Thursday, March 01, 2007

Jumping On the Bandwagon

We all know that "The Departed" is the newly minted Oscar's Best Film of the Year, giving Martin Scorsese his first oscar after more films than can be counted. He actually jokingly said this is his first movie that actually had a plot. The ironic thing is of course that "The Departed" is basically a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong movie "Infernal Affairs". I thought it was funny when the script writer won for "adapting the other movie". Is that really a huge accomplishment to take a movie that was made just a couple of year ago and switch around the actors and add more bloody scenes and call it best film of the year? To add insult to injury, the announcer lady said it was a Japanese movie when doing the introduction. I feel like it is such a ripoff. It saddens me to think the audience in America will never see how great the original was (which by the way I actually saw at Velius' during a party, good times :)).

Anyway, I was just discussing this with my cousin in China when she mentions that there is a rumor going around of Hollywood buying another Andrew Lau movie "Confession of Pain" featuring the awesome Tony Leung. Anyway, I haven't seen the movie yet so I can't comment on whether it will be good *runs to download*. This gets me thinking though, does this mean that there will be a whole slew of remakes of Asian movies now that one has earned the prestige of an Oscar? I think I will be both gratified by the recognition and annoyed at the fact the original will never be seen. Although I hope that if this does happen, it will jilt the mainland movie scene out of their ridiculous pseudo kung fu epic movie trend they got going on. They all suck! When are they going to realize nooexistent dialog, extravagant costumes and no plot does not a movie make?

ETA: I really shouldn't post after midnight, I had to edit this like 10 times cause I was writing nonsense

4 comments:

Kungfucius said...

Wow, that interesting to know that "The Departed" was based off of an HK movie. I heard on a radio show where the talk show host says that "The Departed" had probably come in a good year where competing movies were relatively weak. So although it probably was the best film this year, I bet if you ask Scorsese if this was his best film, he'd probably say it's his 5th best.

Btw...your "Confessions of Pain" link doesn't seem to work :(

moonfleck said...

Oops. had an extra slash, fixed now. :)

Tochi said...

I never saw "The Departed", cause I'm always dubious of "adaptations" that might ruin the original. I guess I have to see it now.

Confessions of Pain looks pretty interesting... I'll pick up a copy and watch it. I might not be able to stand that 2nd guy's accent though. -_-

Anonymous said...

I've never seen Infernal Affairs, amazingly enough. That and Spaceballs.