From: Scott Chase (osteopilus@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu 07 Apr 2005 - 14:45:04 GMT
--- Chris Taylor <christ@ebi.ac.uk> wrote:
> Same old same old; movies seemed to have a
> renaissance about the time
> that Tarantino started recycling Asian fare; we have
> another mini-one
> now with the recycling of deviant Jap stuff and old
> 70s and 80s horror.
> This smacks of the same old puctuated pattern with
> bursts of novelty
> that wax asymptotic in fairly short order.
>
Horror movies seem to wax and wane. We seem to be on
an upswing.
I must say that the British film _28 Days Later_ was
pretty good, but it seems to at least converge with
Heston's _Omega Man_.
Contagion movies are pretty popular in themselves.
There was _The Andromeda Strain_, _Outbreak_ and
recently _Cabin Fever_. With fears of SARS, avian flu
and that nasty Marburg virus, these types of movies
hit home.
>
> Ringu 2 ain't a patch on the first one -- felt very
> much like a 'hey why
> did I get off that wave get back on it quick' thing
> to me. The US
> versions are as you say poor reflections (in this
> case).
>
The Japanese movie _Ringu_ wasn't a very good
reflection of Suzuki's book that I can remember. It
has been some time since I watched the movie or read
the book, but it always seems that when peoople make
movies based on a book they feel compelled to take
liberties by adding a little this and subtracting some
of that. The Suzuki book goes into detail about the
girls mom saving a statue of a Buddhist ascetic from
the ocean and I think that part is integral to the
storyline. When we get to the American version how are
we going to fit some Japanese Buddhist ascetic's
statue into the mix? Maybe _Spiral_ adds some twists
that complicate matters.
With the Japanese storyline there was a volcano which
was replaced by the lighthouse in the _Ring_ IIRC. I
posted on this a while back, but memory fails.
>
> An interesting one was 'The Vanishing' where there
> was a _very_
> continental-European feel to the original (with a
> downbeat ending),
> which was followed by a gung-ho Keifer saves the day
> mostly by hitting
> US version. But... it turns out that the same guy
> directed it!
>
Not sure what you're talking about.
>
> To make this properly germane, we could consider the
> 'echoing' of a
> niche (apparently in this case for a film about a
> skinny freak down a
> well); this could be the meme equivalent of the
> exporting of an
> ecosystem piecemeal (cf, the mammalisation of Aus/NZ
> = hey, I saw Akira,
> what else do you have? Do you have any with less
> tentacles...)
>
Yeah I suppose.
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