I'll start off this blog by saying, I love this film. When I first saw it, I thought it was perhaps the 3rd best film I had seen last year. After 3 months and 10 subsequent viwings (yes, I mean 10), It's tied for my favorite film of all time. It's such a touching and original story that is still fresh after every rewatch. So you can imagine what my response to the news of remake going full force is right? Wrong. Let me tell you why I don't feel like crawling up and walls and bitching about Hollywood:


1. Matt Reeves is directing it. Some of you may hate Cloverfield because of the shaky cam (which is kinda like hating Memento for the backwards narration) but I still hold on to my opinion that it's a great film. Not one of the 10 best films I saw last year, but good nonetheless. I feel that judging from his best film so far, he can handle doing the mood of Let The Right One In.

2. The Remake is actually a readaption. The original author of the book and screenplay (John Ajvide Lindqvist) said he is exicited about the remake because it can be an entirely different film. People, I own the book. The book is a 472 page-long story with a lot more characters and a lot more characerization. Lat den ratte komma in/Let The Right One In (2008) is basically the bar minimun of the book. It chose to focus more on Oskar and Eli and chose to leave out a whole lot of subplots. The old guy Eli moved in with has an entire backstory in the book that is easy to put on film. It's not like Matt Reeves is going to do a cut+paste of the original film with older actors and more gore. He has a lot more to work with and in another interview I read with him, he said the book touched him on a personal level.

3. Now, I read a translated version of an interview with John Ajvide Lindqvist recently. In this interview, he talked about how he got to talk with Matt Reeves about his remake, who replyed that "I will not be changing the ages of the kids in the story", which basically guarantees that it's not going to be a Twilight knock off.


Now, do I think it will measure up to the original? No. The original is a dark masterpiece because of Tomas Alfredsson's great direction, Johan Soderqvist's score, and Kare Hedebrant (Oskar) and Lina Leandersson's (Eli) incredible acting. You can't hit lightning twice with films. However, I think/hope that it'll still be a good film and contain some of my favorite scenes from the book. And yes, Let Me In is a horrible name but when the book was originally translated from Swedish to English in 2007, the title was shortened to "Let Me In" because the distributors felt "Let The Right One In" was too long (don't ask me why) so Matt Reeves might not have had a choice there.