This past Friday we had to say goodbye to my good friend Joe. When we got him, he was a three-year-old rescue who came with some issues, but also with a massive heart that wanted nothing more than to please. Over the past seven years, I ran him in rally Read more…
This election is remarkable in that whoever wins will be absolutely loathed by a plurality of the populace, and distrusted by a majority. It is quite possible that on inauguration day our president elect will have underwater approval ratings. If there is any state out there that splits by less Read more…
I’m only five episodes into Luke Cage and I think I can say Marvel’s managed to hit it out of the park again. Like the prior two Netflix series, Daredevil and Jessica Jones, Luke Cage manages to draw on all the strengths of the MCU in a smaller-scope more street-level Read more…
“Cultural Appropriation” has reared it’s sombrero-sporting head in the literary community once again in another series of critiques and critiques of critiques and critiques of critiquing and those doing the critiquing, over something that should, in the end, be a fairly straightforward caution for authors to just get it right, Read more…
I mentioned on Facebook that the best cover songs are ones that bring something new to the table. There’s something magical when an artist takes an existing song, does something radically different with it, and makes it work. In the following cases, I think the result surpasses the original.
So there was this Ghostbusters remake/reboot that caused a lot of angst among various peoples. Since I’ve yet to see it (I’ll probably wait until it’s on Netflix.) I don’t have an opinion on it one way or another. But the existence of the film has made me ponder the idea of remakes/reboots in general; why they work (Battlestar Galactica, Casino Royale), limp past the post (Star Trek, Miami Vice), or explode in an incandescent glory of fail (The Wicker Man, The Day The Earth Stood Still.)
One obvious thing is that decent quality source material doesn’t guarantee the quality of a remake. In fact, it often seems that there is an inverse relationship; the better the original, the worse subsequent attempts seem. That may be simply a side effect of comparing the two. After all, it’s easier to improve on a crappy movie than improve on a great one, and making any movie worse is the easiest task of all. It also seems to me that the best remakes take the existing property and do something new with it (counter-example and failure: Psycho). Much is made of “gritty reboots,” so much so that it’s now a cliché, but there’s also the “campy reboot” that can also work/not work just as well (see Dragnet or Dark Shadows), what matters is that the change in tone gives a reason for the remake to exist. The gender flip in Ghostbusters obviously serves a similar meta-purpose, to change the story enough to justify the movie’s existence.
With that in mind, here are five stories I’d like to see getting remade.
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Actually, this, the final book in the Apotheosis Trilogy is here: Not this:
They’re called Utopian Riot, and I like them: Also, their other single:
Progressives really get steamed when people point to the Tea Party and/or Libertarians as the spiritual successors to the last great anti-establishment mass movements of the 60s and 70s. To them I provide the following interview with Starchild, a San Francisco erotic services provider and Libertarian candidate for school board Read more…
No time with the holidays and NaNoWriMo to add something beyond the fact that I’m still alive, and repost this from a couple of years ago: