Death To Remakes!
One year ago tomorrow, a film came out into wide release in the United States that, even then, I cringed at. The film was No Reservations , starring Aaron Eckhart (late of The Dark Knight where he plays the idealistic Harvey Dent who succumbs to his evil alter-ego, Two-Face) and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who hasn't needed much of an introduction since she burst onto the pop culture scene in 1998's The Mask of Zorro . The reason I cringed then was because I knew, as few of my contemporaries did, that this film was based on a German film from 2002 called Bella Martha , better known to English-speaking audiences as Mostly Martha . During the summer of 2004 I went on a foreign film frenzy; I devoured almost three per week, and that few only because Netflix doesn't offer same-day delivery. A friend of mine got me started on this frenzy by lending me Babette's Feast and Mostly Martha . These films remain two of the finest films I've seen in the last ten years, and Mostly Ma...
