Matt Reeves Lets Me In

Remakes are rarely viewed as a good thing by discerning movie-going audiences. Think about it; why suffer through Mark Wahlberg’s Planet of the Apes when you can watch Heston’s? From Will Smith’s son attempting to fill Ralph Macchio’s gi to Gus Van Sant’s totally needless Psycho exercise, remakes are treacherous fare, which explains the immediate fan backlash over the announcement of Let Me In, an American reboot of the stunning, Oscar-nominated Swedish film, Let the Right One In, based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel of the same name.

This delicate horror film, about an alienated and bullied 12-year-old boy (The Road’s Kodi Smith-McPhee) building a tentative friendship with his mysterious new neighbor (Kick-Ass star Chloe Moretz), was decried from the moment it was announced, with the rally song pointing to the perfection of the first film, making a second movie, especially one coming so closely on the original 2008 film’s heels, needless.

It was a sentiment writer-director Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) shared in many ways, he admits. “The one thing that made it easier to say yes is that the [original] movie hadn’t come out yet,” Reeves explains. “I’d fallen in love with it but the world didn’t know about it. They showed me the movie almost a year before it came out in the United States and I went through a long process of grappling with ‘Should I or shouldn’t I?’”

Reeves says before making a final decision on whether or not to tackle the remake, he read the novel, spoke with the author and found he couldn’t shake his desire for the project. “It crept under my skin. I couldn’t let it go,” he says. “It’s such a brilliant story about the pain of adolescence and coming of age.”

Able to work in a bubble for about a year and drawing on classic Spielberg films like E.T. and Empire of the Sun for inspiration, Reeves delved into recreating the vampire film, setting it in 1980s New Mexico. “But then the movie came out to tremendous acclaim,” he recalls, “and I thought, ‘Oh no! What are we doing?’ But I’d already written the script and was deeply, deeply connected to it. I knew the best thing I could do was just put my head down and not worry about fan reaction, but just remember that I myself was a fan and to stay true to the things I fell in love with.”

However, he understood concerns fellow fans might have over a retelling of the story. “It had been done so beautifully and the relationship between those two kids was so wonderful,” Reeves muses. “One of the things I love about Lindquist’s story is that is has all of this complexity and ambiguity, there’s light and dark, real tenderness but dark primal stuff. As a fan of [the first] film, if I saw an American remake and it was watered and dumbed down, it would be pointless because what is so special about this story is the complexity and resonance of it.”

The microcosm of Hollywood very often reflects a central theme of Let Me In, a land where the bullied become the mighty. Considering it’s such an important element in the film, I point out to Reeves that he was bullied about his film by fans.

“I guess that’s true,” he laughs. “But we didn’t have any direct encounters in the bathroom.” He says he thinks people’s reticence to embrace the project came from the best intentions. “To be on the outside and know something that you so loved is being remade, you would immediately think the worst. If I’d been on the outside, I would have thought the worst too. If you look at remakes, for the most part, they’re terrible. I get that protective feeling. Lindquist’s story inspires that kind of passion. Those bullies were just trying to protect the story [from] being picked on by Hollywood.”

Unwilling to draw comparisons between his film and the original, even though Let Me In is garnering mighty praise, Reeves simply says, “No matter what anyone thinks of [my] film at the end of the day, that Swedish film will always exist and I hope people will view this film as another expression of Lindquist’s story, one I felt passionate about.”

Let Me In opens October 1.

Hollywood Bites Reviews: "You Again"

It's a rare day you find a female-driven comedy that doesn't focus solely on romantic entanglements or who's prettier, because, obviously, that's all women have the mental capacity to bicker and pull hair over, right, Hollywood?

But the prospect of "You Again," about a nerd-girl-made-good (Kristen Bell) confronting the queen bee ("Cloverfield"s Odette Yustman) who made her life miserable in high school before the mean girl marries her brother (sadly under-watched "Lone Star" rising star James Wolk), seemed ready to sidestep all of those banal clichés. Sure, it was still set around a wedding, but that just served as a backdrop, setting the stage for a showdown so many would love to have (Chenoa Thomas, we'll meet you in the parking lot any day, any time). Add to the mix a cast including hotter-than-summer-in-Boca Betty White, Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Kristin Chenoweth and "You Again" has all the right ingredients to serve up a comedy soufflé that's airy, sweet and satisfying.

So why does it fall flat and airless?

Is it director Andy Fickman's fault? Fickman's career has been frustratingly mercurial to follow. We loved his early efforts, "Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical" and the vastly underrated but cultishly beloved Shakespearian rewrite, "She's the Man," but "The Game Plan" and "Race to Witch Mountain" left us cold.

Is it the way the film spirals out of control and into Disney Channel sitcom territory by pitting Weaver and Curtis against each other in a sophomoric battle mirroring Bell and Yustman's?

Is it the inexperience of first-time screenwriter Moe Jelline showing in a script of cobbled together sight gags?

Is it the continued curse of female comedies?

The answer: All of the above.

While Bell makes for a charming and skilled lead, the film's credibility is instantly shot when the audience is asked to buy her as a pimply, four-eyed loser. Bell is simply too sunny, golden and glorious to be believably bullied. Meanwhile, Yustman, whose career has been largely based on scream queen roles, lacks the comedy chops to stand out in a crowd with credits ranging from "A Fish Called Wanda" to everyone's favorite Lifetime reruns, "The Golden Girls."

Less a feature film than a series of showy vignettes, "You Again" is familiar in the worst kind of way as it meanders along by rote, leaving behind an awkward afterburn that makes you feel like you're stuck in a "Saved by the Bell" episode that's all Screech and no Kelly or Zach. And no one wants to see Jamie Lee Curtis acting like Screech. A continuous loop of her commercials about yogurt that makes you poop would be more enjoyable.

Catfish: The Best Film You Shouldn't Know About

You know what I love about movies in 2010? For the first time in far too long audiences have the opportunity to walk into a theater for a fresh, unsullied cinematic experience without the pall of tell-all trailers or dozens of behind-the-scenes blog posts muddying their enjoyment. Earlier this summer, Inception director Christopher Nolan caused a raucous and was accused of using secrecy as a form of hype because he—gasp—decided to keep some things about the movie under his hat and now Catfish arrives in theaters riding a wave of Sundance buzz that can be summed up in two words: Spoiler Alert.

If you’ve seen Catfish (I have and promise you it’s fantastic), tell no one what to expect. If you haven’t, the best thing you can do is go into the theater with as little knowledge about the film as possible. Complicated and remarkable, the documentary has been plagued with debate about the validity of the story since it debuted in January. Speaking to the group over the phone as they prepared to screen the documentary in San Francisco, I asked why people were so hung up on the idea that the film isn’t true.

“I guess it’s too good to believe,” Ariel began. “There’s a trend recently of fake documentaries as a genre; Cloverfield—”

“Best in Show,” Joost quips.

“Blair Witch Project,” Ariel replies. “But we were completely surprised the first time, at Sundance, someone said, ‘Hey, that’s a mock-doc.’ We were completely taken aback because we’d experienced this and it had never occurred to us that this was fake, because we were there.”

Perhaps one of the reasons some are dubious is because Catfish seems to document every moment of the tales unraveling, a feat that leads many to believe the situations were staged. However, Ariel explains cameras are constantly rolling in the group. They didn’t set out to make a film, they just happened to be recording what was happening in their daily lives and ended up with over 250 hours of footage to cull from when editing.

“Nev and I don’t have home video from when we were growing up so we’ve kind of been making up for it the last six or seven years,” Ariel offers. “And now he has a document of probably the strangest thing that will ever happen to him.”

Asked if anyone else could have made this film, the group erupts with laughter.

“[No one] would have had the time to stick around so long and let everything percolate,” Ariel contends. “That’s why documentaries end up being in retrospect. This documentary is in real time, while it’s happening, because we were spending so much time together.”

One of the things that makes Catfish so tragically beautiful and tangible is its use of Facebook, Google Earth, email and cell phones to tell that story, making it relatable to everyone’s day to day existence and highlighting the death of true human interaction thanks to our dependence on technological intermediaries. I couldn’t help but wonder what relics of simpler times the filmmakers miss in the information age.

“Hand written letters,” Joost offers. “There’s something nice about knowing someone took the time to write you a letter and take it to the mailbox, that it takes a week to get there and a week for a reply. There’s an elegance to written correspondence that’s been lost with email.”

“I miss landlines because you get to speak to people’s parents and you have to be really polite,” Ariel laughs. “You’re like, ‘Oh, hello, Mister Jenkins,’” his voice feeble and quivering, “‘This is Ariel. Is Lisa there?’ And they’d be like--”

“Ahhh, Ariel,” Joost jumps in with a tone that’s fatherly and commanding. “We’ve heard about you. How are you doing? The basketball team is doing very well. I saw your slam dunk on Sunday.’”

“‘Thank you, Mister Jenkins.’”

“I miss not having a cell phone,” Nev says. “I hate cell phones and take every opportunity I can to not carry it with me. It just destroys intimacy. We all use our cell phone as this crutch to keep us distracted and it gives us the excuse to not try very hard in our real life.”

Catfish opens in Los Angeles and New York September 17