Instead of coming up with original ideas for movies, they crank out remake after dogshit remake. The latest hunk of remake dogshit to be spooned out to hungry audiences? Straw Dogs.
Originally an ingenious movie by legendary director Sam Peckinpah, starring Dustin Hoffman, and widely considered to be one of the finest and most disturbing films about a man pushed to the edge of his sanity, the 2011 version will star James “Cyclops” Marsden and Kate Bosworth, two of the LEAST TALENTED ACTORS IN HOLLYWOOD. The filming locations listed by Wikipedia - Shreveport and Vivian, Louisiana - as well as the fact that Walton Goggins, aka Shane from “The Shield,” will be in it - lead me to believe that it will be bastardized from the original setting (the English countryside) into a trite and cliched “evil hicks in the sticks” environment, which hasn’t had a lick of originality to it since Deliverance.
Is anyone else shaking their head with disbelief over the latest and greatest classic film of the 70s to be shit all over by Hollywood?
I saw Zombie’s Halloween last week and was astonished by the mediocrity of it. Not astonished because it was horrible - astonished because it was so mediocre. I was amazed that someone could actually take the premise of the original Halloween and turn it into something so mind-numbingly boring. Every second of it was a colossal bore!
But Straw Dogs! For sweet Christ’s sake! Dustin Hoffman being replaced by James fucking Marsden? The most wooden actor alive? The stunning Susan George re-imagined as utterly bland, baby-faced Kate Bosworth?
I watched Straw Dogs for the first time about a year ago and found it drawn-out and really boring, so I’m not opposed to the idea of a remake although I do agree that James Marsden is a black hole of charisma (which worked when he was Cyclops, but not really anywhere else).
I don’t know, why don’t we ask all those moviegoers from the 30s whether they were sick of all the remakes from the 1910s and 1920s? Or why don’t we ask the 1920s moviegoer if they were sick of the theater adaptations? You know, come to think of it, a lot of the big 1970s movies were just reworkings of earlier films, books and ideas.
Face it man, bitching about remakes is one of the most pointless things you can do, because remakes have always existed. Especially in Hollywood. And not knowing that just makes you look ignorant.
I would be alright with Straw Dogs being remade if they remade it with actors who could fucking act. My biggest beef is not really that they make remakes, it’s that they make horrible remakes.
Then don’t watch them and stop throwing a fucking fit every time a movie made a decade before you were born is remade. Or alternately, watch better remakes.
I agree - I was completely underwhelmed - it started off really well, very menacing, but the end was basically an action sequence that went on so long that all tension and suspense was drained from it. I agree this version is doomed to suck, though, merely because of the leads (even if I am glad to see Walton Goggins get some work).
Stranger on a Train: They remade Wages of Fear? I must have missed that, and I’m glad. The original was the definition of awesome (and in my top 10 of the Criterion Collection DVDs).
How said is it that I had to check IMDb to see if you were joking or not… and I’m still not sure. Apparently there was a remake, but in no way can it be blamed on Hollywood.
It was remade back in the 70’s under the oddly misleading title Sorceror. The remake is actually pretty good. It was William Friedkin’s first move after The Exorcist.
The Blob has also been remade already, BTW, back in the 80’s, and that remake is pretty entertaining too.
Kate Bosworth has an utterly baby-like, uninteresting face, and her “beauty” is entirely the beauty of slick, airbrushed, artificially-lit Hollywood production. The women back in the 70s looked a thousand times hotter; they looked real.
Bullshit, nonsense argument. Of course a lot of great movies are based on books. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re great movies. Barry Lyndon was based on a story by Thackeray; Full Metal Jacket, on a novel by Gustav Hasford. Does that mean that those movies are somehow inauthentic or bad? Hey! I know! Let’s remake Barry Lyndon with Ice Cube, Zac Efron and Angelina Jolie - what could go wrong?! We’ll set it in hip, happening Southern California, instead of boring dreary old England and Ireland…we’ll use real lighting and real studio sets instead of that stupid “natural lighting” think that Kubrick used…it’ll be so much better! And don’t complain that it’s a remake, because the original Barry Lyndon was also a remake! Of a story! Get it?!!?!
I dunno…I thought it was both good and disturbing, as a first run movie. Peckinpah was a trailblazer in the movie violence arena and using a very beautiful woman as the film’s shithead, opposite a geek hero, was pretty gutsy.
