Funny how you can obscure your own position while advancing.
I don't see why that would be funny, given that I explicitly wrote the thing so that its core argument wouldn't be contingent on ideology. If the only thing I had to say on the matter was a series of grumblings about cultural shifts, I wouldn't have written the thing in the first place. I wasn't
assigned the topic.
Yoda, if any part of your argument proposes that the mechanics of film-making should impede ideas or "messages" YOU dislike, then just say so. You'll still be wrong, of course.
I'm not sure I even understand the implication. Obviously, I have my own positions and I want to see some ideas advanced and others retreat. That's what having a position
is. But my argument is not predicated on anyone sharing those positions.
My argument is not that we should "impede" (whatever that means in this context) argument, but that what's happening is
already impeding argument. That the sheer accumulation of these cultural backgrounds changes the assumptions we bring to each discussion. They become common wisdom by default, and worse, they do it by borrowing someone else's creativity to make the delivery of the assumption more attractive. In the short-term that's probably particularly bad for traditional views, but in the long-term anything that obscures our presuppositions is bad for everyone.
The problem here seems to be your conflation of message and medium. Story can be proselytization, but it needn't be.
Well, first off, I didn't say it had to be; I said the best stories usually melded the two.
Second, it's a big leap to go from talking about the harmony of message and medium to talking about "proselytization." Having a message is not necessary preaching; there's plenty of daylight between the two.
Third, this misunderstands the point, anyway, because none of the examples I listed are films that simply pull the proselytization out of the original; they supplant it with their own. The types of remakes you're referencing here, that take the old form but don't need to proselytize, are the types I'm explicitly
not criticizing.
Furthermore, correlation between methods you disapprove of and the perceived quality of the final result doesn't make the method "wrong".
This is technically true; there's no unavoidable link here that says swiping someone else's premise means your movie will be suck, or even be worse than the original. But I think there's a correlation, and I think the theory that describes the evidence does a good job of explaining why. The ideas in question are: 1) when you care more about making a point than making a good movie, the art suffers. And 2) that when you divorce a story from its message, there will inevitably be some degree of clumsy retrofitting. These both seem like pretty agreeable ideas, even if you disagree about the conclusions I draw from them, or the emphasis I place on them.
I am, of course, hardly the first person to note that remakes are usually inferior to the originals. I'm just talking about why.
What's disturbing here is the implication that a film shouldn't be made in any way that might include or lead to an idea or viewpoint you disagree with.
What's disturbing is that you think I was implying that. The problem isn't films that express other viewpoints--as I said, there are
tons of those, and I've never felt the need to write about them just to grouse over their existence--the problem is the way we let them shape the debate behind the scenes. Frankly, you can chalk it up to people's false belief in compartmentalization almost as much as the filmmakers themselves.
At this point, I should probably issue a disclaimer: if this discussion is going to involve you insisting that my secret motive is simply to complain about the culture, then I'd just as soon move on. If you simply refuse to believe that I'm actually arguing about what I say I'm arguing about, then I'll just say: thanks for reading.