10 Reasons You Can’t Stand Mainstream Cinema

3. Oh Yay, Another Remake

You know how I mentioned that 3D was a recycling gimmick for Hollywood, this is Hollywood actually putting in an effort at the recycling gimmick. It seems like every other movie release is a remake. "Total Recall," "Red Dawn," "Dredd," and now there are even more remakes on the chopping block. "Carrie," "Robocop," and "Evil Dead" are amongst upcoming remakes. Remakes aren't totally bad. Remakes of foreign films help relay a brilliant film to an audience that may not get some of the cultural cues that the original had and remakes of old films may improve on the original film, which may have been campy or bad. Some remakes become Oscar contenders such as "The Departed" or "True Grit." However, like most Hollywood films, remakes become part of the status quo than the Oscar contending exception. Hollywood continues to remake films because the foundation is already there. Most people have already heard of or have seen the original film, but enough time has passed or the success of the original, foreign film was so good that Hollywood quickly picks up the rights and is on their way to a relatively easy buck. But recent remakes have flopped such as "Dredd" and "Red Dawn." It seems that people either have no interest in the remake or their target audience is too young to know the original source material. You think kids born in 1995 have seen the 1990 version of "Total Recall?" Do you think kids are looking forward to the remake of "Red Dawn" that came out in 1984? The only way a remake works is if it's a good movie. That's right. The normal rules of what constitutes a good film still applies to the remake. You can remake shot for shot a classic film and still come up short ("Psycho"). Mainstream cinema has been flooded with remakes and while people occasionally flock to the theaters to watch one, the truth is that none of us really want to watch the same movie twice. The recent "Spiderman" is a good example. As much as I liked Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, we've had three Spiderman movies in the past decade. Is it necessary that five years later a completely different reboot is released? Collective sigh.