by The Great White Gypsy

As soon as I get off my lazy ass and finish my list, I’ll have my article about Hollywood remakes up for you. But in the meantime, I had to express my dismay and frustration now that the sick-ass international trailer for Let Me In has dropped.

Let the Right One In, for those of you who don’t know, is a Swedish vampire film that pushed the limits of the genre and changed the way most of us see vampires. It’s not just a vamp film, it’s a really good film, with great direction, cinematography, and music. With its story of a childlike vampire befriending a young loner in her new apartment complex, it weaves suspense, discomfort, and heartfelt empathy with artful violence to create an amazing achievement in filmmaking. This film came out in its native Sweden in early 2008 at local festivals. It didn’t even get it’s international wide release, including Sweden, until October of that year. Think about that. It hasn’t even been two solid years since the original came out, and we already have a trailer for the remake popping up on Youtube.

Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with remakes. It’s been going on for decades longer than any of us actually realize. But lately, Hollywood is stepping the remake game up. Brothers was a fantastic Danish film in 2004. It took U.S. studios all of four years to fuck it up with Tobey Maguire, whose paramilitary training apparently included shrill, feminine shrieks and retard strength. In three years, Frank Oz’s quirky 2007 comedy Death at a Funeral was remade with an all African-American cast, beating Chris Rock’s ten joke library into the ground and setting the civil rights movement back 40 years. Even as I write this, David Fincher is in the process of remaking Sweden’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is still in theaters here, and the second film in the trilogy doesn’t come out until later this month!

Are we really getting so lazy that we can’t even wait ten years to make a film again? Lately, Hollywood even has enough ADD to reboot American franchises that are only a few years old. If you’re going to remake something, why doesn’t anyone try old school stuff? Would it be so bad to actually see another good Shakespeare film adaptation? Takashi Miike opened the Spaghetti-Western vault, let’s run with it! Rainer Werner Fassbinder put out 8 million films in twenty years, are you telling me there’s nothing in there we can use?

Many times, the problem with remakes is they deviate so much from the original in favor of making “their own” (haha) film, we end up with a steaming pile of Americanized bullshit; an unfortunate commentary on our culture. But the buzz around the interwebs today is that Let Me In appears (as far as the trailer is concerned) to be an extremely faithful retelling of the original, but without the subtitles. But without the subtitles???? So we’re excited about this immediate and unnecessary remake because we’re illiterate? To me, it’s infinitely worse that the remake is so faithful to the source material. You know what’s really similar to the original? The fucking original, which is still in the New Releases section at Hollywood Video. Who was it that walked out of Let the Right One In and said, “The only thing that movie is missing is English.” We don’t want to read subtitles, and no one likes shitty dubbing, so instead we spend another ten dollars to see a movie we just saw in 2009.

This has nothing to do with the talent of anyone involved in the new film, and everything to do with me being a pissed off purist. It’s one thing to see a film and not know it’s a remake until months later, and the original was from Bulgaria in 1981. But we know these films just came out, and we see the new one anyway, effectively encouraging lazy, unoriginal filmmaking.

We never stop to realize that no one in the Czech Republic is clamoring for the film rights to Avatar. The Hurt Locker will not show up as an all-singing, all-dancing remake in Mumbai next year. Not only does this say something unsettling about today’s culture to me, but it reinforces the idea that the country with the least amount of narrative history has to immediately and unabashedly sack and pillage other countries for the film industry to put asses in the seats at the local cineplex. Do I blame them?

No, I blame us. Hollywood doesn’t tell us what to like, it panders to us, and then convinces us we need more. We’re the ones who, despite giving Let the Right One In and many other recent foreign successes rave reviews, are shelling out more money to see America’s Red-Headed birth defect of a stepchild…

…and it breaks my fucking heart.

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