Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. You may remember I flipped for Let the Right One In at Fantastic Fest 2008 and the film ended up being one of my tops of the year.
You also may remember that I questioned the US studio remake of the film, called LET ME IN, from the first announcement. There was a lot of dangerous territory there due to the success of TRUE BLOOD and TWILIGHT, that a studio was going to grab the rights, take advantage of the grass-roots buzz of the original fantastic character driven Kubruckian ink-black coming of age story and then pander to the soap opera Vampire fans out there.
Cloverfield's Matt Reeves was on the property and when he cast Kodi Smit-McPhee from The Road (why didn't more of you guys go see that flick? It was good!) and Kick-Ass' Chloe Grace Moretz most of my trepidation went out the window. If they were keeping in the basic coming of age story... well, there is still lots of room to fuck up, but at least the foundation is strong. Then with Richard Jenkins as the vampire's guardian? Yeah, Reeves came through on the casting aspect.
The first images from the movie are starting to come out. We had one of Grace a few days ago and then The LA Times ran a profile piece on Reeves, in which he kind of begs to be given a chance on this film, and premiered a new pic, one that fans of the original will recognize.
Remakes are a difficult beast to tame and it's impossible to make everyone happy. There are people out there who grew up with the Hawks' THE THING who don't like Carpenter's version. I get that and I'm as open as I possibly can be for Reeves' film to be great. My main fear now is that he's going to be so true to the material that the end result is going to be a pale reflection of the original.
That's why he's in such a tight spot. If Reeves strays to far, he's betraying the movie people love, but if he doesn't find his own hook and inject his voice into the film somehow there will be no point in him having done the movie at all.
What do you folks think?
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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