I am in no way anti-American, but I do believe that the current practice of remakes is harmful for both culture in general and the consuming populace.
It's a practice that was, is and shall forever be valid for theatre, drama, any live and real-time on-stage production.
With movies, I just plain don't think so. We get more and more disconnected with the original, source material. Sometimes, rarely, we got lucky and the 'updated', 'reimagined' production was, no doubt, 'better' or just so very good by itself that it deserves a go at immortality. Take, for example, the 1980's remakes of, say, Little Lord Fauntleroy with Alec Guiness and Connie Booth - it's just all-round perfect. The images, the timing, the actors - very, very well done. And the 'original' was made in 1921... and 1936, respectively. See, back then, movies were indeed handled like stage production preserves.
These days, however, we see remakes that happen twenty or thirty years later (The Thing, Total Recall), and the main issue I have with those is that they tend not to respect the source material - at all. They reinvent, they make stuff up, the omit, they make a mess.
Then there's the issue with good movies that were produced anywhere else but Hollywood. They get remade pretty much as soon as someone pitches its viability to someone inclined to sponsor the effort. I think that pretty much destroys worlds. People get served their McCulture, not having to even try watching the true, original effort. They pay to see well-established stars and the story gets changed, cut, mangled and 'modernized'.
For quite a while, I was not aware of this abominable practices, then I saw a "TV remake" of The Shining. It was a truly horrible experience and an abominable, shameful effort. So far, my extreme aversion to these efforts has not changed.
"The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" was at least a 'true' remake in that it kept the story largely intact, but I feel it's still wrong to waste the money and the talent in a sort of job-creation measure when I would actually prefer to see some money and respect flow to the original creators and artists. But that's not what Hollywood is about, is it.
