This is a bit of a surprise for me, being a big Far Eastern movie and literature fan (I’m reading a lot of Japanese and Korean authors just now, really interesting writing) I’m a bit against all these remakes of perfectly good movies often just to bring them into the English language and slap on some recognisable faces while watering down the scripts for the audience they think won’t understand.
However I was really excited when Hideo Nakata was taken onboard for The Ring Two, and I’m even more excited now as I leap off on a huge tangent for a moment.
I’ve just seen his IMDB profile and something has popped up that I haven’t seen before. Since I started reading translations of Far Eastern authors, I’ve been getting more adventurous and breaking from the books of movies. So recently I tried the first English translation from Natsuo Kirino billed as Japan’s leading crime writer. The novel was Out, and it was an excellent read, with a well crafted story mixing crime and horror extremely well, no creeping ghosts here, check out my review of the book. Anyway, it appears Nakata is set to direct the screen version of the book, planned for next year I can hardly wait for it. Reading it I knew it was going to make a good film, if only they got a decent Director.
Okay, back to the original story! So, my surprise was that Coming Soon is reporting that Nakata is scheduled to remake the Pang brothers The Eye for Hollywood. Interesting. If they had just learned something from the remake department, surely it was to retain the original as much as possible. It was done with Ring to a degree, and then Grudge, but I surely thought that since the Pang brothers were in Hollywood anyway that they would be doing The Eye.
However, this does bring some hope for me. The ending of the original is a bit weak, and most of the film you feel like you are being led somewhere only to be left. To be honest it’s quite typical of these stories, they are about the journey more than the ending, but I’d like to see Nakata take a slightly different approach. However he really should try and keep the visual feel of the rest of the movie, it’s strong and visually enthralling. Really do watch out for both these movies. Check out the original Eye, and the book Out if you can, I strongly recommend them both.
Oh, and before I leave, let me drop off onto another tangent. Reported here ages ago, Nakata’s next movie is the Entity remake. I hope Hollywood doesn’t kill his non-hollywood directorial flair. Is anyone else surprised? Has anyone else read Out?
