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I have recently discover, on the Escapist forums, a thread entitled 'It's November 5th, what are you going to be doing?'. The list of activities then listed as options were 'Nothing' and 6 variations on 'Watching V for Vendetta'.

Now... I'm not one to mock ignorance... no... wait... yes I am.

In my reply I posted 'that's like asking people what they're going to be doing on the 4th of July, killing aliens or smoking cigars with Jeff Goldblum?'. It kind of staggers me to think that someone actually believes that Alan Moore came up with November 5th as a holiday in order to write a graphic novel about it, which then became a much poorer movie. Still, it's been a while since I was on a forum site, it might help to infantalise my mind, or at least give me a non-porn based reason to spend hours on the internet at a time. Go me.

On the other front, November 5th is the birthday of one of our most treasured classmates, WILL SALE, founding member of the Knights... of CLUNGE, and general all-round legend. It was a good night, with much things being burned (it being Bonfire night after all), many things being liberated from nearby gardens in order to be burned, much shot-ing that Will managed a great deal better than his predecessors and a plethora of gifts. Will's one of these people that it's just great to help him celebrate, and we were at it for hours. Many of them.

Will is now the proud owner of his very own Knights... of CLUNGE tshirt, which'll make the rounds so that everyone in that most august of organisations can have one, then we can go to parties together and be mocked for it. Good times.

In other news, my phone is well and truly screwed (it now only works half the time), the plug for my bath is completely clogged and will no longer drain water and it feels like we're up to our ears in assessments. Que essay whinging for next post.

Good times. Oh yeah.

LET ME IN.

So, a good while back me and Ad tried to watch Let The Right One In, a Swedish Vampire movie that apparently had true vampire fans sharpening their pointy teeth and squealing in girlish delight since none of their creatures of the night sparkled. Truth be told, we got 40 minutes into it and turned it off. It was very, very slow and very, very unstimulating. We decided that we'd have to give it another go at some point, but we were just too tired to put the effort into that film at the time. Also, we'd just watched Flame and Citreon, a Danish film about WW2 Resistance Fighters, which was much more up-paced and frantic. If you haven't heard of/seen that movie, you HAVE TO check it out.

Then Coates invites me to come see Let Me In with him on an advanced viewing. We get the train, we go to Crawley, we see this absolutely MASSIVE Cineworld, we get in, we sit down, film begins.

Now, I haven't seen all of Let The Right One In, but the first half an hour might as well have been a shot-for-shot remake, with the exception of the prologue sequence in the ambulance.

This gave me a much better sense of the original film, since this one was pretty much exactly the same, even down to the visual style, as far as I could tell. Now, nothing can stop America trying to remake foriegn language films, especially popular foriegn language films, but it's always seemed like such a waste of time to me. This kind of film is probably one of the worst culprits in that regard, since it's a near-enough carbon copy of Let The Right One In. But at the same time, it's actually quite a good movie. It's tense, it's dark, it's well shot, it's well acted, there's a lot of little details that really bring it to life... which almost in a way makes it worse.

You can be okay with Quarrantine being a crap remake of [rec], but this actually threatens the original film in a way that wasn't really expected. I'd say you could see either one and be satisfied, but that feels a bit unfair to the hard-working Swedish crew who put a lot of blood (heh, pun), sweat and tears into their film, only to have it remade near as damnit, by a bunch of yanks. But decent work is decent work, and I can't blame the Americans under Matt Reeves for doing a good job, as much as I think they should be blamed for it. It's a confusing world, eh? I'm sure I'll go back and watch all of the Swedish movie one day, but the American one is just as good and half an hour shorter.

Next up: RED.