Summer Movies: Read the calendar section of the LA Times yesterday (Saturday night, actually, the future is NOW!) and I'm both excited and scared for this summer.

Excited for all the obvious ones--the new Harry Potter looks great, and even if Will Smith slaughters Asimov's I, Robot, by doing the film equivalent of rendering a fine, classic dish into snack food, I'm okay with that, I think. I like to snack on occasion, and it might just be the impetus for some smart, indie filmmaker to come along and do a story or two from the original book right.

What I'm the most upset about is that they're remaking the Japanese film Shall We Dance. The original film is one of the finest pieces of work Japan has produced, steeped in the artful subtlety that is so integral to Japanese culture, even while delving into strangeness.

They're remaking it with Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez. No, no, no, no, no. This film will not work in an American context. To be true to the spirit of the original, the people in the film would have to be doing something WE thought of as strange and odd. Like, oh, I don't know. Exotic body piercing. Nah, that's already too mainstream. Um, Irish folk dancing. No, then they'd just seem behind the times, not strange.

The fact is, the message of the original movie isn't really one you can teach Americans, because it's so embedded in their collective psyche. Remember, the "Wacky comic relief" in the original movie showed his zaniness by wearing a slightly louder colored polo shirt than the men around him. Here, that would still place him squarely in the category of, well, square.

You can't do a subtle piece on pushing boundaries in a culture where boundaries have already been pushed to the point of farce.