Variety reports today that Hideo Nakata will direct the remake of the Pang brothers THE EYE. Now the guy’s an Asian genre legend, and he’s done the remake his own film thing with THE RING TWO, so I suppose remaking another director’s horror film is just a natural progression – in the bizarre, twisted logic of Hollywood.
I guess this counts as good news, since a very talented director will be handling a project that was freaking scary on the first go round. But it all continues to seem weird to me. Imagine this remake fetish taken to it’s logical extreme. Spielberg remakes STAR WARS. Kubrick (who somehow comes back from the dead), remakes AMERICAN BEAUTY. Scorsese remakes THE GODFATHER.
I mean outside of the whole PG-13 debacle that’s being visited upon genre fans like a plague of f*cking locusts, and ignoring the fact that an intriguing director is going to deliver an intriguing remake even if there’s little point, have we really come to value artistic vision so little that we will allow any work to be redone for an expectation of a moderate cash cow?
I believe that most of the folks working in Hollywood got into it for the love of movies, not cash. Not that I’m denegrating cash mind you, but I wish some of those studio folks would reconnect with the idealistic student filmmaker in their soul, and like Robin Williams in HOOK (which is just about ready for a remake I think), remember who they really are.
Give these great directors their Hollywood shot, but let ’em do it with the kick ass creativity that got ’em on the radar in the first place. Let ’em knock out, or collaborate on, or pick a new script that is going to bring something new to the genre, blow away expectations, and then bring in mountains and mountains of cash because every fan in the world is gonna tell their buddies You must see this movie.
Sure you can double your money with Hey, isn’t that a remake of that Asian flick, but is that why you really started making movies in the first place?
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