La La Land has gone la la

On the release of 2010’s A Nightmare on Elm Street I got questioning whether recreating originals was actually a crime to cinema. What is the purpose of taking a story and trying to improve it? If the toast is burnt you cannot simply take it and place it back inside then toaster, life doesn’t work that way. Films have as much right to live (of course I’d say this, I’m a cinematic psycho) so surely the originals should be left alone. It is impossible to remould a life, therefore it should be impossible or just not the done thing to remake a story that has already been told!

It’s almost as bad as when singers take a classic song and try and sing it as if they’re the ones to make it epic; I think not, take Leona Lewis attempting to sing Oasis’ magnificent ‘Stop Crying Your Heart Out’. She failed ultimately, but perhaps that’s down to the fact that she can only sing depressive styled tunes.
Making films that have been made is like Leona trying to sing. (It should be noted that most of her songs are remakes, it is probable that that is the reason her music fails).

The only film that I can think of that actually works as a defence of remakes is 1986’ ‘The Fly’ staring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. This film truly captures the story, but after the horror of sitting through the whole 103 minutes of the disastrous remake of a 1951 classic: ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’. I’ve never in my entire life sat in a cinema and wanted to play ‘Quadrapop’ on my phone. That was the sign that remakes were criminal! For all those that have played ‘Quadrapop’ you’d be well aware that it is not the sort of game you would play unless extremely bored, though at that point in my life I highly doubt that I’d turn to a Sony Ericsson game.
As I walked from the cinema myself, Dad and brothers could only turn to each other and ask why the hell we’d gone to see Keanu Reeves play himself but weirder and without a pecker bird on his head. It was atrocious.

If films (or movies; maybe at the right time I’d explain the difference between the two) can be done over can the same be done for life? Can we forget how good or bad the past was and simply re-do all that had been done? Or is that where remakes are flawed? At the end of the day they are following the same story line so at the end there’ll be no difference; if characters lived or died in the original they will live or die in the new toast. Remakes are no different, just presenting further bad actors and a predictable line of events (after all there was the exact same story sometime in the past that if we had brains, we would have seen, after all Gort did move in the original). Better special effects and airbrushing doesn’t equal better story telling nor does it equal a happy viewer!