Somehow I knew it was bound to happen — after all, it happened with Oldboy (although that remake’s currently stalled) — but it nonetheless came as a huge blow to me when I read that Charlize Theron is planning to produce and star in a remake of Park Chan-Wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, the finale to his vengeance trilogy.
Now, my particular frustration with this news is perhaps the culmination of previously pent up anger towards Hollywood’s Asian remakes. As a fan who takes their Asian cinema seriously, it pisses me off to no end to see perfectly fine — no, just perfect — films being (poorly) remade just so that an audience who’s too lazy to read subtitles can idle away their time for 2 hours. You can argue that remakes attract attention to the original, but honestly, who, having seen The Lake House or Shall We Dance or some other crappy remake which I’m too pissed off at the moment to remember, actually bothered to check up on the original? In fact, if anyone reading this did, leave me a comment and I’ll give you an e-cookie!
The fact is, the film will likely be marketed as a brutal revenge blockbuster ladened with sadistic violence, completely ignoring Park’s core argument that ultimately, vengeance achieves nothing. No, the whole point of the remake will likely be, “vengeance achieves everything.” So the next time you take the fall for someone else’s murder, you know what you gotta do: bust a cap in his ass.
1 response so far ↓
deleuzean // June 20, 2008 at 8:40 am |
two words:
Infernal Affairs
That is the best these remakes will ever get, and while I will say that for a Hollywood movie the remake (whatever it was called) was actually pretty good, compared to the HK originals it was like staring at a poopsmear for two hours.
I have worked at an arthouse theater for over a decade and it still boggles my mind that US distributors insist on creating ridiculous rapid-fire-edited trailers that attempt to conceal the fact that foreign films have subtitled dialogue. Don’t they know who their core audience is???
And who are they trying to trick??? I mean, is someone going to go see a foreign film and when the subs come on they’re gonna go “Man, I thought this was gonna be in English, but I guess I’ll just suffer through reading these subs?” What kind of sense does that make????????