Remakes, a rant

I, like anyone who is interested in reading this blog, love films. There is no better evening to me than watching a film and the having a discussion about it afterwards. Sometimes I am lucky and get great conversation, other times I get the "Yeah that was cool." blanket statement with no follow up (But that is a topic for another rant).

So with that in mind you can tell I get excited to see a film when it comes out, or when I find one on sale that I had never watched before. This excitement, which I can compare only to a small child finding a treasure trove of chocolate bars, is great - that is until I realize that this "new" film is nothing more than a remake of an older film.

Call me crazy, but do we really need remakes of classic or foreign films? Was there someone who said;
"Hey you know what, no one alive has seen Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece 'Psycho' lets do a shot-for-shot raping of that original and shit it out onto the fans of film. They wont even know it's a remake, no one sees old movies anymore!"
This has to be the reasoning behind their motivations to remake films. No one will see the original, we'll make it better.
Bullshit.

What usually happens is someone rapes the corpse of a classic film and then drags the mutilated body over to another place and smears it's remains on an "updated concept" and calls it a
re-imagining of the original.
Bullshit.
Call it what it is, a way to cash in on a good idea and shit on it while you're at it. Unoriginality at it's worst.

I have never, ever, in all my life, heard someone say; "Oh hey that film is old, what we need is an updated version of it, I can relate to. Throw in cursing and nudity and sponsors. That will appeal to my generation."
Hell No! These films don't need to be updated, they were perfect the way they were, and if not, then don't try to fix them, leave them alone! If it sucked and tanked the first time, guess what, logic states it will probably suck a second time around.

Think about it, if this continues to happen, eventually we'll see "re-imaginings" of remakes of old films, a third generation inbred bastard of cinema! I really do not want to live in a world where someday, some suit out there while clutching a stress ball and kicking back on his huge desk, thinks of updating The Dark Knight for an audience that never saw the original, so it will be "new to them".

How about you keep your greasy fingers off the classic films, and think of something new. I'm sure there are plenty of great scripts just dying to be read and turned into films. Why do you have to update an older film? Did anyone want The Poseidon Adventure updated? How about Psycho? What about those classic Asian horror films, did anyone want to see a remake of The Eye? No, I didn't think so.

So there's my rant, people will see the classic films if they were good enough to see, and if they don't like Black & White because they live in a fast paced colorful society filled with I-Pods and blackberries, well fuck them. Let them watch Moulin Rouge.