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Thursday, January 5, 2012

(Movie Review) Straw Dogs (2011)

The thing that usually bothers me about a remake is that it takes a story that is so great, so perfect, and it waters it down to make it more accessible to the current audience. Directors take those scenes, characters, and themes and change them to make the movie "their own". If you want to make it original then maybe you should make an original movie. Simple, right? I can understand remakes of iconic franchises, Jason, Freddy, Leatherface...these are characters that deserve to be updated from time to time, but trying to cash in on the name and controversy of a movie like Straw Dogs is pretty low.

Plot: L.A. screenwriter David Sumner relocates with his wife to her hometown in the deep South. There, while tensions build between them, a brewing conflict with locals becomes a threat to them both.- provided by IMDB.com

Thoughts? I LOVED the original movie. One of my favorites. I probably would have liked this one if it would not have tried to piggyback off of the original films name. I will say this, the idea of what a person would be willing to do to survive, and who that person becomes when they hit their breaking point...that is a very interesting topic to me. We are, no matter how much we want to pretend that we are not, animals at our core. So to see that survival instinct come out when your back is against the wall and you have no other options...that is a very chilling thing to watch. James Marsden plays the part well and does great justice to a character that I never thought anyone would be able to play as well as Hoffman did in 1971. All in all, the movie is not bad (it's actually pretty good) but you are way better off going and renting/buying the original.

PS. Why move it to south? The original film was in Europe, why move it to south and show us all as a bunch of racist hicks??

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