Nothing beats spending a relaxing Sunday night burrowed in an overstuffed chair with a big bowl of popcorn on your lap as you turn on a classic. Sometimes only these classic films can provide that warm comforting sensation that you especially crave throughout your college years. My guilty pleasures range from anything including Humphrey Bogart, "Dirty Dancing," "Sixteen Candles," and the list can extend for miles.
Therefore, when I’m scrolling through Facebook and come across an article saying that Hollywood is remaking greats such as "Ghostbusters," "Jumanji," "E.T," "Honey I Shrunk the Kids," and so on. This is not the first or the last instance where Hollywood has reached back in their archives to modernize a few “oldies”. Although their intentions are to make it so these films appeal to a vaster (primarily younger) group of audiences, I am begging them to please just stop.
When these classics first made their appearance on the silver screens, audiences fell in love with the pure originality and story plot. I mean who could ever say, “No one puts Baby in a corner” better than Patrick Swayze? Therefore, I am on my hands and knees pleading with producers and filmmakers to stop “recycling” our favorite oldies and to harvest something new and original. When remakes snake themselves into the limelight, the original story loses its originality and distinctive characteristics it once carried. It is then that younger generations begin to forget or never even learn about these groundbreaking hits that have over the year’s impacted society. For example, what would you think if twenty years from now they decide to remake Titanic? We are all aware of how the internet practically broke after Leo (finally) received his Oscar, therefore, how would we react to some impostor coming in to try to portray the role of Jack Dawson?
One of the various issues that have emerged in recent years is a lack of imagination. Popular shows, novels, and films all contain the same themes (vampires and werewolves have lost their appeal many years ago). What ever happened to thinking outside of the box to succeed? In school it is embedded in our brains to always come up with our own ideas and to not plagiarize, therefore, why can these major movie producers continue to recycle old ideas?
Literally “same town different story”.
Due to my strong appreciation for classics or “oldies”, seeing these new-ish lackluster films makes me want to simply cringe. When looking back at some of the more popular and well-received films in the past decade, the physiognomies that were the most beloved was the inimitability and relativeness it had for that time period. Themes such as love, revenge, good vs. evil, loss of innocence, man vs. nature, and triumph over adversity shall never die and will always provide as a sturdy backbone for the story in films. The issue arises when the same dialogue and plot are reused to convey the motif.
Therefore, I hope Hollywood and all directors hear me when I say, “Leave our classics alone!”
