Let Me In

But that's neither here nor there, Yoda. WT said

And the answer is that the people making money from this remake can't make money from the original. That's the answer for virtually every remake. Whether it's good for the original or not is another matter. Whether the remake enriches other peoples lives, society, the culture, whatever is something else. I answered the question.

Yeah but I don't wanna hear about corporate greed amongst an art form haha

Ah... Well, you're ****ed then.

Well, I didn't answer the question--largely because it seemed rhetorical--but I did address the content of the post. Specifically, I took issue with the idea that it "tarnished" the original and that it would cost "ludicrous amounts of money" to make..

Your reason for why remakes exist at all is correct as well, of course.

Has this ever happened with a movie, I wonder? I can't think of any offhand, but I'm too tired to Google.

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We've got a thread about it that was posted in pretty recently. Obviously it's a matter of opinion but I said there that I thought The Departed pulled it off, and that while I hadn't seen Ringu, I couldn't fathom it could be more frightening and polished than Verbinski's The Ring. I think a few other users echoed both choices, and of course listed some of their own.

The Bourne Identity comes to mind, as does The Fly and Evil Dead II. Some may disagree, but I think John Carpenter's The Thing is quite a bit better than the original, or at least I like it a lot more. Cape Fear may not be better per se, but it rocks nonetheless.

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Oh, tell me you're not in the Evil Dead II is a remake crowd.

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Suspect's Reviews

Well...since my class got cancelled tomorrow I decided to go see this. I will try not to hate it, but if I do, I will write a caustic review

So tired of pointless remakes. So many of them are just because of the idea that "Americans don't like to read their movies".

Semi-quoting King of the Hill's Hank Hill "If it were any good, they would've made an American version by now". And it seems Hollywood takes this stereotype to heart.

I'll rent this, maybe, from Redbox or watch instantly on Netflix if that is an option. Otherwise I'll just stick with the brilliant book or the original movie.

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Everyone's acting as if it's just here to provide an un-subtitled version for stupid American audiences, but that's a pretty baseless assumption, and a fairly insulting one at that. Why not go one step further and say that they only made the first film for people who don't have the patience to read the book? Reworking a story for different cultures is not that different from reworking it for different mediums.

The assumption doesn't make sense logically, anyway. The majority of Americans haven't Let the Right One In because they've never heard of it, not because they saw it, thought it looked good, but decided not to watch it because it was in another language. Most American remakes happen to bring awareness of the story to begin with, not to dumb down something people have already heard of but rejected for being too complicated.

There are any number of reasons to remake a film. Changes in emphasis. Better casting. Better production values, too. Early reviews of Let Me In suggest that it does some things better than the original, and others worse, but that on net's it's an extremely worthwhile effort, and I don't have any trouble believing that.

you're quite the optimistic one

I think, in this instance, I'm just not exhibiting the same kneejerk pessimism as almost everyone else. There's nothing about the sheer fact of this film's existence that suggests it should be bad. Matt Reeves has shown skill, and he's obviously working with great source material, and it's not made instrinsically worse because it was made second.

But more than that, we already have reviews of it! Longtime MoFo Peter Hall (OG-), for example, is a horror afficiando and was very impressed by it, and he loved the original.

I haven't seen the first one but the fashion for American remakes of good foreign films is just irritating. I haven't seen The Ring but I saw the sequel- Ringu is genuinely scary and I doubt the Americanised version could top it.

I don't think it'll convert anybody to the foreign film. Most people are too lazy to watch foreign films because they have subtitles- as if the whole thing was solely about dialogue. They like to have their 'translated' version. If foreign films got more publicity and were not reserved for the art crowd, we'd be a lot better for it.

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I just said this in the last post, but I dispute the notion that people skip over films simply because they have subtitles; it's that people assume this is the case, and therefore don't give them as much exposure, that perpetuates the cycle more, to my mind. The funny thing is, the last sentence in your post seems to agree with this, but the rest of the post suggests the opposite; that viewers are to "blame."

People don't see films here like Let the Right One In because they're not cinephiles and don't go out of their way to find things. That's entirely different from knowing about it, but deliberately passing it over because they don't like to read, or what have you.

As for The Ring; I still haven't gotten around to seeing Ringu, but the American version was horrifying, and I'm not someone who usually sees just the American version of things, or minds subtitles in the least. I don't know if we'd be getting Let Me In if films like The Ring hadn't been such impressive adaptations.

I never understood foreign films, until I started reading the subtitles...

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Honestly, the original Ring made the american one look like tellitubbies

Also I need to meet these people whom you say research the original source after seeing a remake, because they just don't exist in Michigan

I'm not sure "research" is the word I'd use, as I'm just talking about finding the original and possibly watching it. It's not the kind of thing I'd expect to find in real life, anyway, because it usually seems to take a runaway hit to creep over into the offline world much.

But really, I'd be stunned if rentals of Let the Right One In (on Netflix, especially) don't go way up after this version comes out. How could they not? Millions of people are going to see Let Me In before all's said and done. The idea that even a fraction of them won't Google it and take some interest in the source is inconceivable.

We can speculate about the degree of this difference, but it has to make a difference. Googling the thing you just saw, or just heard about, is something that inevitably happens. Trending search topics on all the major sites almost invariably reflect new movie releases, celebrity news, etc. For an increasing number of people, finding more information on the thing you just saw is just standard operating procedure. And I would guess your average horror fan is younger than your average moviegoer, and those more predisposed to do this.

I'll comment more on Ringu after I see it, but horror movies are probably poor examples of this sort of thing, because even the best of them aren't as likely to be as scary the second time around, which is kind of what it's like to watch a remake. I suspect the order in which we view these things has a greater influence than most of us (myself included) would care to admit. But, technically speaking, there's really nothing about the order of their release that renders the second version inherently inferior. Even if you want to take points away for originality, this would only withhold some praise for the second screenwriter.

By the way: Let Me In is at 83% on Rotten Tomatoes, 78 on Metacritic, and Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 out of 4 stars, which is the same score he gave the original. And I think it's safe to say that most movie critics don't fit into any of the clichés about subtitle-averse Americans. Even the local guy on the radio, by complete coincidence, was raving about it on my way to work this morning.

There's already a clear consensus that this is a good movie. You may call it unnecessary if you like, but the fact that it's receiving this praise, and many have suggested it's very similar to the original, just doesn't fit the boilerplate complaints about stereotypical "Americanization" we've been hearing since the film was announced at all. Maybe that's true usually (though I'm skeptical of that), but I think people completely jumped the gun on that point with this one.

I must agree with the notion that the "average movie goer" doesn't go to the movies to read. People(not including myself and mofos) find it hard to concentrate on the visuals and the text.