The Experiment's End

As you might have noticed I finished up my experiment this past weekend, Halloween as it turned out. Is it fitting that I finished this little task on a scary day like Halloween? Well, not really, I actually enjoyed the experience and I plan to do more of the same in the future. For now though, I will recap a bit, this first movie match-up experience, before moving on to another.

I went into the experiment with some definite ideas on how I would react to the films I was going to watch. Across the board I assumed that I would either like or find the originals to be acceptable and I would hate the remakes. I figured that, if a movie was going to be considered for a remake than it had to be good enough to warrant a remake. For the most part, this was true. With a couple of exceptions, the originals were good movies and held up well over time. When it comes to those exceptions, one could argue that it was just my personal feelings that made them less than worthy for remaking, but thats the beauty if movies, they can cause almost endless discussion.

So, I determined in my infinite wisdom that these original films were worthy of remakes, what else did I find? As it turned out, of the movies I watched, not every remake was a disaster. That was another preconceived notion I had going in, that all the remakes would be pointless cash grabs. I did count, however, that only one film seemed to me, to be an improvement over the original. That was the case for The Departed. In all other cases, the remakes were at best, only equal to the original. The rest were those pointless cash grabs I mentioned earlier. I have to say though, with the exception of Disturbia and The Amityville Horror, the rest of the remakes had, if examined close enough, something to offer.

So what does this all amount to? Hopefully I caused someone (anyone? Bueller...Bueller...) to take a look at this blog and think a bit more deeply about the films on the list. Perhaps caused them to discuss with others, their own thoughts. Because if nothing else, all film criticism aside, one of the greatest things about films is our desire and need to discuss them. Good or bad, there is almost always something you can say about a movie you just watched. Some argument in favor of why you think it was worthwhile.

If nothing else, this experiment did shed light on a act that, for me, I had previously only superficially considered: the act of film critique. When you look closely at any film you can better see the motivations of the people that put it together. What were they trying to do here? Did they pull it off? Was it entertaining? All very important questions to ask yourself when trying to criticize a film. When we watch movies with just entertainment purposes we can let all of that go, but to watch a movie with the intention of criticizing it, you need to keep those questions at the front of your mind.

As I mentioned earlier, I plan to continue to match-up movies from time to time. I know I plan to catch Let Me In on DVD as soon as I can. This is a remake of a foreign film called, Let the Right One In and from what I have heard, the remake is quite good. We'll see about that...

The Match-Up and it's Effects

Recently, I was asked to try and quantify some effect my movie match-up experiment has made on my daily life. That's a hard one. I realized that I rarely go to see movies in the theater, so my experiment didn't cause me to dig into my pockets for movie money. Like many people these days, I used Netflix to watch to movies on my list. Again, this didn't really effect me too much since, with some careful planning, I was always provided the next movie on my list. Did it have any effect? Yes, but only in a more philosophical way.

What's most valuable thing to every one of us? No, not money, and shame on you if you answered that way. The correct answer is TIME. Out of my typical week I probably watch 1 movie a week. Sadly. There are times of the year that the number goes up quite a bit, but for now I rarely get the chance. The way this experiment was planned out, I needed to watch 4 movies a week, and that is not even counting the time I required to write the blog content. Which, I hate to say, doesn't coming flowing out of me in a rush. So, this means that I had to increase my movie watching by 4 times! And at about 2 hours a piece, my typical 2 hours a week of movie viewing turned into 8 hours a week. Also, you can figure about 30 minutes per movie to write about them (and sadly that's a generous time estimate.) So, we are really looking at 10 hours a week.

We are all short on time and it felt even more painful to sit and watch a movie I knew I didn't like from the first 15 minutes, because I needed to review it for my experiment. I honestly have sympathy for professional film critics now. We are all short on time, that big clock hanging over our heads is always ticking away, and some things just aren't worth our valuable time. To think I was originally planning on reviewing a total of 30 movies! At an average length of 2 hours, I would have spent about 90 hours watching/reviewing them! That's 22.5 hours a week, or 3 hours a day! Ummm, no thank you.

The Amityville Horror (1979) vs The Amityville Horror (2005) - The Match-Up

Well, we are not going to be discussing extremely thought provoking subjects here. These two movies don't provoke that sort of response. They are just horror flicks, after all. I already admitted that I don't care about horror movies, but it's time for Halloween and it seemed like the thing to do. Even if I can't find much to love in these to films, that's OK, I'm actually just here to compare them. Comparison is comparison, even if you are comparing to pieces of coal.

Story-wise, the two films are pretty consistant in their situation. One family, one evil house scary stuff happening. Blah,blah,blah. There are some considerable changes in the in the remake though, and none of them are for the better.

First off, in the original we had the house as a character. A house that was inhabited by an evil presence, which we found out was generated by one particular evil man. However, it was pretty much a given that the idea was that the house over all was evil. In the remake we get a evil house acting out, but we also have the ghost of a little girl, Toby, who was killed the year before in the tragic murder of her family at the hands of her older brother. This makes for a confusing situation where you are not sure if the house is trying to get the main characters or is it Toby? We also are not sure if Toby is a evil presence or is just misunderstood. She seems pretty friendly to Chelsea, the family's young daughter. As I mentioned in the review of the 2005 version, I have a feeling that the Toby-ghost aspect was added in for the sole purpose of having more opportunity to flash images on the screen of a young dead girl in various representations of dead-ness. Movies like The Ring and others, have established a certain visual style for horror movies and this movie seemed to be borrowing that style. It could just be me, but that doesn't make a movie more frightening, just annoying.

Another differnce in the two films is the treatment of the father character going mad. In the original, it seemed to be a much more solitary experience. He would withdraw from the family and when he did interact with them he would lash out in frustration. With the remake's version of crazy dad, he seemed to be looking for reasons to torture the kids. There is a scene where he makes the oldest boy help him chop wood. In the most unsafe way you could chop wood. He forces the boy to hold the small pieces of wood with both hands for him to chop. If he wants to kill the kid, just chop the kid up. I'm being sarcastic, but it shows a difference between the two dads. In the original, father was sick and troubled and he eventual lost it completely, but there always was a sense that he knew that he was a kind man. In the remake, they have the father wandering the house finding ways to scare and abuse the kids throughout the whole story. You don't get a sense of him "losing" his mind, he is mental from almost the start. And this leads to the last bit about the differences in the father character. I explained that the original film ended somewhat abruptly. The "s" hits the fan, with the house falling down around them and you are ready for the father to chop up his family with an axe, but he comes to his senses are rescues his family from the house. I said that this must represent the events of the real family's account. In the remake however, they probably realized that is this is an anti-climactic way to finish a story, so they jazzed it up. In the remake, the father does his darnedest to kill that pesky family of his and fails, but not for lack of desire. This is a strange way to end it too. Even though they escape, how could any of those kids still live with that guy. Sure he was influenced by an evil house, but he also mentally tortured you for weeks and then tried REALLY hard to murder you with an axe. And he didn't stop trying because he came to his senses, he stopped because he fell off a roof. This seemed like it was trying to be more of a The Shining, ending but you would need to have the father die in the end for it to make any sense. Silly.

I have already admitted to hating horror movies, that might have colored my judgment of these two films, I'm pretty sure it has. It's hard to be objective when it comes to this genre. Like love stories. Which one was better? I would have to say, even with all it's flaws, I liked the 1979 version better. It had problems but I don't think that all of them were it's fault. Just unfortunate circumstances. It had a much higher creep factor than the remake, since it had to rely on creating a eerie feeling for the movie, over special effects. Did it need to be remade? This is another one I can say, that this is a definite, no. On paper it probably seemed to be a good idea to remake this one. We'll get more money and special effects to throw at it and we'll have a winner. That's probably what they thought. Ironically, it's is exactly what caused it to fail.