Remakes

Yeah, yeah so you're going to say, oh but The Thing is a remake and that's great. And The Fly. And...


No.


I've had a lot of discussion recently about remakes (because there are so many of them) and any remake you can name that was actually good, you have to go back about 20 years or more to find. They were made because someone thought they could make a great movie out of the concept. They weren't made during a time of total creative bankrupcy and cynical lowest-common-denominator film financing.

Oh, but what about Dawn of the...

No.

That wasn't a remake. It shared the name of a movie and one location - a shopping mall. That's it. No characters were brought over. Not the story. It didn't even have zombies in it. Wasn't a remake.


The use of the title there was little more than a symptom of the problem. Slap a name on it that people will recognise and hope that will sell it. Do you think The Thing really had any value in its name? Wasn't even the full title of the original movie. Was a whole different time when Carpenter made that movie.

Modern remakes are not made with love. They are dead. Soulless. Especially those that are remakes of current movies that just happen to be made in a language other than English.

They're shit.

And that's why I don't watch them.

Is the week over yet?

I love cover versions. I love searching for different takes on tracks I like and yet hate movie remakes. Is that weird? Hypocritical? I don't know but that's just the way it is.

I find cover versions often lead me to bands I otherwise wouldn't have known. For example, my most recent search has been 'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush. Of course most people will know Placebo's version, which I love. But I also found a version by Chromatics, which I really like, and a version by some goth-by-numbers band called Icon and the Black Roses.

And while calling it 'goth-by-numbers' could be seen as an insult, I checked out the album and it's actually really good. There's not a damn thing on it that you wouldn't have heard before but they do it so well it's hard to fault them. And that's how Kate Bush led to me finding an album I otherwise would have missed.

I was going to illustrate this post with a doodle of me as Charlie Brown or something, like a remake. But I had this image in a notebook and, for some reason, went with this instead. It just kind of gets across the current mood yet looks far more cool than the reality. I wish I has an Astro Andy shirt.

And a cup of coffee.

Actually, I think I'll go make a cup of coffee. That would be nice.