in praise of cheap remakes

I saw The Crazies with Ian last weekend! I didn’t hate it? Also, this was previewed before the movie:

So far, I’m not hating it, either.

I like remakes, in general. I think it’s snotty or something when people get all upset and wonder why Hollywood keeps remaking perfectly good movies, blah blah. It’s like getting upset that the movie is never as good as the book was – it’s not necessarily that it wasn’t as good, it’s just not the one you liked the first time. It’s a trick of your imagination, maybe. Old people will think that the Sex Pistols version of “My Way” isn’t as good, but punks would disagree. Or something like that. Plus, I think I’m a lazy movie-watcher, so already knowing what a character’s, um, character is isn’t that bad a thing. It lets you skip it and get to the other stuff: the scares or the effects or the whatever. And I sometimes don’t hate spoilers. I like being able to say, “Aw, shit, that is some ironic-ass foreshadowing.” Which is something I say sometimes. And, I don’t know. Even when the remake isn’t as good, it’s neat to see it re-interpreted by pretty people wearing modern clothes and shot on cleaner film stock and with better cgi. The new Omen isn’t better, it’s just different. It’s not worse. (The mask was scary!) (Oh – and! Using Mia Farrow in it, with the reference to other older devil-baby movies, strikes me as clever, which is another reason I like remakes: I like easy meta and clever references and in-jokes and winks and nods and feeling like I know some imdb trivia.) There are very few movies I would claim should not be remade.

The Crazies, in particular, I think was very very ripe for remaking. I have been known to claim that it is “Romero’s second-most-underrated movie,” but that’s just me trying to get someone to ask me about Martin. Honestly, it’s a shitty movie, and therefore not actually underrated at all. But it’s a really good idea. That’s what made it perfect for remaking: it was a good idea done poorly; I couldn’t wait to see this good idea done well. The remake didn’t make it as awesome as it could have been. The ending was very Indiana-in-a-refrigerator, kind of literally, and it didn’t push either the zombie comparison or the random-acts-of-violence metaphor far enough. But it was spooky and tense and scary and nerve-jangly. It was effective enough.

I’m excited about the Nightmare on Elm Street thing because it’s not just a remake, but it appears to be a reboot. I’m excited that Freddy’s makeup looks so much more realistic: he actually looks like a burn victim. I’m excited that it looks like it’s dropping the goofy one-liners and the humor (which I don’t hate in the Nightmare movies – it’s what they are and it’s it’s own thing and that’s fine, but – ). Nightmare is ripe for a reboot the way The Crazies was ripe for a remake: this is actually useful and makes sense. Nightmare really does have an honestly scary premise: the dreams, the trying-not-to-fall-asleep-but-failing, the pedophile who is the product of 1,000 crazy men raping a nun, who was burned alive by parents of children for revenge! What a great back story for a villain. Making it actually scary, and not arch and goofy and silly is a good change and a good idea.

Also: I love love love the scene in the trailer where they do the wet-sheet-as-wall trick, but then extend and extend and you realize that it’s actually really cgi. I claimed this was an homage or a clever reference to the original movie, but then Ian made fun of me and told me that putting Freddy in the remake was a very clever homage to the original or something. But I totally disagree: I think they’re referencing one of the all-time most famous homemade pre-cgi special effects ever (that’s right, I claimed that, eff you, Rick Baker) but making it cgi. I think that’s really funny and clever and kind of a “fuck you.” And I think maybe it’s also kind of the encapsulation of the whole process of a remake: you take the original, and you do something with it that they couldn’t or didn’t do the first time. You try to make it better. Maybe you make it worse. Maybe you make it worse through laziness – cgi is lazy.

Also, I do not want to work today. So, hello blog! Hello, talking about Nightmare on Elm Street for some reason! Hello, rambling about cgi.

I’m thinking about the tags I use on my blog (which are so stupid and useless – I do not fucking get tags; they’re so unnecessary) and i’m wondering if I’ve ever used the “movies” tag without also using the “horror” tag.

Okay. Work. Totally working now.