Once upon a time, it seemed as if I spent most of my time on this blog bemoaning the sudden ubiquity of Hollywood remakes. I got off that beat for a while because I could barely keep up and I couldn’t take my childhood dying by a thousand cuts anymore (Want to make me cry? Mention this). I thought that the critics were with me on this one — until today, when I saw that Salon has basically surrendered to the remake juggernaut. The title of the article? “Why We Should Give Remakes a Chance.” Et tu, Salon?

It seems so, but at least Salon TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz admits that we’ve all got reboot fatigue at the outset. After all, the first sentence of the article reads, “We’re getting very close to the point where the phrase “Entertainment news” may have to be replaced by ‘Remake and Reboot News.’” Then again, the fact that Spike Lee is remaking the South Korean action classic “Oldboy” and Martin Scorsese plans to do the same to the gritty 70s drama “The Gambler” would make anyone giddy. (Well … just about anyone.) Since movies like “The Smurfs” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” did well at the box office, critics like Zoller Seitz are realizing that — love ‘em or hate ‘em — these reboots are here to stay. It comes off a little like acute Stockholm Syndrome, but I appreciate their efforts to assess these newer works on their merits.

Zoller Seitz uses three main points to make the case for his “Why So Serious?” stance on these remakes. For one thing, they’ve been around almost as long as the film industry itself. I’m reminded of this every time I watch one of my favorite films, “Imitation of Life.” It came out in 1959, but it was a remake of a 1934 film of the same name. (Yes, they’ve been around that long.) He also points out that all of these movies aren’t the craven money grabs that some appear to be — and points to Scorsese’s film career as a very apt example.

The third point that Zoller Seitz makes may be the one that gets him in hot water with the fanboys — you know, the ones who tend to slam these remakes before they even get cast? He’s a critic, so I can’t get mad at his call to judge each work on its own terms. I know that people were very up in arms about “Let Me In” — which may have led to its demise at the box office — but it turned out to be a very good film. Of course, when I mentioned this to friends, I got a whole lot of responses like “But it isn’t the original!” and “They couldn’t possibly do justice to the pool scene!” These are all perfectly understandable reactions, but Zoller Seitz makes it very clear that true film fans do this at their peril. As he puts it, “all art should be innocent until proved guilty.” That’s a great point, but what does that say about “The Smurfs?”