Then again, my taste in cinema tends to run more towards, well...

If I had a list of some of my favorite movies, it'd go something more like this:

Tank Girl
Ghostbusters
The Evil Dead 2
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Italian Job (the early 2Ks remake; never seen the original)
Blazing Saddles
The Mummy (the Brendan Frasier one)
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Beetlejuice

And that's just limiting myself to 10. I tend to like a lot of different movies... but like with stories, I watch films to be entertained, and to me, these are entertaining.

I'm probably the kind of cinema-goer y'all would complain about :P I enjoy the superhero movies, don't mind a good remake (so long as it neither directly copies nor does a disservice to the original,) and generally feel that, while modern cinematography does tend to rely more on spectacle than cleverness, when the tools are used well a good experience is a good experience regardless of the time it came out.

I'm kinda looking forward to the "A Wrinkle in Time" adaptation; I liked the book as a kid, and think it could be neat to see. Likewise, with a lot of movies based on books, my opinion is this: if the story is treated with respect, then all it is doing is giving a group of people who might never have experienced it a chance to do so. I'd argue that some film adaptations -- such as Lord of the Rings -- are de facto superior from a pacing/storytelling perspective to the original works. The same can be said for a handful of the Harry Potter films for that matter; it's all about how the creators who are working on the project choose to tackle it, and when handled well a film based on a book can improve it or give a different view of its contents. Yes, the opposite can be said too, and is arguably more common, but you have to consider that, comparing books to movies, a WHOLE lot more books come out every year, but less of them tend to make a notable impact than films. As such, both the best and worst elements of cinema tend to sit there, glaring, while the worst of books tends to simply drift away in the sea of would-be authors.

Like what y'all like, and don't let nobody but no-one tell ya different. The argument for cinema being dead/lazy is an old one, though, and ignores the fact that the majority of what people consider classics were remakes or retellings themselves, including:
--Dracula (1936)
--Frankenstein (1936)
--The Last Man on Earth (195-something, the one with Vincent Price)

The list goes on. Like with books though, it isn't really the core plot that matters in the end (gasp! I said it!) If it were only the core plot that mattered, then I wouldn't be sitting on a Jack Reacher book a friend of mine lent me I can't read because it's written in such a godawful way. If it's not the plot that matters, then what is it? It's the way it's presented that does, and with the tools creators have nowadays, whether that be the literary, cinematic, or just generally artistic types? There are a LOT of different ways the same story can be told without re-treading any relevant ground whatsoever.

We should all know that, given how much we do the same ourselves.

Melanie E.