Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I think that most remakes and reboots are uninteresting at best and creatively bankrupt at worst. They bring little to the table other than the desperate appeal to name recognition: remember when you liked this ten, twenty years ago, or when it had subtitles?

But here’s a confession: no, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with remakes – and, more importantly, I don’t think that they’re more of a symptom of the lack of originality of present-day cinema than, well, so many other films that don’t have the same name as an earlier film or TV series. And I think that many of the people who decry this lack of originality have a fundamentally naive understanding of what originality is. More than that, I think there’s a frequent misunderstanding of what a remake at its best is. Or, to put it in controversial terms (I should be doing this on Twitter!): I think there’s more of a point in remaking a good film than a bad one.

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