1/ Generally speaking, the majority of remakes are unnecessary and/or bad. However, I’m not against remakes per se.
2/ I am, as a principle, against remakes that are unnecessary and offer nothing new. What does David Lee Fisher offer in his 2005 remake of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, except sound? Even the visual style is the same. And what after all is the point of Gus van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho—with colour? Everyone I know, and perhaps everyone, associates Psycho with Anthony Perkins, not Vince Vaughn.
It’s because of this reason that I embrace the new Suspiria (which I intend to watch) and don’t understand some people’s complaint that Luca Guadagnino doesn’t want the same style and colour style of Dario Argento’s film.
Faithfulness may be a good thing for a film adaptation of a book (though it depends), but what do we need a remake for, if it offers nothing new? For filmgoers who only watch new films and refuse to watch B&W films and silent films? It is their problem that they deny history and the legacy of cinema, and miss out on masterpieces.
3/ As a principle, I’m also against remakes of films that are already regarded as among the greatest films ever made.
For example, I keep hearing rumours about a Gone with the Wind remake. Why would you remake a film that got 10 Oscars? I can’t think of any reason.
I’ve just discovered, though, that there’s a 2016 Ben-Hur. To be a precise, it’s not really a remake, but a 5th adaptation of the novel—however, the other adaptations are a silent short film, a silent film, and an animation, so this new film by Timur Bekmambetov would be directly compared to the William Wyler film, which got 11 Oscars.
Even the 1995 TV version of A Streetcar Named Desire is not a wise idea, in my opinion. Glenn Jordan’s take on the play is different from Elia Kazan’s—closer to Tennessee Williams’s play, if I remember correctly, so in a sense it does offer something new. At the same time, how can you compare to the cast of the 1951 film, especially Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando? Alec Baldwin was very brave to take on one of Marlon Brando’s best roles, and Jessica Lange looked more like she was playing Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois.
4/ For some reason, all American remakes of Asian films I have seen are terrible. That includes The Departed, an acclaimed film which got Martin Scorsese an Oscar—the Hong Kong original Infernal Affairs is much better.
Spike Lee’s remake of Oldboy I haven’t seen, but it looks like a big mistake, judging by the cast. The story is also, in some sense, very Asian.
5/ However, I’m not against remakes in another language, country, and culture. In fact, when they’re good, I love them even more than standard remakes.
The best remakes of this type that I can think of are The Handmaiden and Untold Scandal, South Korean remakes or adaptations of Western material—Fingersmith and Dangerous Liaisons respectively. They are excellent films on their own. As remakes/ adaptations, they retain the spirit of the original whilst adapting the story to the culture and traditions in South Korea, so they don’t feel foreign.
I haven’t seen A Fistful of Dollars, but I like the idea of it as a Western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. Same with The Magnificent Seven and The Seven Samurai.
I suppose the question here is whether the remake in another culture offers anything new (as in the case of The Handmaiden) or just takes good material and makes it in English for filmgoers who are too lazy to watch films with subtitles. In the latter case, those people should watch dubbed films instead, and I’m saying that despite being against dubbing.
6/ Here’s an unpopular opinion: I think David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is better than the Swedish version.
This is my list of favourite underrated films.
To explain, I don’t mention films such as Cries and Whispers—generally speaking, most people haven’t watched it, but it’s regarded as one of the peaks of Ingmar Bergman’s oeuvre and recognised as among the greatest films ever made.
By underrated films, I’m thinking of the films that are overlooked—the films that people don’t often include in the list of best films or films you should watch, and the films that people forget when talking about an important director.
The list (strong favourites in bold):
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), dir. Max Ophuls
In a Lonely Place (1950), dir. Nicholas Ray
Gion Bayashi/ A Geisha (1953), dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
Street of Shame (1956), dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
The Killing (1956), dir. Stanley Kubrick
Nights of Cabiria (1957), dir. Federico Fellini
The Bad Sleep Well (1960), dir. Akira Kurosawa
The Innocents (1961), dir. Jack Clayton
My Fair Lady (1964), dir. George Cukor
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), dir. Billy Wilder
The Last Detail (1973), dir. Hal Ashby
The Phantom of Liberty (1974), dir. Luis Bunuel
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), dir. Martin Scorsese
3 Women (1977), dir. Robert Altman
On Golden Pond (1981), dir. Mark Rydell
My Left Foot (1989), dir. Jim Sheridan
Bound (1996), dir. The Wachowskis
Happy Together (1997), dir. Wong Kar-wai
Happiness (1998), dir. Todd Solondz
Memento (2000), dir. Christopher Nolan
Sideways (2004), dir. Alexander Payne
Fracture (2007), dir. Gregory Hoblit
This list would expand.
Generally I don’t consider myself a horror fan. But here are the films I like:
The Innocents (1961), dir. Jack Clayton
Eyes Without a Face (1960), dir. Georges Franju
The Silence of the Lambs (1991), dir. Jonathan Demme
Psycho (1960), dir. Afred Hitchcock
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), dir. Robert Wiene
Hour of the Wolf (1968), dir. Ingmar Bergman
Ringu (1998), dir. Hideo Nakata
The Sixth Sense (1999), dir. M. Night Shyamalan
The Others (2001), dir. Alejandro Amenábar
Dead Ringers (1998), dir. David Cronenberg
Plus a film I don’t know how I feel about: Suspiria (1977), dir. Dario Argento
In this list, the 1st 2 are probably unusual choices. They are not the films people usually think of when talking about horror films, because they are more than horror—they have deeper meaning and convey something else. The films are eerie and haunting more than terrifying. The Innocents is possibly the most aesthetically pleasing horror film I’ve ever seen (not Suspiria), and among the best films ever made.
Eyes Without a Face is very poetic—a word that we normally wouldn’t use for a horror film, but watch it and you’ll know what I mean.
Once in a while I watch a film not in my favourite genres, and get a lovely surprise.
I’m still reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, slowly, because of all the other things going on.
Look at chapter 11:
“The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions.
But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge.”
That’s a good passage.
And then I came across this line:
“Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”
I’m reading a copy that has no notes, no annotations. But I caught the joke—Vivian Bloodmark is Vladimir Nabokov, like Vivian Darkbloom in Lolita.
It’s the next part that I don’t get:
“Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.”
What are these references?
