Just saw Låt den rätte komma in, a beautiful and critically acclaimed Swedish movie with subtitles, based on the novel of the same name.
It's about a boy who befriends a centuries-old little girl vampire (actually, it's a castrated male child-vampire, but you don't find that out until later).
The reason this film is showing on Netflix at the moment is because... *drumroll*.... they've made an American remake of it, which will be released in theaters Oct 3rd.
So far, the critical reviews have been outstanding; they say the remake is "perfection": better than the original, which was completely top-notch.
In the remake, the boy will be played by the little boy who starred in The Road, and the girl vampire will be played by Hit Girl from Kickass. :lol:
I'm not sure if the whole "castrated male" element will be part of the remake at all; from the reviews, it sounds like in the remake, the vampire is a girl, period, the end.
Which is fine, too. It won't really effect the storyline any, because the children are prepubescent anyway. I sort of wish they'd kept that element just to stay truer to the book, but it would be difficult for "Hit Girl" (actress Chloe Moretz) to pull that off; she's older than Lina Leandersson (the actress in the original), and clearly female. Lina Leandersson is much more androgynous.
Anyway, I'm definitely going to see this in the theater on opening night. I expect miracles from the remake, since the original was so awesome and the remake is supposed to be even better.
Just saw
Let Me In (the remake).
I was very disappointed.
It wasn't
terrible; it just wasn't magic, like the first one.
And what's really sad is that it probably cost a hundred times more to make, and it used stars for the lead roles, unlike the original, which was extremely low-budget and used unknown child actors.
But this one, somehow, didn't have the same creepy, knife-edge feel.
Part of it was ambiance: while both movies took place in 1983, the original took place in communist Stockholm, Sweden, in the dark icy dead of winter; the remake takes place in New Mexico, where it's snowing, but only a little bit. :roll:
The remake was bright and vividly colored; the original seems, in retrospect, to be filmed in black and white (although it wasn't; it just seems that way, in my memory. The colors were dull and dingy; the contrast was stark).
The dialogue, in the remake, seems stilted and silly, and the girl vampire seems far too old for the boy, like some sort of teenage pedophile babysitter.
It seemed much more natural in the original (although admittedly, it was in Swedish, so maybe that helped), and the children in the lead roles were beautifully matched.
The special effects in this remake- as expensive as they probably were- detracted from the movie. They seemed incongruous and stupid, and detracted from the movie's seriousness. They didn't use as many special effects in the original; the vampire seemed more like a pitiable child with a crippling disease that made her dangerous than like some superhuman demonic creature, as she is in the remake.
The remake also did this thing I hate: they kept shoving 80s memorabilia in viewers' faces in a distracting way (oh look! It's a shirt with an Izod alligator! oh look! it's a Ms pacman video game! And look here! A rotary telephone!!), which was completely unnecessary, since the movie opened with a line of text stating it was New Mexico, 1983. I'm pretty sure viewers aren't going to
forget that information if they aren't beaten over the head with tassled loafers, Ronald Reagan broadcasts on black and white television sets (wtf is up with that, anyway? Who still had a black and white television in the early 80s?), and lame David Bowie music, and even if they do, who cares? It's not really relevant to the plot.
The original had a timeless feel, the era subtly established only by peripheral political events going on in the background.
In this remake, the gritty realism just wasn't there. And there was no chemistry between the actors, and you were
glad for that, because it would've just been gross.
Anyway. Yeah, $19 bucks to see this crappy remake.
All it did was make me want to watch the original again, which I plan to do tomorrow, on Netflix.
