Hollywood is Insulting You (but would still love your cash)

Our culture is lightning paced and global connectivity is at a historic high.  It makes sense that film studios would want to capitalize on excellent filmmaking in other countries by introducing it to citizens of the USA, yet how they go about this process has all the grace and finesse of dentistry with a chainsaw.  From re-making a film mere months after it is released internationally, to recording audio overlays that literally scrub a facet of an actors performance, let us enter the world of appropriation for cash.

Allow me to clarify by saying this: Not All Remakes are Bad.  Some Are Awesome.
I am specifically referring to the constant barrage of remade foreign films that are released as soon as the studios are able to crank them out; the Americanization of great stories that can stand on their own.

This current process of remaking foreign films results in (most often) a low quality product that is neither fine art nor decent storytelling.  There ARE some success stories, these must be noted, but they don't get a free pass either (we'll explore that later on).

Let's kick off the quality angle by examining some truly wretched remakes of wonderful films.

The Eye
Original
Summery:
"A supernatural thriller, which has redefined fear for Western audiences by offering a glimpse into Eastern rituals and attitudes surrounding death."  -Metacritic

Release Year: 2002
Region: Hong Kong

Metacritic: 66/100
IMDB: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 64%

Positive Review:
"With its spooky first-person rendering of Mun's experience...blurred, tentative, disoriented...The Eye creates a world of constant and imminent upheaval."
 - Geoff Pevere (Toronto Star)

Negative Review:
"It's a definite display of talent, but without enough thematic richness to get deeply under our skins."
- Robert Denerstein (Denver Rocky Mountain News)




Remake
Summery: 
"A woman receives an eye transplant that allows her to see into the supernatural world. Remake of the Hong Kong film."  - IMDB
Release Year: 2008
Region: USA

Metacritic: 36/100
IMDB: 5.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 21%

Positive Review:
"An effective if redundant fright flick."
- Tirdad Derakhshani (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Negative Review:
"With every twist of the second-hand plot telegraphed far in advance, you don't need to be clairvoyant to see where this is going."

- Neil Smith (BBC)

[*REC]

Original 

Summery:

"REC turns on a young TV reporter and her cameraman who cover the night shift at the local fire station. Receiving a call from an old lady trapped in her house, they reach her building to hear horrifying screams, which begin a long nightmare and a uniquely dramatic TV report."  -IMDB

Release Year: 2007 
Region: Spain

Metacritic: Not Available
IMDB: 7.6/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 96%

Positive Review:
"A demonic, barnstorming, cinema verite horror experience that pulls few punches, fears no genre taboo, and reaches for the throat with delightful intimidation."

- Brian Orndorf  (BrianOrndorf.com)

Negative Review:
"Even though it's the third such effort to employ handheld camera in a zombie flick, this has more than enough shocks to hold its own."

- Kim Newman (Empire Magazine)

Quarantine
Remake of [*REC]
Summery: 
"A television reporter and her cameraman are trapped inside a building quarantined by the CDC after the outbreak of a mysterious virus." -IMDB

Release Year: 2008
Region: USA

Metacritic: 53/100
IMDB: 6/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 59%

Positive Review:

"A respectable, if uninspired, adaptation of... [REC], a Blair Witch-style variation on zombie movie cliches that might seem fresher had it not opened after veteran George Romero's grimly pared-down Diary of the Dead."

- Maitland McDonagh (Miss FlickChick)

Negative Review:
"Quarantine fails to correct some of the problems evident in its predecessor while also incorporating a few defects of its own."
- James Berardinelli (ReelViews)

A Tale of Two Sisters

Original

Summery:

"Based on a famous Korean folktale, this grim fairy tale is one of the most heart-breaking and unexpected movies about loss, guilt, and grief ever made." - Metacritic

Release Year: 2003
Region: South Korea

Metacritic: 65/100
IMDB: 7.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 86%

Positive Review:

"Ji-woon Kim may be the Korean David Lynch and his juxtaposition of seemingly innocent and suddenly searing situations is marvelously unnerving, as are the constantly shifting personalities of most of his characters."
- Tom Long (Detroit News)
Negative Review:
"We aren't meant to understand the story fully until the film's closing minutes, so the shocks and suggestions come in a muddled context."
- Jonathan Rosenbaum (Chicago Reader)

The Uninvited

Remake of A Tale of Two Sisters

Summery:

"Anna Rydell returns home to her sister (and best friend) Alex after a stint in a mental hospital, though her recovery is jeopardized thanks to her cruel stepmother, aloof father, and the presence of a ghost in their home."  - IMDB

Release Year: 2009
Region: USA

Metacritic: 43/100
IMDB: 6.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 31%

Positive Review:

"As far as PG-13 Americanizations of Asian shockers go, it's about 70 percent passable."
- Fernando F. Croce (CinePassion)

Negative Review:
"Take a concept, strip it bare of all layers of meaning, remake it with added genre cliches and scantily clad American teens in order to pander to a wider audience. Voila."

- Mike Edwards (What Culture)

These three films that show a disturbing dip in quality when remade with American audiences in mind.
  

Do the studios responsible have a deep level of contempt for their audience or are these terrible remakes simply the product of rushing to cash in on the hit of another culture?
The truth probably lies closer to the latter, yet the taste left in this connoisseur's mouth is that of the former.

This begs the question, if time has (in general) shown the quick, shoddy remakes to be inferior products, why even bother?  Why can't these studios, instead of buying the rights to remake, buy the distribution rights and market the high quality original film?  Between many Americans being perceived as too lazy to read subtitles and rampant xenophobia within our culture, it is possible that many large studios just don't feel as though the risk is worth taking.

For more solid films that have had less-than-flattering remakes, here is a short list to research (these are just films that I have seen, there are many more):

Ju-On/The Grudge

Ringu/The Ring

Dark Water Original/Remake

Pulse Original/Remake

They Are Around Us/Shutter

But wait, the knowledgeable movie lover responds, there exist remakes of foreign films that are actually quite good!  In order to discuss the next issue, filmmaking integrity and morality, let us first take a comparative look at two remakes that were very well received upon domestic release. 

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Original

Summery:

"A journalist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by a young female hacker." - IMDB

Release Year: 2009
Region: Denmark

Metacritic: 76/100
IMDB: 7.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 85%

Positive Review:

"Appreciation of the film relies more on the performances than the problem-solving, and Rapace delivers a complicated and deliciously contrary performance that tattoos Lisbeth Salander straight onto the brain."
- Peter Howell (Toronto Star)

Negative Review:
"[W]hile the film offers silly fun for a while, its ultimate schizophrenia and self-seriousness become its undoing."

- Jeremy Heilman (MovieMartyr.com)

Remake

Summery:

"Journalist Mikael Blomkvist is aided in his search for a woman who has been missing for forty years by Lisbeth Salander, a young computer hacker." - IMDB

Release Year: 2010
Region: USA

Metacritic: 71/100
IMDB: 8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 87%

Positive Review:

"It's certainly worth seeing if you missed the original. If you saw it, however, there's no way of unseeing it, and nothing in the new one to top it."

- Joe Morgenstern (Wall Street Journal)

Negative Review:
"Seeing Fincher's version is like getting a Christmas gift of a book you already have."

- Richard Corliss (TIME Magazine)

Let The Right One In
Original
Summery:
"Oscar, an overlooked and bullied boy, finds love and revenge through Eli, a beautiful but peculiar girl."
-IMDB  

Release Year: 2008
Region: Norway

Metacritic: 82/100
IMDB: 8/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 98%

Positive Review:

"The film is a bevy of contradictions - beauty and horror, young love and violence, innocence and guilt. The fact that it works at all is impressive. The fact that it's a mind-blowing sensory experience is inexplicable."

- Simon Miraudo (Quickflix)

Negative Review:
"A limited how-to on efficiently cracking necks after biting and draining them. But whether this frosty Nordic couch potato vampire gore is your cup of bodily fluid, will depend on your preference for bloodsucker cinema as a dish best served cold."
- Prairie Miller (NewsBlaze)

Let Me In
Remake of Let The Right One In
Summery:
"A bullied young boy befriends a young female vampire who lives in secrecy with her guardian."
-IMDB  

Release Year: 2010
Region: USA

Metacritic: 79/100
IMDB: 7.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 89%

Positive Review:

"There was no good reason for this movie to exist beyond a lazy American disinterest in subtitles. But having said that, it's pretty great on its own."

- Dave White (Movies.com)

Negative Review:
"A striking picture to study, but a blunt, condensed take on the source material, sacrificing an unsettling sense of macabre harmony to keep elements blocky enough so they might be appreciated by a wide, profitable audience."

- Brian Orndorf  (BrianOrndorf.com)

Both remakes listed above are good, solid examples of filmmaking, and they both garnered (mostly) positive reviews while under-preforming at the box office.

What is the issue then with these films?

The facade of quality starts to unravel when the viewer simply stops to ask why the films were re-made in the first place.  Like the most of the terrible remakes shown, as soon as the original started gaining ground as a self-contained work of cinematic art, screenplays were penned to profit from the success of another.

Money is a huge motivator and the only difference between the quality of the Americanization of, say, REC and Let The Right One In would have to fall upon the shoulders of the people involved.

Why do these stories NEED the Hollywood rework when the global community has largely accepted the original already?  Do we view ourselves as being above the rest of the world, that our films are so much better than anything other countries produce (South Korea has already shot that notion the hell down)?

In essence, what we are dealing with here are the same money-grubbing, spotlight-stealing tactics...yet somehow many people find it acceptable in the case of Let Me In and Dragon Tattoo simply because the final product was one of high quality.  Is quality really the threshold of morality or decency?  What if you wrote/directed a film, then your studio sold the rights just as people started recognizing your work?  

It is reasonable for every crew member and fan of foreign films to be angry beyond belief when an English language remake is in the works before the theatrical run of the original version has even completed.

There is another aspect to consider, despite the intended ethnicity or sexuality of the original story, characters are often white-washed and women become sexual objects in many Americanized renditions.  These aspects alone are reason enough to stand up against such films, despicable corporate motivations aside.

The low level of literacy in the USA probably has a huge factor in the decision making process of the number-fueled accountants who run the companies that determine our media consumption.  If Hollywood is simply remaking due to the literacy issue, then they are directly insulting your intelligence by assuming that you cannot read fast enough to keep up.

I've heard people defend "good" remakes of foreign films by asserting that they are quite different than their counterpart; I would argue that if they are different to a degree that justifies their existence immediately after the original was released, then change the name of the film and make it original.

This will never happen.
Remakes exist because there is a market for the original film that a studio wishes to leech off of and expand.

It would appear as though artistic merit and storytelling genius have a greater amount of sway overseas than they do here.

The film-going public should not be considered cows to be blindfolded then milked.
Think globally and benefit from it.

With this in mind, vote with your wallet. 

Buy foreign films and speak out against their cringe-inducing remakes. 

Happy viewing,

Josh Evans