There Are Some Things For Which There Are No Explanations

Are you people punishing me with no comments or have I truly lost what extremely small readership I had? Am I just talking to my wife now? If that's the case, how's it going dear? What's for dinner tonight?

So god help me but I watched the Karate Kid remake this past Saturday. I woke up at 8 on Saturday morning and couldn't get back to sleep 'cause my back was hurting me so I went downstairs and put it on (baby had stayed overnight at Grandma's). I take some solace in the fact that the time I spent watching this film was just replacing time where I should have been unconcious. Makes it seem like less of a waste that way. Anyway, I really don't know how to review this movie other than to recommend that anyone who has ever seen the original shouldn't watch it. But if you've never seen the original, then I think it's probably a halfway decent film. Basically every place where the new one strays from the original, it was better in the original. And everytime the new one copies the original, it was waaaaaaaay better in the original. Probably the single biggest problem of the new one has to do with Jaden Smith. Notice that I say "has to do with" because it's not actually anything to do with his performance that's the problem - he actually does just fine. It's the fact that he's 11 (playing a 12-year-old). All the "teens" in the original were in their early to mid 20s playing 16-year-olds. Seeing a relationship between two 16-year-olds (who are really 23 and 21) is a lot more believable and relateable than one between two 12-year-olds (who are really 11). Second, the bullying of the enemy gang just doesn't carry the weight that it did in the original. What are a gang of unarmed 11-year-olds gonna do to you? Give you a cut lip? This leads to easily the most absurd scene in the movie. In the original, Daniel is literally getting the crap kicked out of him by a bunch of thugs in scary-looking skeleton makeup and Mr. Miagi comes and saves him. It works because 1) you feel like Daniel really might be in some legit danger, 2) Mr. Miagi looks like a frail old guy that you'd never expect this from and thus 3) you believe that he is actually putting himself in danger as well. The new one tries to recreate that scene but now you have Jackie Chan taking on a group of pre-teens. That's right; Jackie f'n Chan, martial arts god, taking on 6 11-year-olds. Feel the drama! That's like asking the audience to cheer for Bruce Lee as he beats up the Partridge Family (ok maybe I would have cheered for that).

I've gone off on tirades before about Hollywood running out of ideas and resorting to remakes and reboots, so I don't want to repeat myself too much. But I think what really gets me is when they decide to do so with blatant disregard as to why the original was a success. Or they do something equally absurd like the shot for shot remake of Psycho. Um, if I wanted to watch the script and shots that Alfred Hitchcock created, why I don't I just, you know, watch the film he already made? To me it just says that studio heads are wishing they could get away with just rereleasing the original films but they know they can't so they're just trying to repackage them and call them new. "Remember the Karate Kid? Big hit for us. But Pat Morita's dead and Ralph Machio's old, so do we have an old asian and a young actor that audiences will recognize? Great, go!"

Sometimes, remakes and reboots are a good idea: Batman Begins and the new Star Trek come to mind. Both of them took very popular icons that had run out of steam and tried to take elements of what made them a success in the past while putting a new spin on them. Even if you didn't like the results you can at least appreciate that there was some effort and imagination involved. Of course, you probably need look no further than the director to tell if a remake's going to be any good or not. Those two were directed by Christopher Nolan and J.J. Abrams, two of most imaginative directors out there. The new Karate Kid, on the other hand, was brought to us by the legend-in-his-own-mind Harald Zwart, director of such monumental testaments to cinema as The Pink Panther 2 and Agent Cody Banks as well as the epic films (I am not making these up) Long Flat Balls and Long Flat Balls 2.