First of all, the reason why I'm posting this late is because I was uh, busy battling Space Pirates on the planet Zebes.
Cool to see you pop in again, Microwave Dude! I'm going to take this comment to mean you've been playing the recently released (and then smacked down) fan re-make of
Metroid 2 (speaking of remakes). Or wait, did that take place on SR388? My Metroid lore is a bit rusty. As a kid, the first game blew me away because it had an "open world" and the levels could scroll both vertically and horizontally, which was totally novel at the time. I think I finally managed to beat the game when I was about 12 or so. Never played much of the GameBoy sequel except this one time my friend was trying over and over to beat the final boss. In frustration, he finally he let me give it a go and then I made him look like a total ass by beating the Mother Metroid on my first attempt (which was also my first time ever playing the game). One of my prouder gaming moments. And of course
Super Metroid was one of my favorite SNES games. I never got into the Prime games because I wasn't into the changed game-play.
Anyways, I probably should've been more specific in my criteria for remakes. I think that this article has a good idea of when remakes are necessary.
I agree with every example in that article. Great remakes can be done, but some movies are such a product of their time, like
Big Trouble in Little China, that I can't imagine a remake doing it justice. There's also the fact that so many re-makes feel the need to update the setting to become contemporary. Since I'm not a fan of many aspects of our current culture, this tends to render remakes less appealing to me.
However, a few years ago when I first heard they were doing a remake of
It, I thought it'd be interesting to have the "adult" portions be contemporary, so that the "kid" portions could take place in the '80s. That way, instead of Pennywise taking on the aspect of classic movie monsters, as he does in the original story that takes place in the 50s, he'd take on aspects of '80s horror icons like Jason, Freddie, Pinhead, Chucky... oh man, that could be awesome. Of course the studio making it would need to have the rights to use those characters, but if not, approximations could suffice ::coughMr.Skullcough:: I recently found out that the
It remake will indeed set the "kid" portion in the '80s, so I'm very curious to see how they handle it. Especially now that
Stranger Things has shown the Hollywood bigwigs that there's demand for well-made '80s throwback stuff.
Speaking of
Stranger Things, Jessica and I recently started watching it. Four episodes in and we're loving it. I really appreciate that it captures the look and feel of the '80s without going way overboard and cranking the "80sness" to eleven like so many '80s throw-back things do. They don't shove things like giant cell phones in your face or have every girl sport giant hair and wear neon clothing. Anyway, I think we'll do a podcast episode on it once we're done, so I'l save my thoughts on it until then.
At any rate, I have also seen the True Grit remake and I thought it was pretty good. One thing that bugged me though is that it wasn't always easy for me to understand what Jeff Bridges was saying because of his drawl. It's why I like watching movies with the subtitles turned on-it makes the movie easier for me to follow along.
I know what you mean. Jessica and I have watched lots of European movies and anime (subbed, of course), so reading subtitles has become second nature to us. So yeah, we're also not shy about throwing it on if some of the characters in an English-language movie are hard to understand due to a heavy dialect or poor audio mixing. But after watching lots of subtitled stuff, it can feel a bit liberating to watch a movie subtitle free. Then I can just sit back and really soak in the visuals.
Furthermore, my dad loved the song, Leaning on the Everlasting Arms by Iris DeMent which was featured in the True Grit remake . However, my older sister made the mistake of buying my dad an Iris DeMent CD. Lets just say a little Iris DeMent goes a long way.
I just looked up a random song of hers on YouTube. Interesting voice, but her stuff's not for me. But then, my taste for country/blue grass/folk is about on par with my taste for rap/hip-hop/r&b, in that it's pretty much non-existent.
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