Happy Friday the 13th! Watch yer step today.
So I’ve really enjoyed going in depth about recycling creativity this quarter. There is something I want to be sure to touch on though, because the idea is so silly to me:
how about Hollywood just straight up remaking movies? Not basing a new movie off of an old one, not borrowing ideas from previous films, but just flat out redoing one?
I’m baffled by this and, as someone who adores old movies, find it slightly blasphemous. I suppose Hollywood thinks that films lose their relevance to the moneymaking youth after a time, and want to push the stories back into the limelight in order to earn a couple bucks. I guess they’re probably right — not many kids are interested in watching a movie made pre-nineties — but it just seems so cheap to me. Not to mention the remakes are NEVER as good.
This is especially evident in horror movies, which get remade quite often. I know I’d take the bone chilling terror from the original Halloween over Rob Zombie’s blood and guts firework display in his remake any day. Same goes for Psycho, The Omen, and, well, just about any horror movie that happened twice.
Horror isn’t the only genre at stake here, though. As a diehard Audrey Hepburn fan, one remake that I find ridiculously irksome is Sydney Pollack’s 1995 stab at Sabrina. Billy Wilder’s 1954 original is, in my opinion, one of the greatest movies in the world. Anyway, how do you even BEGIN to replace Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden with Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear? Nice try.
Check out both trailers, and notice the campy 50′s Hollywood style of the original trailer’s narration. I love that.
xoxo,
Jen
