosely connect a bunch of rousing musical numbers and lightly sketched out characters, and it's enough for a show. In fact, in a post-show discussion of other live theater we've seen, I told my wife about the musical Fosse, to which I'd gotten free tickets when I lived in New York. The show has no narrative throughline, but rather, is just a collection of stagings of Bob Fosse's most famous numbers (from such shows as Cabaret, Chicago, All that Jazz, etc.). It's no wonder I didn't think very highly of that show. But the point is, you can get away with it. It's theater, and different rules apply.

In a film, you need a strong narrative. In most cases, anyway. The characters need to have characters arcs, journeys. And I think Forman and Weller detected that George Berger needed to have a journey. He needed to start out as a free-loving hippie who's fun to hang out with, but is defined by his lack of commitment. He needs to start out as charismatic but unreliable. Over the course of his journey, he must develop the personal fortitude to stand up for something, do something for somebody else, and suffer the consequences of his new enlightenment.

That's what gives a loose story about the liberal revolution of the 1960s its emotional core. I don't want to call the stage version "unemotional" -- after all, Claude going to Vietnam and dying is certainly tragic. But it's predictably tragic. Berger taking his place is one of those unpredictable things that teaches you something about the capacity for goodness in the human soul.

Because we had such a fun time at the Pantages on Saturday night, with such a joyous climax, this discussion is largely academic. I don't want you to think that we sat there all night, criticizing the choices made by the person who originally dreamed up Hair. The real takeaway from the show was the energy, the rousing production numbers, the soaring vocals ("Aquarius! A-quaaaa-reeee-ussss!") and the cast breaking the fourth wall in such delightful ways, including running up the aisles and occasionally interacting with the audience. Not to mention the fact that were actually up on stage at the very end.

But I do think it's interesting to consider how, at least in the case of Hair, a dramatic work can be a work in progress, possibly not having reached the definitive version of itself in its original form -- even if that original form is staggeringly popular. Instead of being annoyed, Ragni and Rado should have felt proud that Weller and Forman embraced the raw materials they provided, and tried to make Hair the best version of itself it could be.

We should all be glad they did.

On versions

During a recent piece comparing Let the Right One In and Let Me In, in which I stated that the two films were of comparable quality, I also stated that this seemed like one of those situations where whichever one you saw first, you'd probably like better.

I went on to describe my belief that this is a widespread phenomenon in general -- the first of anything you consume is the one you like better. Assuming you like it at all, that is. If you happened to watch Gus Van Sant's Psycho first, and then followed it up with Alfred Hitchcock's, I'd have to assume you'd find Hitchcock to be the superior version.

But not necessarily if you actually liked Van Sant's movie, even though I use it as an example because so few people did. If you liked Van Sant's Psycho, you might think, "What is this old, grainy version of the story that steals all of Van Sant's camera setups?" Ha ha.

But I have a kind of serious point here. I contend that, especially in the case of songs you like, you might attach to one definitive version of it, and not like the other versions quite as much. That might be true whether you were first exposed to the original, or a remix, or a cover.

So I thought today I would put to the test my "first seen, best seen" theory by examining a bunch of movies I've seen, where I've also seen a remake of the same film. Will I like whichever version I saw first, best? I actually don't know, because all I've done so far is identified the pairings. I'm saving the actual judgment for real-time, as I write.

I have to say, right from the start, that it's a pretty inexact science. I'm sure somewhere there will be an example of a pairing where I saw the vastly inferior version of the film first, and will recognize that as such. But will this really blow my theory out of the water? I'm going to say "no," because we're talking about situations where you like the first version you saw. Is that cheating? I don't think so.

I also should mention that my theory does, by its very nature, have the potential to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And by that I mean, a vast majority of us see the better version of a film first, simply because remade films were often classics in their original form, and most film buffs watch the original before they watch the remake. But there are a number of films among the following pairings where I definitely saw the newer version first, and then went back to see the older one. And besides, remakes are not necessarily only of good films, or of films that fully lived up to their potential. In fact, in the piece about the two "Let" vampire movies, I quoted Let the Right One In director Tomas Alfredson, who thought that only bad films should be remade.

Okay, just a little more bookkeeping to take care of before we get started. Which films don't qualify in this discussion?

1) Multiple reinterpretations of the same famous character. I'm not going to consider Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to be a remake of Disney's Robin Hood, any more than I would consider The New World to be a remake of Disney's Pocahontas. We all know that there are characters in our popular consciousness who get regularly revisited in forms that don't constitute remakes of the other films dealing with these characters. (See also: Dracula, Ebenezer Scrooge, The Three Musketeers.)

2) Genre shifts. I don't think I'm going to consider Adam Shankman's Hairspray to be a remake of John Waters' Hairspray, because there was an intervening step in which the story became a Broadway musical, and Shankman's film is based on that. (See also: The two versions of The Producers.)

3) Taking the essential plot and updating it. Courage Under Fire uses the same essential plot dynamics as Roshomon, but I don't consider the former to be a remake of the latter. (See also: O vs. Othello, A Fistful of Dollars vs. Yojimbo.)

4) Multiple versions of the same source material. No new versions of movies based on Shakespeare's plays can be considered remakes of the other versions. There were three Hamlets made within a 10-year period -- Franco Zefferelli's (1990), Kenneth Branagh's (1996) and Michael Almereyda's (2000). None are remakes of each other.

Well, let's not get bogged down in rules. It basically comes down to, I'm choosing the ones I'm including for reasons that make sense to me, and that's that.

Ready? I'll list the film I saw first in each pair. In more or less alphabetical order by one of the two titles:

1) Vanilla Sky (2001, Cameron Crowe) vs. Abre Los Ojos (1997, Alejandro Amenabar)

Winner: Vanilla Sky. Amenabar's film probably didn't stand a chance, because of how passionately I feel about Crowe's film. The visual bombast and great soundtrack are two of the things I love about Vanilla Sky, so Abre Los Ojos felt comparatively quiet on its lower budget.

2) Can't Buy Me Love (1987, Steve Rash) vs. Love Don't Cost a Thing (2003, Troy Beyer)

Winner: Can't Buy Me Love. It was a childhood favorite, and I still think fondly of it. Beyer's modern urban update is actually pretty good, but Ronald Miller (Patrick Dempsey) on his riding lawnmower wins out any day.

3) Chaos (2005, David DeFalco) vs. Last House on the Left (1972, Wes Craven)

Winner: Last House on the Left. Then again, Chaos is one of the most loathsome films I have ever seen, so this violates the rule that states I had to like the first version I saw. (I have not seen the movie Last House is based on, Ingmar Bergman's 1959 The Virgin Spring, nor Dennis Iliadis' 2009 remake of Last House.)

4) Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971, Mel Stuart) vs. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005, Tim Burton)

Winner: Willy Wonka, hands down. It's arguable whether Burton's terrible film is a remake of the original or just another version of the book, but I'll include it just so I can shit on Burton's film in a public forum.

5) City of Angels (1998, Brad Silberling) vs. Wings of Desire (1987, Wim Wenders)

Winner: Wings of Desire, but with a big asterisk that kind of proves my point anyway. City of Angels is a very flawed film -- I don't even know that I necessarily give it a thumbs up. But what I couldn't help noticing when I finally saw Wings of Desire last year was that I felt the plot was much more focused in its Hollywood remake. I know intellectually that Wenders' film is obviously the better film, but I did find myself impatient with it because I was expecting the more straightforward narrative structure of Silberling's film.

6) Dawn of the Dead (2004, Zack Snyder) vs. Dawn of the Dead (1978, George A. Romero)

Winner: Snyder's version. I really wish I had seen them in the reverse order, because Romero's movie seemed soooo slooooow to me -- both in terms of the speed of the plot, and the speed of the zombies. So instead of getting to appreciate one of history's seminal zombie films, I was laughing at its corniness compared to Snyder's kinetic and bloody remake.

7) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, Robert Wise) vs. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008, Scott Derrickson)

Winner: Wise's version. This one is really easy, as the remake is absolutely terrible. Even a good version wouldn't have stood much of a chance, though, because I've always appreciated the original -- it was my dad's favorite movie growing up.

8) The Dinner Game (1998, Francis Veber) vs. Dinner for Schmucks (2010, Jay Roach)

Winner: The Dinner Game. This one actually had the potential to upset the applecart, because although we liked the French original, my wife and I were marveling over how little of it we could remember, even though we saw it within the last couple years. When we both hated Dinner for Schmucks, it was no contest in favor of the original.

9) Point of No Return (1993, John Badham) vs. La Femme Nikita (1990, Luc Besson)

Winner: La Femme Nikita. But again, I hated Badham's film -- hated it -- so this hardly counts in this discussion. Am a bit ashamed that I actually saw the remake before the original, but I was still only in the beginning stages of my film geekdom back then.

10) The Flight of the Phoenix (1965, Robert Aldrich) vs. Flight of the Phoenix (2004, John Moore)

Winner: Aldrich's version. I watched them weeks apart so I could review both for my site, and so the original could inform my review of the remake. I have a slight preference for the original, though the remake has its strengths as well.

11) The Hitcher (2007, Dave Meyers) vs. The Hitcher (1986, Robert Harmon)

Winner: Meyers' version. This was a bit like with Dawn of the Dead, where I thought the newer, radder version was surprisingly enjoyable and had a more streamlined plot, while the original was boring and poorly constructed by comparison. So sue me.

12) Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Segel) vs. The Invasion (2007, Oliver Hirschbeigel)

Winner: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It's a classic, so of course this wins. I should see the 1970s version as well. Though I should say, I didn't hate The Invasion as much as most critics seemed to. I thought it was okay.

13) Lolita (1997, Adrian Lyne) vs. Lolita (1962, Stanley Kubrick)

Winner: Lyne's version. I know, heresy. But here's my theory working again -- I really liked the version with Dominique Swain and Jeremy Irons, and had this as my standard for the definitive version of Nabokov's novel. Even if the original version was directed by the great Stanley Kubrick.

14) The Manchurian Candidate (1962, John Frankenheimer) vs. The Manchurian Candidate (2004, Jonathan Demme)

Winner: Frankenheimer's, though I do like Demme's.

15) Planet of the Apes (1968, Franklin J. Schaffner) vs. Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton)

Winner: Schaffner's. I don't actually think Burton's is terrible, but it's not good. Besides, how could Mark Wahlberg ever duplicate the inimitable Charlton Heston?

16) The Wages of Fear (1953, Henri-Georges Clouzot) vs. Sorcerer (1977, William Friedkin)

Winner: The Wages of Fear. Sorcerer is actually a pretty good attempt, but it has a lot of excess plot stuff from before the real action begins, which really gets in the way.

17) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974, Tobe Hooper) vs. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003, Marcus Nispel)

Winner: Hooper's. Again the original is of course superior, but I thought the remake was a worthwhile enough effort.

18) Three Men and a Baby (1987, Leonard Nimoy) vs. Trois Hommes et un Coffin (1985, Coline Serreau)

Winner: Three Men and a Baby. At the time I saw both, I would have preferred the former just because it had actors I recognized and was in English. So, not a great example maybe.

19) The Time Machine (2002, Simon Wells) vs. The Time Machine (1960, George Pal)

Winner: Wells' version. Though I may be remembering it that way primarily because I really enjoyed the turn-of-the-century period design on display at the start of the 2002 version, as well as some of its later special effects. Pal's original may be the better version, but I'd probably rather re-watch the Wells version.

20) The Wizard of Oz (1939, Victor Fleming) vs. The Wiz (1978, Sidney Lumet)

Winner: The Wizard of Oz, of course. It's questionable whether this actually qualifies because The Wiz is based on an urban, Broadway version of The Wizard of Oz rather than on Fleming's movie. But 20 seemed like a good round number, so why not.

And 20 is definitely a good place to stop.

So, prophecy self-fulfilled? I guess so. There definitely wasn't any movie on this list where I felt strongly about both versions, and liked the one I saw second better. Does that prove anything? I don't know, maybe not. Would I write this post again, if I had it to do over again? I don't know, maybe not.

Also, there were some pairings I could have discussed but didn't. Are Last Man Standing and A Fistful of Dollars clearly both remakes of Yojimbo, or are they just the dynamics of Yojimbo reimagined? Same question for The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven. Do you consider Red Dragon to be a remake of Manhunter, or are they just two competing versions of Thomas Harris' novel? And what about the only sequel I can think of that might also be considered a remake of the original, Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead?

Well, one thing I determined during the course of accruing this information from my movie lists is that there are a lot of movies where I've seen one version but not the other. In fact, I identified 61 other movies I've seen that either have an original version, a remake, a competing version or some other film that's sort of the same.

Maybe one of these other versions will finally buck the trend of my apparently iron-clad rule.

How different? Maybe not enough

Warning! The following post contains spoilers about both Let Me In and Let the Right One In. Read on if you've seen both, or if you've seen one but don't care about the other. If you've seen neither, you probably won't have any idea what I'm talking about anyway. Also, what in the world are you waiting for? I'll give you another spoiler warning before I get into anything too serious, if you want to read the first 8-10 paragraphs.

I figured out a pretty good way to catch an extra movie or two in the baby era -- go to a 10:05 showing on a Monday night. See, my ability to take responsibility for watching my son is in highest demand during the hours that my wife would actually like to be awake, actually doing things that need to get done. He's developing a routine of winding down around the time we wind down, but before then, we might expect anything from inconsolable crankiness to angelic sweetness. So before then is when I need to be there ... and the late show is when I might get a chance to sneak out. Besides, who wants to see a vampire movie during daylight hours?

The vampire movie I saw last night was Let Me In, the Hollywood remake of the Swedish masterpiece from 2008, Let the Right One In. And not a moment too soon did I see it -- its inexplicably poor box office suggests that it might not survive this Friday in most theaters. Ten days ago I blogged about my interest in seeing it, and was determined to award it a theatrical screening, based on my love of the original and my stated confidence in director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield).

What I really wanted Reeves to do -- and this may seem funny in light of what I'm about to tell you -- was recreate the tone of the original. He did that in spades. In fact, perhaps the box office failure of the movie is more explicable than I thought, and has to do with Reeves' extreme faithfulness to the European stylings of the original.

Maybe too extreme?

No, that's not it -- but there was definitely something too similar about Let Me In to make it as enriching an experience as I wanted it to be. Tomas Alfredson, the director of Let the Right One In, has gone on record not understanding the point of remaking his movie -- he's said that only bad movies should be remade. And while there's obviously a little immodesty in that statement, it's certainly justified. With such an excellent specimen of this story already existing on film, an American remake seemed to demand some slightly different vision -- not essentially the same vision with American actors.

And so yeah, even though I thought Let Me In was technically flawless, and quite good in every way you'd want it to be, it contained very few surprises for me. Hence, it wasn't a home run for me, even though I don't think I could have asked for much more from Reeves. Maybe Alfredson was right, and there was nothing more to say, cinematically, about this particular story.

Or perhaps it's so close in quality to the original that whichever one I saw first, I would have liked better. I find that idea somewhat sacrilegious, because the original is so good. However, I have long held the opinion that whatever version of something you consume first is usually the version you like better. This is most often the case with songs. If you fall in love with one version of a song, usually, even a different version that is objectively just as good, or possibly better, will not affect you in quite the same way. The same principle seems to hold for movies.

So I guess I'm paying Let Me In a really big compliment -- for all intents and purposes, it's in the same league, creatively, as Let the Right One In. But because I saw Let the Right One In first, I can't see it as different enough to stimulate me the way I wanted to be stimulated.

But since I have you here, I thought I'd use the relative freshness of my viewing of both movies (I saw Let the Right One In for the second time about a year ago) to do a comparison of the original and its remake. And here's when those spoilers I mentioned come into play. Last warning!

Consider this your Cliff's Notes on the differences between the two movies. And to make things shorter, I'll use acronyms (LTROI vs. LMI).

1) LMI starts in the middle of the action. LMI starts (quite arrestingly) on a pair of emergency vehicles winding their way through the distant hills of snowy Los Alamos, New Mexico, so far away that their sirens are at first not audible. These ambulances are hurriedly transporting a man who has just disfigured himself with some kind of highly corrosive acid. It's an event that's quite familiar to those who have seen LTROI, but there it occurs somewhere in the second act. Since we've gone on the record with our intention to ruin things, this is the scene where the vampire's guardian (played here quite well by Richard Jenkins) is about to be caught bungling a murder, so he uses a tupperware container full of acid to render his facial features unrecognizable, to protect the vampire from discovery by association. (Though in LMI, we don't discover these details until later on.) In this opening scene, we're seeing just the aftermath of that decision. After the rest of the scene plays out -- I won't ruin that part, but it's the same as in the original -- a title card appears on the screen reading TWO WEEKS EARLIER.

Verdict: It's a bold way to get us into the action, and the scene is shot with excellent depths of focus and a lyrical beauty that is simply stunning. However, I also think it's a bit lazy. TV writers have been majorly relying on this device as a crutch in recent years -- to start with some inflammatory piece of exciting action, and then to include a title card that reads something like EIGHTEEN HOURS EARLIER, and proceed to go back and tell you how we got to this point. In fact, since I had just picked on this very thing in an episode of Lie to Me we'd watched that afternoon, I felt like I couldn't really let LMI off the hook for resorting to this, even if it was done pretty well.

2) The guardian's murders are carried out differently. In LOTRI, the guardian randomly encounters a man on a snowy path and kills him, proceeding to turn him upside down and drain his blood in a spot not very far away. There's more premeditation in LMI, as the guardian favors putting a trash bag over his head and lying in wait in the back of automobiles, before pouncing on the unwitting driver in the front seat. (The first such instance here is pretty memorable, as he catches the driver stopped at a train track as the train goes by, and the sound of the train muffles the victim's screams.) He then takes the victim to the same wooded setting for the draining scene, which is botched in a slightly different way. The bungled murder that leads to him disfiguring himself is also in the back of a car, and Reeves holds his camera in the back seat as the car flips and goes tumbling down an embankment in one of the film's most memorable sequences.

Verdict: Possibly more memorable in LMI, though a cynic would say that Reeves may have just been showing off. That may point to the need for an American film to have more set pieces that are specifically recognizable as part of the horror genre. A killer waiting to pounce is a bit more Hollywood than a killer randomly walking up to a victim and attacking him. However, I do think that the decision to disfigure himself seems more like a desperate last resort when he is pinned in a car, unable to escape. In LTROI, he disfigures himself more out of resignation, when it seems like he might have a possible escape route.

3) Less ambiguity about the relationship between the guardian and the vampire. The first two points I brought up were essentially cosmetic or structural differences. This one is substantive, and it's kind of a big deal. In LTROI, you know there's an older man living with the vampire, and his status is assumed to be her father a number of times, because that's society's default norm for the relationship between a man and a young girl. (Actually, he could be her grandfather, given their age difference). But Alfredson smartly keeps us guessing about his true identity. He could be her father, though that seems like the least likely explanation. He could be a mortal who was once her age, but has grown old while she's stayed young. That seems more likely. Or he could be a pedophile that she has lured to do her bidding, which would serve as kind of a moral judgment against his value as a human being. That's very tempting but is a bit more outside-the-box.

LMI makes a crucial mistake by giving us a definitive answer to this question. While at Abby's house, Owen finds a heavily yellowed sheet of pictures from a photo booth, featuring her and a bespectacled boy, who we are meant to believe is the younger version of the (now recently deceased) guardian. To Reeves' slight credit, he never actually spells this out in the dialogue, but it's pretty clear which answer to the above question he favors.

Verdict: Advantage, LTROI. Leave it to a Hollywood film to be uncomfortable leaving questions unanswered.

4) No digital cats. One thing that LTROI has that LMI doesn't seem to have is a hint of a sense of humor. Not much -- they are both pretty somber affairs -- but there are a couple visual gags in LTROI that can have no other purpose than to make us laugh. One has to do with the neighbor the vampire bites, but does not kill. In both films, this woman perishes in the hospital when the window shade is thrown open and she's incinerated by the sun. However, in LMI, this occurs the next morning after her bite, moments after she's started sucking on her own IV wound. In LTROI, the woman survives for a couple days, showing a number of the symptoms of vampirehood, before she finally needs to be hospitalized. During this period, she's attacked by a bunch of digital cats, who swarm all over her body as they try to attack the evil inside her. The scene is almost played as slapstick.

Verdict: Which actually works, even if just as a short respite from the bleakness of the rest of the film. Besides, I liked following this character for 5-10 minutes on screen as we see her becoming sicker and sicker, kind of a side plot to the main narrative. The extra screen time this character gets in LMI is when Owen (Rear Window-style) spies on her getting busy with her boyfriend in the apartment across the way, through his telescope. This serves only to show us Owen's budding sexual desires, a theme that is not really explored in the Swedish film.

On the subject of humor, I must have watched LMI with the wrong audience, because the time I heard people tittering was when Abby kisses Owen in the wake of tearing out someone's neck, and leaves a smear of blood on his lips. I thought it was supposed to be a poignant moment, but the fools behind me were laughing.

5) Abby leaves no survivors. The climactic scene in the swimming pool, which is possibly the most memorable set piece from the original film, occurs more or less the same way here. You hear chaos and see heads and other appendages dropping into the pool as Owen is being held under the water to drown, and Abby slaughters his assailants, just out of view. Again, though, I thought Alfredson did this with more of a sense of humor. The scene is choreographed as outrageous -- you see legs dragged through the pool, etc. You're supposed to laugh as kind of a tension relief. I did not, maybe because I already knew what was coming, so there was no sense of surprise. However, there was another fairly serious tonal misstep by Reeves in this scene, that makes it considerably less funny. In LTROI, one of the more mousy of the bully's minions is left without a scratch on him, whimpering and shaking in fear on the bleachers beyond the pool. In LMI, there's nothing but carnage, puddles of dead kids, both bullies and their minions.

Verdict: Again LTROI has the advantage, because that act of mercy of leaving the least threatening minion behind to tell the story makes us like LTROI's Eli all the more. However, I have to admit that what happens in LMI may be more "realistic" in terms of portraying the vampire's protective instincts over her loved one. Having not witnessed Owen's dalliances with the bullies up close -- they all occur during daytime, at school -- Abby would probably not know which ones really posed a threat, which ones had caused him the most pain, and which ones should be spared. A clean and efficient execution of all parties would be the most vampire-logical response.

I've highlighted the key differences. Everything else is close to an exact duplication of LTROI. Which is not necessarily such a bad thing. But in the same way that people hated Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, it's reasonable to question the point of making an American version -- albeit a very good one -- of this film, if you aren't going to change more significant aspects than these.

A couple other thoughts on the movie:

1) Really enjoyed Reeves' decision to treat Owen's mother as the equivalent of the adults who sound like out-of-tune saxophones in the Peanuts specials. The role is played by Cara Buono, but you never get a straight-on look at her face. It's a conscious decision designed to highlight Owen's alienation from her as she and his father go through a divorce. This may constitute a difference from LTROI, but I can't remember the way Oskar's mother and/or parents are handled there, so I won't swear to it. I will say it's too bad, because I adore Buono and would have liked to see her face at least once.

2) Found all the actors in this film to be excellent at duplicating what the actors in the original brought to the table, without exception. However, for some reason I did not like Chloe Grace Moretz quite as much as I thought I would. Kodi Smit-McPhee, on the other hand, is perfect. Elias Koteas and Richard Jenkins are also both superlative.

3) Found the score to be pedestrian. That's another big difference from LTROI, which has a wonderfully plaintive score that also seems original. This score was plaintive but seemed kind of trite. That said, I did really enjoy the selection of 1980s pop songs that helped flesh out the setting.

Okay, I think I've written just about enough on this particular topic.

Watch the right remake

Let's see ...

"Let-the-right-one-in."

"Watch-the-right-re-make."

Yup, same number of syllables.

I don't have anything super profound to say about Let Me In, the remake of 2008's Let the Right One In. But I had even less profound things to say about The Social Network, and it doesn't represent a lack of interest in seeing either of them -- in fact, quite the opposite. But sometimes, you just can't tie the release of a new film to a larger trend. And you know my tendency toward writing about new releases on Fridays.

However, I do offer you the following reasons you should check out Let Me In, which opens today:

1) Unlike certain Asian horror films that are almost as bad as their unwatchable Hollywood remakes, Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One is a legitimately awesome movie -- perhaps my favorite vampire movie of all time. Given the way the cineplexes have been littered with vampire movies over the years, that's pretty high praise. If this version can capture even a third of that movie's awesomeness, it will be worth seeing -- even though it seems to epitomize the trend we all like to moan about, which is, the immediate repackaging of quality foreign products for the consumption of American audiences.

2) I have faith in the director. Matt Reeves directed one of the most interesting horror/monster movies of the last decade in Cloverfield, also released in 2008. Both that and Let the Right One In occupied my top 10 for that year. And even though there's no faux documentary gimmick here, and the Swedish film/novel on which it was based are very dissimilar types of source material, I trust the guy and want to see what his encore to Cloverfield will be. What's more, he's really gotten down the look of the original film, and that definitely seems to be a good thing.

3) Chloe Grace Moretz is awesome. The Kick-Ass scene stealer was by far one of the best parts of that movie, though to that movie's credit, it had a lot of best parts. Given the physicality she displayed in Kick-Ass, she seems the perfect actress to play a 10-year-old vampire.

4) Kodi Smit-McPhee has the perfect soft temperament to play her love interest. You may remember him from such films as The Road and ... well, The Road. He seems to be another perfect echo of the character in Alfredson's film.

5) Richard Jenkins is a perfect choice as the vampire's guardian. In fact, when I saw the first movie, I thought "That guy reminds me of Richard Jenkins."

6) Elias Koteas is always awesome. He plays a policeman here.

7) Cara Buono is talented, but also, cute. Catching her as my wife watches Mad Men, I have been reminded that I've had an on-again, off-again crush on her for years -- so on-again and off-again that when it's off, I sometimes forget what her name is and have to look it up on IMDB. She plays the mother of Smit-McPhee's character.

8) I read only the opening line of the review that was submitted for Let Me In on the site I write for, but it opens quite promisingly. And my site has given it four out of a possible five stars.

Now: to figure out when I might actually see it, given that I'm already using up this weekend's share of good will with my wife by going to the L.A. County Fair for most of the day on Saturday. Mmm, deep-fried butter.

Literally nothing they won't remake

I enjoy days when I don't have a specific post planned for that morning, because it gives me the flexibility to be shocked enough into writing an impromptu post later in the day.

Today is one of those days, as I just discovered that I Spit On Your Grave has been remade, and will be released worldwide this fall.

Criticizing remakes has been all the rage on the film blogosphere, to such an extent that you are now more likely to see posts that defend remakes. This is both a form of backlash, and a form of anti-snobbery that I think we can all appreciate. I find myself in the latter category, as I feel good every time I re-assert my appreciation for "low culture" and its potential to be extremely pleasing in its own right.

But it doesn't mean I can't register shock every once in awhile about exactly how far things have come.

I Spit On Your Grave? Really?

I've had occasion to discuss the 1978 original a couple times on my blog already. (Check out my label for it if you're interested.) So you already know I find the film interesting -- and that I feel a significant amount of guilt in saying this, because I know many people find it loathsome.

So today's outrage is not because I think the evil of that graphic, bloody exploitation movie is being re-released on the world. In fact, my outlook on it probably shouldn't even be characterized as outrage, but rather, disbelief. There's no morality attached to my perspective at all -- there's simply a surprise about the business decision that allowed this film to be greenlit.

Granted, it's not starring anyone I've ever heard of. (Though looking at this production still, I thought, for a fleeting moment, that Nicole Kidman was the star -- tell me you don't think that looks like Kidman.) Granted, Anchor Bay Entertainment is not exactly a major distributor. (Though I'd certainly heard of them.) And granted, it premiered at horror festivals earlier this year, meaning that it was looked upon somewhat marginally.

But the fact that it exists at all shows you just how far name recognition will get you.

I mean, just look what Roger Ebert wrote about the original: "The story of 'I Spit on Your Grave' is told with moronic simplicity. These horrible events are shown with an absolute minimum of dialogue, which is so poorly recorded that it often cannot be heard. There is no attempt to develop the personalities of the characters - they are, simply, a girl and four men, one of them mentally retarded. The movie is nothing more or less than a series of attacks on the girl and then her attacks on the men, interrupted only by an unbelievably grotesque and inappropriate scene in which she enters a church and asks forgiveness for the murders she plans to commit." He called the movie "a vile bag of garbage ... without a shred of artistic distinction. Attending it was one of the most depressing experiences of my life."

As indicated above, I don't necessarily agree with the strident nature of Ebert's comments. But let's just say I never thought I would have to be discussing a remake of it. The movie seems to be particularly a product of its place and time, which is not to say that the late 1970s were a time when hillbillies regularly gang-raped innocent women. Just that it was made at a time when exploitation movies had the potential to exist as fodder for intellectual discussion. Exploitation movies made today would not seem to have the same possible sociopolitical relevance ... though I guess I can't really say that for certain until we're 30 years removed from today.

I just watched the trailer, and it looks pretty legit -- high production values (which the first film did not have) that look completely in line with the post-Saw, post-Hostel standard. It's not such a surprise that it's being marketed as a straightforward horror/torture porn -- I guess that's probably more or less how the original was marketed, but I was only five at the time it came out, so even if I'd managed to see the trailer somehow, I wouldn't have had much to compare it to. It also has a legit writer, Jeffrey Reddick, who created the Final Destination series. With Meir Zarchi, who directed the original, serving as a producer, it's possible it could be a competent film that still has the outrageous quality that Zarchi brought to the original.

Far more likely is that it will blend in with a dozen other anonymous torture porns that appear to promote violence against women. In fact, come to think of it, the worst fate for the I Spit On Your Grave remake is not for it to be too shocking -- it's for it to be too boring.

I guess we'll find out on October 8th.

Perhaps a change of color will help

As I mentioned on Monday, it's been two years since I got married. My wife and I had a terrific honeymoon, but it wasn't without its low points. I'm having trouble deciding the lowest low point, though. Maybe you can help me.

Was it

a) when the airline lost my wife's luggage on the second leg of our trip, leaving her without most of her clothes for the last ten days of our honeymoon, or

b) when we watched Death at a Funeral on my portable DVD player?

That's a joke, but not necessarily for the reason you think -- we also watched The Brothers Solomon, which I may have disliked even more than Death at a Funeral.

But I really did hate this British farce (directed by American Frank Oz). I found it busy, over-the-top and mean-spirited. And worst of all, not funny. This was the movie that made me realize how played out it is to have a character get accidentally dosed on psychadelic drugs, strip off all his clothes and climb up on the roof. I concluded my review thus: "Back in the day of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Frank Oz knew how to make total bastards hilarious. Now, he's making characters who should be sympathetic into total bastards."

But I guess Death at a Funeral was popular enough with people other than me, because tomorrow, Screen Gems has seen it fit to release a remake that's totally American this time. Totally African American, in fact.

Okay, not totally African American -- it's directed by a white guy (Neil Labute) and also features the likes of James Marsden and Luke Wilson. Plus, Peter Dinklage reprises his role as the blackmailing homosexual dwarf from the original. I guess Tony Cox, the African American dwarf from Bad Santa, wasn't available.

Is there reason to hope this version will be any better? Yes, some. The problem is, most of the people involved could go either way.

Let's take Chris Rock. He's probably one of the most beloved comics in the country today -- I can't think of a single person who would say they don't think he's funny. But his abilities have not yet translated to film. He's aces doing stand-up or hosting the Oscars, but he strikes out at the movies: Down to Earth, Head of State, Bad Company, I Think I Love My Wife ... need I go on? No one deserves a cinematic hit more than Rock, and some of the clips I've seen suggest that this could be it. But it's just as likely to continue his inexplicable trend of cinematic failure.

Then there's Tracy Morgan. Similar situation to Rock -- great on TV, not great at the movies. Cop Out was on the business end of some of this year's most intense critical lambasting.

Martin Lawrence gives me a little more hope. Ever since he's switched to family-friendly mode, Lawrence has become a likable presence in film and has been scoring some modest hits. Perhaps that will continue here.

And Zoe Saldana appears here, too. There may be no black actress headed to the stratosphere more quickly than Saldana -- literally, as she was in both Star Trek and Avatar last year. She's got another movie opening next week in The Losers, as well.

But shifting back to the pessimistic, some of the performers just seem past their prime. I'm looking at you, Luke Wilson and Danny Glover. Wilson has deservedly become a bit of a punching bag since he took on the role of AT&T pitchman -- the universal response to this decision seems to be that it's career suicide. Funny, because I didn't even realize he was having career problems until he started these terribly unfunny AT&T ads. Then there's Glover. Granted, the man is over 60, but he's definitely losing his skills. He's spent the last decade being pretty anonymous, though I suppose I should mention a small career resurgence when he turned up as the president (quite credibly) in 2012.

Perhaps my greatest source of pessimism is this film's director. No one is on a bigger losing streak, in my opinion, than Neil Labute. His lacerating debut, In the Company of Men, seems much longer than 13 years ago. Consider his string of failures since then: Your Friends & Neighbors, Possession, The Shape of Things, The Wicker Man, Lakeview Terrace. I have not seen the last in that series, but from what I heard, it was terrible too. In fact, Labute's only good film since In the Company of Men was Nurse Betty, and that was ten years ago.

But let me finish on an optimistic note. And the following comment is going to be strange, considering that I spent yesterday's post praising a mean-spirited British farce. But I think a black American cast may be able to make this subject matter more funny than a white British cast.

It's difficult to make this assertion without seeming in some way insensitive, or like I'm making a value judgment about what different races can bring to the table. But I think it comes down to what we expect from this kind of movie. If you're watching a British farce, you're expecting a good helping of sophisticated, urbane humor. If you're watching an African American farce, you're expecting it to be a bit broader and more untamed. I don't necessarily think one is better than other -- it's just a matter of what mood you're in. And perhaps that was what I didn't like about the original Death at a Funeral -- I was expecting sophisticated and urbane, and I got broad and untamed. For the same reason, I'd probably be dissatisfied if I went to Labute's Death at a Funeral, and everyone was trying to make jokes about parliament and Oscar Wilde.

The thing is, this is a raucous, outrageous story, where all sorts of wrong corpses are in the wrong caskets, and accidental drug ingestion is the norm. So let's hope those interpreting it this time will be better choices to bring what could be a funny idea to the screen.

If I'm looking for a precedent for the possible success of this Death at a Funeral, I'd rather skip the original and consider a different ensemble comedy/drama in which a large black family pays tribute to a deceased patriarch: Doug McHenry's Kingdom Come (2001), which starred LL Cool J, Cedric the Entertainer, Jada Pinkett Smith and Vivica A. Fox. I reviewed this one too, and here was my final line:

"In its best moments, Kingdom Come even approaches a version of The Big Chill, with the funeral serving not only as a catalyst for confrontations among a dysfunctional clan, but a clear window into a character."