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USA: Christine Jeffs, 2008

I really didn't know much about this film going in, other than that it starred both Emily Blunt (who first dazzled me in My Summer of Love) and Amy Adams (who, in Enchanted, took a character who could so easily have been infuriating and made her adorable), and that it was from the producers of Little Miss Sunshine (which I haven't seen yet). Oh, and that it was about two sisters making a living cleaning up crime scenes. I wasn't sure what to expect, but had a feeling it would be a broad, bawdy comedy with lots of outrageous jokes about death. I was half-right: the film is, at times, very funny, and draws a lot of its humour from the awkwardness and unpleasantness of the various locations the two sisters find themselves posted to. What I couldn't have predicted, though, was that it could also do "subtle" and "heartfelt", vividly depicting two very different but damaged siblings. I'm not sure who gives the better performance - Blunt or Adams - because they're both so damn good. All credit to the writer, first-timer Megan Holley, for giving them such good material to work with. The best film no-one saw of 2008? I'm not sure, given that I haven't seen many of the films no-one saw in 2008, but this is one blind buy I definitely don't regret.

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USA: Ivan Reitman, 1984

It's funny how many cult classics fall into the "you had to be there" category. I was born in the early 1980s, but Ghostbusters was never part of my childhood. Well, I did see a couple of episodes of The Real Ghostbusters, that dreadful animated series made by DiC, at a friend's birthday party once, but that's about it. Actually, come to think of it, perhaps seeing those cartoons is precisely the reason why Ghostbusters was never part of my childhood. (And I always thought it was stupid that the animated series was called The Real Ghostbusters when the live action film, featuring real people, wasn't.) While my friends were watching shows like Transformers and He-Man, all things that bored me to tears, I was always much happier watching real cartoons like the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry shorts. I always found these stiff '80s shows (little more than glorified toy commercials) dull, depressing and frankly ridiculous, which has persisted into adulthood. It's no secret that, despite growing up in the '80s, I think that that decade would be best served by being confined to the trash heap, in part because of the sorry state of my beloved medium of animation during that period.

Anyway, I watched the original 1984 movie for the first time last night, and... yeah, it's was... fun... kinda. It made me laugh a few times and it more or less held my attention for its duration, but I found it completely and utterly disposable. I think my brother summed it up best when he said "I'm not saying it's bad or anything, but out of all the films that could have remained in people's consciousness, why this one?" or words to that effect. Like I said, you had to be there, I suppose.

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USA: Doug Liman, 1999

I'm an unabashed fan of the concept of parallel narrative storytelling. It's not always completely successful, of course (see Vantage Point for an example of the gimmick being repeated to the point of tediousness, or Barbara Machin's recent Kiss of Death to see how it can potentially get in the way of developing an attachment to the characters if overdone), but it's a neat technique and one that has been used to great excess in projects as diverse as Akira Kurosawa's Rashômon and the two episodes Barbara Machin wrote for Casualty back at Christmas 2006. Go was seen by some as an attempt to cash in on the success of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, a sort of teenage-oriented version of the same type of multi-strand, drug-fuelled romp, but I always felt that this was unfairly dismissive. It's very much a product of the late 90s, from the fashion to the on-the-nose lingo the presence of actors who at one point seemed to be the next big thing but then just seemed to fade away - people like Breckin Meyer, James Duval and Katie Holmes (look what happened to her). That said, a decade after it was originally released, it still holds up, thanks to John August's snappy, off-beat script, a pre-Bourne Doug Liman's fluid and often inventive direction, and some great performances from an eclectic cast, including the likes of Sarah Polley, William Fichtner and that kid from Grange Hill.

Watched it last night, had a blast. It's as good today as it was in 1999.

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UK/USA: Jim Henson, 1986

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USA: Dennis Iliadis, 2009

As I mentioned in a previous post, it's somewhat unusual for me to show any real interest in a horror remake. Ordinarily, you'd be more likely to find me railing against them and decrying the lack of originality in Hollywood today. That said, I'll be the first to admit that originality is overrated. Yes, it's nice if a director can come up with something new, but it's not the most important aspect of a film. If a film is derivative but well-made, I'm generally inclined to look favourably on it, and in any event, I've said in the past that, instead of remaking the classics, the film industry should put its collective talents to far better use by revisiting its disappointments: good ideas that were poorly executed.

I'd class Wes Craven's original 1972 The Last House on the Left as an example of this. It's a straightforward enough tale: two girls are abducted by a group of sadists and are humiliated, tortured, raped and ultimately killed. The parents of one girl get wind of what happened and exact their own brand of personal revenge against their daughter's attackers. This rape/revenge framework has been used to considerable success elsewhere, including in Aldo Lado's Night Train Murders, perhaps the best of an array of Last House rip-offs. (Of course, as has been pointed out, Craven's original in fact takes its cues from Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. But then again, The Virgin Spring is a retelling of a thirteenth century Swedish poem. Like I said, originality is overrated.) Craven's film is an exceedingly nasty piece of work - grubby, sordid and deeply unpleasant in just about every way imaginable. Unfortunately, it's also extremely clumsy, clearly the work of an inexperienced filmmaker, and the decision to continually cut away from the torture of the two girls to comic relief sequences featuring the idiotic local police simply boggles the mind. (Compare this with Meir Zarchi's notorious I Spit on Your Grave,* an even nastier and similarly flawed film that at least maintains a consistent atmosphere.)

So yes, I'm less inclined to automatically dismiss a remake of Last House than I am, say, Suspiria or Poltergeist (both of which are in development, by the way). I'd read mixed things about Dennis Iliadis' 2009 offering, ranging from utter condemnation to more considered appraisals. For instance, Mark Kermode, a critic whose opinions I always enjoy even when I disagree with them, argued that, while the new version solved a lot of the original's plot holes and problems with tone, by cleaning it up and ironing out the flaws it somehow ceased to have any purpose. I mention this because that's very much the opinion I came away with when watching it for myself. Yes, removing the goofy comic relief elements works wonders, and there is in fact a scene in this version that is more horrible than anything in the original,** but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts. It's well-made and genuinely artful in places (there are some fantastic-looking moments involving a lake during a rainstorm), and has some good performances, particularly from Sarah Paxton as one of the victims, but it all seems a bit too slick, too efficient for the subject matter. Looked at objectively, it's a better film than the original, and it does change enough of the narrative for there to be a couple of genuine surprises along the way, but as Kermode said, the original was so much about the period in which it was made that, detached from it, it begins to lose a lot of whatever meaning it might have had.

By the way, whoever thought that microwave incident would be a good idea needs to have their head examined.

* I note that a remake of I Spit on Your Grave is currently also in production. Given that the cornerstone of the original version was a brutal half-hour rape scene, I wonder just what Hollywood is going to have to do to make it palatable to a mainstream audience.

** I'm referring, of course, to the rape of Mari, which apparently resulted in walk-outs during theatrical screenings, even in its toned-down R-rated state. Incidentally, the notion of "toning down" a rape scene strikes me as an incredibly reprehensible act, suggesting as it does that, by softening the horror, the rape somehow becomes more "acceptable".

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USA: Stephen Anderson, 2007

Supposedly, when John Lasseter took the helm of Walt Disney Animation Studios midway through Meet the Robinsons' development, he ordered the film to be drastically retooled, resulting in 60% of the completed footage being scrapped. If the finished product in any way constitutes an "improvement", I'm in no great rush to see what ended up on the cutting room floor. Disney's second in-house CGI feature, it's a step up from its predecessor, Chicken Little, in that it takes itself considerably more seriously and doesn't spend its duration undermining its own plot and characters. Still, it doesn't exactly measure up against the sort of material being pumped out by Pixar; even DreamWorks' features have more character than this. With few exceptions (i.e. the bowler hat-wearing villain, the best part of the film), the designs are bland and unappealing, with the filmmakers mistaking non-stop flailing for personality. At times, it feels as if the whole thing is one big long motion blur, with characters zipping around the screen, flapping their arms and generally behaving as if they have the consistency of gelatine. I'm not familiar with A Day with Wilbur Robinson, the William Joyce novel upon which it's based, so I have to say that a couple of twists midway through relating to the identities of certain characters generally took me by surprise and impressed me rather a lot in retrospect. Otherwise, though, I found Meet the Robinsons to be more or less as disappointing as any number of other latter-day Disney productions.

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UK: Nick Park, 2008

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