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Diamondbacks line-up
Well, almost completely. It's relatively easy to do so, since this is another one of those East-coast day games, meaning it's going to be auto-posted while I'm still tucked up in bed, and is being written the night before, comfortably before any line-up is posted. I'll throw that up the Gameday Thread instead: I should be up in time for that. Right-handed pitcher, so maybe we'll see Jason Kubel in the line-up. After all, he got a hit yesterday! And that's quite enough about the Diamondbacks. Don't want them to start thinking I care, making them get all tensed up and stuff. So, what else is there?
Well, when I finish writing the preview, I'm probably going to sit down with Mrs. SnakePit and watch the series finale of Being Human. That's the British original, rather than the SyFy remake - which isn't actually too bad, it's just that like most remakes, it suffers from a fair degree of pointlessness. I tend to think you should only do a remake, be it of a movie or TV show, when there's something new you can genuinely bring to proceedings. Otherwise, what's the point? Might as well just dub the original or whatever. Case in point: Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perfectly fine movie. Unless you've seen the Swedish original, in which case the US version has no surprises at all.
As a horror fan over the age of 25, I get this feeling a lot. There hardly seems to be a successful horror movie from the past forty years that hasn't been remade - in most cases, to significantly less effect than first tine round. That's in part, I think, because a lot of the best horror films are made outside the mainstream studio system, and that allowed (or even forced) their makers to take chances. I'm thinking of movies like Halloween, The Evil Dead, Texas Chainsaw, Last House on the Left. You can't take those movies, import them into the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food restaurant, and expect anything except McNuggets.
If you want a remake done right, look no further than The Thing. No, not the 2012 remake-of-a-remake, but John Carpenter's 1982 version, which was itself an effective remake of The Thing From Another World, dating from 1951 and based on the same story by John W. Campbell. Obviously, the special effects in those days were extremely primitive, and the description of the monster as "an intellectual carrot," is about right. Thirty years later, Carpenter and his effect team went to town, and delivered what's Exhibit A in my argument that, no, it's not always better to leave things up to the viewer's imagination.
Bottom line: you shouldn't remake good films or series, because it's pretty pointless: see Gus Van Sant's version of Psycho for details. Instead, they should be looking for flawed ones, whose deficiencies can now be addressed and corrected. There's a lot more scope for improvement if you're remaking Attack of the Giant Leeches, than if you're going after Casablanca...