Titles IV

How have I not posted this yet? I found it on my hard drive today, left over from when I was collecting my favorite movie title shots.

Note to all who watch 30 Rock obsessively

and think to themselves "Was that funny commentary on racism, or was that racism?":

Behold. They're having the argument for us over at Tiger Beat Down.

The Crazies (2010)

There are a lot of reasons to remake a movie, none of them very good. Sometimes there have been so many sequels already that the only way to continue the franchise is to restart it. We have seen a rash of these in recent years, Nightmare on Elm Street being the newest (note: I don't approve of rebooting the franchise, but I sure do like the idea of Jackie Earle Haley as the new face of Freddy). Sometimes a movie has a small but loyal following and the filmmakers hope to gain a wider audience for something they consider great by releasing a new version of it. Or technology has changed since the time of the original, and the filmmaker feels he can make a better-looking version of the same story. I suppose this is what justified remaking King Kong. Perhaps the hardest remake rational to argue with is when the original director himself remakes his own film, as Michael Haneke did with Funny Games last year. If anyone has the right to tamper with the legacy of a film, surely the director does. But if you go down the road of creator ownership, eventually you will run into George Lukas, and you will have to admit that just because a person created something, that does not mean he understands it. 

The Crazies was not remade for any of these reasons. Director Breck Eisner approached the project with the question, "What would George Romero have done with this if he had had more money?" So far so good. First, he hired real actors. Fine. He added big explosions. Fine again. Then he edited out all the really terrifying parts. You know, the horror. 

It's been a long time since I saw The Crazies. I saw it only once, and I remember it for one reason: because it was horrifying. 

The Crazies was very much in the Romero mold: mysterious illness infects a population, no one knows who to trust, a small group of unconnected people are thrown together in rural Pennsylvania, where they all turn on each other. Ugly things happen. Some not-very-subtle points are made about human nature and/or politics and/or society. Very ugly things happen. Roll credits. 

The remake of The Crazies is a perfectly adequate epidemic movie. Timothy Olyphant is a likable small-town sheriff, Radha Mitchell is a likable extremely hot small-town doctor. Joe Anderson (who I did not remember from the three movies imdb tells me I've seen him in) was very convincingly not British. There are jumpy moments, and big fires, and one pretty cool scene in a carwash. But I will forget all those things pretty quickly. I will never forget a certain scene from the 1973 movie. If you've seen the old one, I bet you know exactly what I'm talking about. 

p.s. Was it the music or the hand-held camera or the hot teenagers that made me think more than once that I was watching an episode of Friday Night Lights? Am I the only person who had this experience? The Internet says I am.