7/10 | Mimic | Guillermo del Toro
7/10 | Mother's Day | Darren Lynn Bousman
- I like Jeremy Northam. He's vague. He does a good job of disappearing into movies more about mood than characters. In this sense, he's perfect for "Mimic," an X-Files episode by way of Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I'll forget it in a week, but I loved watching it.
7/10 | Mother's Day | Darren Lynn Bousman
- We don't like remakes because our expectations are heightened by the source material. The average remake is no worse than the average film, but it's hard to not be bothered by even a good remake if it falls short of an eminent original. We have expectations of a movie before we watch it. This is not conscious. It seems as if we just become aware of our like or dislike of a movie rather than make an active decision, but this is not so. We subconciously determine a value judgment of each movie we watch based on our expectations. If it meets them then it's good, if it doesn't then it's bad and if it trumps them then it's great. More often than not, we know the potential of the premise of a remake - we've seen it for ourselves, in the original - and in these cases we expect the remake to also be great, if only because of the gaps in our understanding of the reasons for the success of the original. This affects our value judgments: films that ought to satisfy us disappoint us because they're remakes.
- We can agree that a movie picked at random has as much chance of being great as another movie picked at random. We can also agree that remakes tend to be of great movies. We can't agree, though we should, that a remake of a great movie has about as much chance of being great as a movie picked at random. We think that the remake has more potential because the original has proven it. There's a marginal difference, sure, but it's so slight that it doesn't even matter, not nearly as much as the cast and crew involved.
- I surfed the web while this was on. I paid attention to a few bits. They weren't so good.
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