An Analysis of Remake Hate

[metoo]

Being the insensitive clod I can sometimes be, I read Kyle's post in its entirety without perceiving it as intended to attack on anybody in this forum; I took it literally as an attempt at understanding hatred for remakes in general. It is not, in my opinion, a troll, nor is it any kind of blanket accusation. [...]

I agree. It was - and is - to me an attempt to analyse a phenomenon.

[gattoparde59]

Being the insensitive clod I can sometimes be, I read Kyle's post in its entirety without perceiving it as intended to attack on anybody in this forum; I took it literally as an attempt at understanding hatred for remakes in general. It is not, in my opinion, a troll, nor is it any kind of blanket accusation. [...]

I agree. It was - and is - to me an attempt to analyse a phenomenon.

I disagree. I share some of Lee Kyle's annoyance with knee jerk opinions like this, but I am not going to write several hundred words on the subject.

"Lack of formal education?" This is not diplomatic and definitely condescending.

[sauvin]

Let's talk about food for a moment.

Everybody knows about food, and most of us have kitchens with packages of various kinds of foods, some pots and pans, and a stove to burn the food with. I'm an expert in this area; I've even managed to burn water.

What many of us also have is a rack, shelf or drawer of different kinds of spices, even if said repertory of spices is limited to salt, pepper and sugar.

So... what can we do with wheat flour? Well... drop a cup or two of milk into a pan, whisk in a couple tablespoons of flour, light a medium fire under it and keep stirring. Sooner or later you'll have a really basic white gravy. Boring? Maybe... but that, a few hot biscuits and a couple chunks of hot sausage can warm up the coldest parts of a man's body after coming in from a cheerlessly freezing January night. But, yes, really basic white gravy can be awfully boring after a while. So, sprinkle in some peppers! Some ground ginger! Play with it for a while! - add a bit more of this or a bit less of that, it's a sauce. Add a bit more of that and a bit less of this, it's a really yummy pie filling.

Don't even think about getting me started about the teff flour and the wheat berries I've got hiding in a cupboard somewhere, but you get the idea. Also, don't even think about getting me started on the virtues of chili powder over chipotle or the ground white pepper or that absolutely mind-blowing curry powder sitting in a corner...

And the world has so much more to offer in the way of meats, fruits, vegetables, nuts, berries and whatnots, even if you only ever shop at the Walmart supercentre.

Dude, you probably really don't want to know what I can do with a bottle of ketchup, a few spoonfuls of ground cummin, some vinegar, some brown sugar, a healthy sneeze of ground chili peppers, a pinch of chipotle, a dribble of Worcestershire sauce, a plop of Dijon, chopped onions, grated cheeses, browned ground beef, half a teaspoonful of MSG and a plateful of steak fries. My parents don't want to know, either, but boy howdy, can they pester me for more sometimes!

(and, of course, if I mess it up, it gets mixed in with more chili sauce and I'll eat it alone, privately and in shame...)

So, if you don't like cooking your own food, run off to the Mexican place! You don't have to be Mexican to love Mexican food (although it can be helpful to have a tongue made of teflon-coated cast iron). When you get tired of that, run off to the Chinese place! You don't have to be Chinese to love Chinese food, even if what you get in the US isn't exactly truly Chinese. What's not immediately obvious is that a lot of the stuff you ladle out from the buffet at the Chinese place is made mostly from exactly the same kinds of stuff that went into making the Mexican food you got tired of just a minute ago. Same stuff, that is, but maybe a little less of this, maybe a bit more of that, and maybe deep-fried instead of pan-fried, or steamed instead of baked.

So, you can make all kinds of wonderful and seemingly different things out of a few basic ingredients. Everybody already knew this, or should have.

But, what's food got to do with remake hatred?

A little songbird who has been known at times to sing entire operas sat on my shoulder and said “You know something, Sauvin, you really can be a fearsome idiot sometimes." That little songbird tweeted and chirped something about there not being just three basic story plots, there might be as many as 36. Maybe even more! That list of plots might not seem so very vast, so it certainly must be true that if people have been telling each other stories built on these plots ever since we starting stringing sounds together to form words, then yes, we've probably all been there, heard that, gotten the stupid T-shirts a few hundred thousand times over a long time ago. Seen one murder mystery, seen them all, and when the butler didn't do it, the maid did.

The problem with (for example) a basic murder mystery is that it's not always just a basic murder mystery. Sometimes it involves a guy who got driven out of his mind competing with his brother for the love of the family's matriarch who happens to be the founder and CEO of a major international conglomerate specialising in supplies used in disaster recovery while not realising that that cute little blonde he'd just married three months ago was actually his long-lost twin sister. A little more of this, a little less of that.

That list of subplots may not even be complete since a great deal of the fiction I've read over the years have also involved pressures at the macrosocial level (a coin I termed to denote the evolution of conflict between large populations as influenced by the wealth or dearth of needed resources of some kind). Most of the plots I see on fast scan over this list have to do with the plight of an individual, or maybe a small band of people.

So, if your basic murder mystery contains nothing of these other kinds of plot, yeah, probably been there, probably already read or seen it a few thousand times, probably slept through the last few hundred. Toss in another couple of subplots, though, and suddenly your basic murder mystery gets to be a bit more... erm... "tasty"?

So, if you decide to write the next Great $National Novel, and you want to make it mostly a murder mystery, but you decide to include elements or subplots from some of the other "Basic Plot Types", how many different kinds of story could you write? If these "Basic Plot Types" were discrete entities with unit absolute value, and you pick three of them, you could make some 7140 different kinds of story blend. Add another three, you could make 1 947 792 different kinds of story. If you're really ambitious, and supremely confident in your ability to crank out twelve or thirteen pages of hot, fresh fiction each day (every day) for the next solid year, the story you wind up writing is one of 254 186 856 different possibilities.

But, well, these different Basic Plot Types don't have "unit absolute magnitude". Some stories are mostly about this kind of plot, with maybe one or two of these others just for added spice, but they're mostly in the background. The only thing "absolute" about their relative "magnitudes" is in the insanity I'd be suffering in asserting that they could be quantified. So, if you were to try to write some kind of Unbelievable Opus containing all 36 of these Basic Plot Types with some types being ascendant over others (and still this is an hallucinatory attempt at quantification), your multi-volume masterpiece would be one among 221 256 270 138 418 000 000 different possibilities. That's roughly a "two" followed by 20 zeroes, a number for which I have no name just off the top of my head.

Ain't math fun? It doesn't even begin to tell the whole story because what the cold, hard numbers leave out is the artistry of the person writing the story. Snoopy is going to continue writing "it was a dark and stormy night" long after more talented people have launched hugely successful careers, put millions of books on the bookstore shelves and banked enough money to buy small countries. Nobody wants to read about Dark and Stormy Nights (tm) when VC Andrews can keep you spellbound with stories of siblings locked up in attics for months or years at a stretch. Some of Stephen King's stories about wayward teenagers and heartbroken English teachers have never been absent from the bookstore shelves in nearly forty years.

So, where's this leave us with remake hatred? I dunno... but I just had to drop in and drone on a bit after that little songbird reminded me (oh, so gently) that it can pay huge dividends to pay attention to some of life's smaller details, and to let that songbird know I think he's got a point.

But now, I'm hungry. I wonder what I could do with a piece of bread...?

[drakkar]

I don't feel your allegory reaches quite home.

I like Japanese food, even try to make it now and then. But all the ingredients are not always available in the quality I'd like to have them, if at all. And I don't have the 8-year education of a Japanese sushi chef.
Going to a sushi restaurant helps, but then you have the Norwegian legislation (I think it's pan-Scandinavian), demanding sushi fish to be frozen before use (to avoid parasites), something a Japanese sushi chef probably would regard barbaric. So, it looks like I'll have to go outside Scandinavia, at the very least, to get the real thing. As long as I stay home, I'm stuck with something resembling the real thing, but not quite it.

A Japanese film? Just order it, and after a couple of weeks the real thing drops into my mailbox.

So my point is this: If I'm prone to food remake hate, I' might have a hard time comparing the Trondheim remakes with the real thing, while with films I can just sit in my easy chair comparing the original with the remake hating as much as I like.

Btw, I feel the phrase "Remake Hate" is a bit over-simplified.

[PeteMork]

I don't feel your allegory reaches quite home.

Ah, the pitfalls of allegories. They almost always fall short of perfectly mirroring the original. But I think the emphasis is correctly placed on the infinite variety of dishes that can be created out of basic ingredients.
The argument that three (or 36) basic story types is somehow analogous to remakes is a stretch at best, and I think Sauvin has correctly identified the problems with it – especially in the second half of his post.

[gattoparde59]

What the funnel cake?

[sauvin]

I don't feel your allegory reaches quite home.

Maybe that's because there's a reason I don't write for a living. I'm no good at it.

So my point is this: If I'm prone to food remake hate, I' might have a hard time comparing the Trondheim remakes with the real thing, while with films I can just sit in my easy chair comparing the original with the remake hating as much as I like.

And yeah, on the surface, it seems absurd to compare baked beans to Billy Jack.

Btw, I feel the phrase "Remake Hate" is a bit over-simplified.

What about 'remake discomfort' instead?

Maybe I should have had a few more litres of coffee before trying to write this...

There was this one guy who seemed to want only the best of anything, one of these guys who would snootily point out that 95% of anything is garbage, and he'll stay steadfastly on the 'safe' side of the remaining 5%. Only the best foods, only the best fiction - I'd almost be willing to wager he spent more on is laptop than I did on my car. I remember feeling sorry for the guy, in a way, because if he ever gets stuck in Podunk Holler (maybe because his fancy car broke down and the local mechanic has to order out for parts), he's not going to eating the kinds of foods one could proudly call "specialite de la maison", he's going to be choking down mush and sour mash.

At the same time, it's no secret that nobody makes meat loaf as well as Mom does. There's just no better meat loaf to be had anywhere, for love, money or fear of bloody murder. It's juicy, it's succulent, it's loaded with onions and peppers and a deep, rich meaty flavour. So, when I'm out and about and duck into a 'family restaurant' deciding I'll brave its institutionalised freeze-dried 'fortified' equivalent, I'll often do so with dread because... well... really really good meat loaf can be awfully hard to find, but truly awful meat loaf is everywhere. I mean, well... :sigh:, there's a language policy in effect in this forum, isn't there? I could get away with calling it "rubbery" or "an awful lot like many ceramics", couldn't I?

I watched the recent Carrie remake. Lots of people accuse it of being a (more or less) shot-for-shot reshooting rather than a remake; it's not a reboot, not a re-imagining, it really is an almost literal reshoot, with a few small variances such as cell phones and laptops. If I were prone to poo-pooing remakes of this sort, I'd say it compared to original movie about the same way the meat loaf from the diner just up the road compares to my mother's meat loaf: it just didn't take me home.

And why didn't it?

Mm... well... some of it doesn't really have to do with what's original and what isn't. I first saw the original Carrie at the drive-in with a girl I'd picked up (in retrospect) hoping she'd ease the pain of my fiancee having told me to get lost. Hadn't known a darn thing about the director, the actors, the original novel's author or anything, it was just a movie playing at the drive-in where it gets dark enough to play with Russian hands and Roman fingers. I was, in a word, exactly in the right demographic for the original to be subtly but profoundly broadsided by it.

I'm officially fifty five years of age, now, nearly forty years after the original came out, and there are no drive-ins to go to (or sweet-looking sixteen year olds to look to for comfort), there's just these moderately sized "stadium style" theaters with air conditioning or heating that doesn't work very well, and bathrooms somewhere in the next township, and (modulo the rarity like LTROI), I'm a bit old to be "broadsided", subtly or not, by much of anything.

Another part of not being "taken home" by the remake has a lot to do with decisions made in the movie's making. For starters, I don't remember seeing anybody in the remake wearing polyester. The blues were bluer, the reds were redder in the original, and the music (mostly) livelier. Hair styles were different, and for all of me, even the language was. In other words, the remake was set in the here and the now, where everything is just similar enough to be recognisable as 'home', but dissimilar enough to be recognised as 'but some decades later, after the drive-in got turned into a race-track, the hardware store burned down, the A&W got turned into a 'family planning' clinic and all the factories just outside city limits have been abandoned for so long they're starting to crumble".

On the plus side, in the remake, the girls showed a lot more cheek...

If you take away the clothes, the camera phones and the mullets, have everybody in both the original and the remake run around completely naked and with shaven heads, take away the cars so everybody has to do all his hithering and thithering by shank's mare - take away, in other words, any clue of when or where the movie is set - and then compare the original to the remake, I think you'd find the remake varies very little from the original because the real story is something that could happen in the most primeval of settings; unlike LMI, which was a lot more Owen-centric than LTROI was Oskar-centric, even the POVs are the same.

The remake is made from exactly the same kind of ground beef the original used, and fried in exactly the same kind of pan.

That being said, remake poo-pooers can easily say the movie had no point. It didn't say anything new, didn't change the underlying message one tiny bit. Since it brings nothing new to the table, poo-pooers say, it has just no reason for being except to fatten the bank accounts of the folks who made it.

Thing of it is, most of us who saw the original Carrie on the Big Screen still had all four grandparents, whereas many of us are now grandparents ourselves. A whole generation and a half, more or less, was born, has grown up, grown old and has begun to die off. When the original Carrie came out, the Latest and Greatest Thing in Home Entertainment was, iirc, the laser disk, the equipment alone costing about a month's pay (at the rate I was earning then) and each disk costing a week's pay. VHS and Betamax had yet to make it to the market and have their turf war, so, once the original Carrie left the theater, she also escaped public attention. For quite a while, there was no "picking up a copy to watch at home while lounging on the sofa". Sure, VHS started getting to be common within a handful or two of years, with VCD and DVD coming out not terribly long afterwards, but those of us hardy and immortal young fools who could have appreciated the movie most fully left behind the polyester leisure suits and took up punching time clocks, with the hardy and immortal young fools following us having little idea the movie even existed.

Here is a reason for a remake: if the story carry an important enough message, something socially redeeming or bringing to the fore some ongoing gross social wrong, then the Liberal Arts types among us should surely appreciate the value of adding a few cell phones and a laptop or two, and maybe showing a car that was relatively expensive and luxurious thirty years ago turning into a real rustbucket, changing some of the language and some of the cultural ephemera within which today's young people live, all the more to make the message the movie carries more readily accessible to them.

I offer the same argument for LMI for an American audience, even if LMI changes the ground rules a bit.

The essential bone of contention I'd pick with the OP's post is the assertion that movies tend to be "mediocre at best". While I certainly agree that there've been some perfectly execrable movies, the distance any movie might enjoy qualitatively from the "mediocre" (in whichever direction) depends in large part on how it's perceived by the people consuming it, meaning, there's a a continuum along which movies position themselves by how well their makers perceive what might move an audience and their skill in acting on that perception. I've seen a few movies I'd most certainly not call "mediocre"; some of them have stunk so badly I couldn't get more than halfway into them, and others kept my butt firmly on the seat their entire durations, often leaving me wishing it didn't have to end. In the former case, the makers just had no clue where my personal buttons to push might be, and in the latter, the makers clearly not only knew where the buttons were, they knew how to push them, and honking hard.

The assertion that movies are "mediocre at best" is simply patently untrue, even if only because "mediocrity" implies a middle ground between "excellence" and "worthlessness".

[drakkar]

What about 'remake discomfort' instead?

The thing is that I've seen and heard so many ways of critisising remakes. Ranging from the time aspect ("too soon", LMI), misunderstanding the original, or thinking the remake audience will not get the original (Head Above Water), lack of originality (LMI). Insomnia was a 2002 remake of the Norwegian 1997 original with the same name. While not quite in LTROI's league, both versions of the film received good reviews, and the director of the original was satisfied with the remake, using it as an example of how it could be done (this was a radio program about the "remake plague").

Comparing with LTROI/LMI: I don't know if it is the time difference (5 vs 2 years) or that LTROI (probably) is better than Insomnia. I've never seen the remake card being pulled against the American version of Insomnia - they are largely regarded as equal, the latter copying the first hasn't been an issue.
Not so with LTROI/LMI. Here many people are outright offended by LMI. My feeling is that it is both a quality issue (LMI is soiling LTROI, and that it came so soon that it is very easy to compare them.

A third issue is that the Insomnias came before the big dvd rush (here, at least), while with LTROI/LMI "everybody" got an opinion.

[intrige]

I for one dislikes LMI strongly. But I think what you have tried to. figure out, is when people feel the need to complain and "hate" on it, just because it didn't forfill their expectations. Or rather that their disliking of the remake was intentional to defend the original product. I don't feel the need to hate on LMI. Sure I have said a few remakrs here and there, but nothing against LMI as its whole or the people who likes it, espesially not against the people who likes it. People can like whatever they want.

I think my main point here is that you have to part those who rage wildly about their "hatred" and those who don't. There are amny on this forum who adores LTROI and dislikes LMI, and doesn't complain about it all the time. I understand you can get angry about people not liking what you like, but you simply have to suck it up. As long as nobody insolts another, we should handle that someone says that LTROI is the better movie, or visa versa. What's the big deal?

[jetboy]

Well I have to say what isnt being said, or few people have said and that the hate was started by the OP. The hate was started by the guy who is complaining about the hate. It isnt an analysis at all but a rant, out of nowhere. Read what he is saying. He is speaking from a position that assumes his position is the correct one. He never once takes the position from the other side. Granted people like myself should use their ignore buttons more but lets get the story right.