Unforgiven 2013Usually it’s the Americans who take excellent foreign films and remake them, with less than stellar results. But it goes both ways. Japanese filmmaker Sang-il Lee (Hula Girls, Villain) has made a remake of Clint Eastwood’s Oscar winning 1992 film Unforgiven.

The standard practice had been to take classic samurai movies and have they turned into a western. Seven Samurai – The Magnificent Seven, Yojimbo – Fistful of Dollars. But this sounded like the reverse. Ken Watanabe steps into the Clint Eastwood role as a samurai taking a bounty on a couple of guys who cut up a prostitute. But after watching the trailer it looks less like a samurai film and more like a western. In fact it looks exactly like the original Unforgiven but with different actors. It might still be interesting to see.

Speaking of remakes Spike Lee’s unnecessary remake of the classic Korean film Oldboy has had it’s first trailer hit the interwebs. Again it doesn’t look that much different from the original. Nobody wants to take a gamble on an original idea it seems. Lazy lazy filmmakers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVMmwW7rdqQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8gpi44y4TU