21 March 2007

Re-Makes

A friend of mine sent me an email last night to let me know that there will be a re-make of John Carpenter's Escape from New York. It's currently in pre-production, and scheduled for release in 2009.

When is enough enough? It seems to me that we've had a ton of classic movies re-made in the past few years: The Omen, Psycho, Dawn of the Dead, The Hitcher, The Poseidon Adventure, War of the Worlds, and The Fog, to name a few.

And don't get me started on The Ring and its ilk, taking perfectly good foreign movies and re-shooting them with popular American actors and releasing them abroad, almost as if they're completely original. After all, why would anyone want to see a movie with subtitles?

I'm not entirely anti-re-make: I'm more fond of the Dawn of the Dead re-make than I am of the original, for example. Yet it's tough to win me over to a movie's "re-envisioning" until I've seen it and given it my stamp of approval. (I've got much the same problem with cover songs.)

Escape from New York doesn't need to be remade, any more than The Breakfast Club did. Yet someone obviously feels that they can do it better, and win over a new generation of moviegoers in the process. Time will tell, I suppose.

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