1. The "rehash" thing has been going on for a long time now, years even.
2. It's being accelerated because our culture is very media-intensive nowadays and we've accumulated a lot of material culturally so that it's possible and plausible to do all this rehash. This contributes greatly to a "pastiche-style" form of art/thinking. Thinking up new things is hard; people have always found it easier to collect things in the environment and try to make something out of it. (The thinking even predominates in home decoration shows -- our culture is bent on recycling the past.) It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it can easily be hackneyed.
I will say that I do NOT want to see Nightmare on Elm Street remade, the original was unique and awesome and I can't imagine it being improved with a remake. However, the new Star Trek -- while not the greatest movie -- is an example of redeeming a franchise by reinventing it.
But Star Trek is much older than Nightmare on Elm Street. The original series of Elm Street movies didn't even end until about 1995.
It's one thing to take films that have been dormant for thirty or fifty years and bring them to a genuinely "new" public who probably hasn't seen them. Especially since a lot of old Hollywood got left in the dust by the transition to color in television and film. Also, societal values changed tremendously in the mid-twentieth century. All of that makes so much more sense to me in terms of remakes, though I will say there are pictures that are seventy years old that should not be touched because they are true classics.
I'm deeply, deeply annoyed by the lack of originality in present-day Hollywood, which is why so many people turned to a preference for independent and even foreign films in the past decade or two. I'm bothered by the sub-par American versions of Japanese films like Ju-on and Ringu. It irritates me that someone would mess with
Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. I'm irked by the remakes of horror classics like
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, and am completely disgusted by the suggestion that Argento's
Suspiria could ever be touched because it is genuinely a work of art, it's an ART FILM, not just a horror movie, it's not anywhere in the neighborhood of slasher stuff like
Friday the 13th...or admittedly, Elm Street. Nothing is sacred. What's next? The Exorcist? The Wizard of Oz? DO THESE PEOPLE NOT HAVE ORIGINAL IDEAS? I truly wonder, because their remakes aren't even good, and they're so reliant on crap like CGI.
However, I feel strongly about
Nightmare on Elm Street because I have a sentimental connection to it from my later childhood years. It's a movie that was actually popular within my memorable lifetime, and I'm not that old. I feel like they should have waited another decade before THEY decided it was time to destroy it. Then again, there are rumours of
Scream remakes which is absolutely preposterous because it's from *the nineties*.
On a purely aesthetic, and maybe irrational (?) level, I'm perturbed by the fact that they've changed Elm Street from this quaint neighborhood with ghostly girls and historic houses and unique character into some grandiose, upper-middle class, boring, cookie-cutter neighborhood. Blech.
