Two Rhetorical Questions

First, who are all these people out there who are attempting to take things away from athletes? Is there some sort of concerted theft of identity or accomplishment that we can stop? They seem so concerned with achieving things that no one can take away from them. I would like them to not be worried about this.

Second, I remember the moment when I heard about the story that forms the narrative action of When a Stranger Calls. I was standing in the front yard of the house of a neighbor, right in front of their wood-slat fence, and my younger sister's classmate laid it all out to me with a flair for the dramatic that was precocious for someone who was no more than eleven. I was probably twelve, and I still remember how effective the punchline comes across. It was represented to me to be a movie, but with the addendum that it had really happened somewhere, so the story came to occupy that hazy place in childhood nightmares where even the most outlandish fiction is just standing in for the things that have actually happened in some vague place one county over.

Maybe it wouldn't be possible to recreate that sort of experiential terror on today's twelve year-olds. It's too easy to snopes something and obtain one of many other unreliable sources of authority which can confirm or deny the actual occurrence of something that could have inspired something. Nevertheless, I had no idea they were remaking the film, and while I reflexively think little of these kinds of projects, it seemed to me that for a new generation of teens who aren't familiar with the older film, a well-done, non-gory remake might be a film experience worth having. You can remake a film like this because you can have some confidence that for many of the members of the new audience, the ending will be unknown to them. And because they don't care to read reviews of the films they see before they see them, it can remain unknown for a sizable number of kids.

Of course, it never occurred to me that they might give away the ending, perhaps the best urban legendary twist ending in post-70s American B-moviedom, in a TV teaser. That did not occur to me. And the fact that it didn't strike any of the film's marketing people as something that might want to be kept out of the advertising, what does that say about them? And about us?