Daily Inspiration Quote by Joel Siegel

A critic’s nastiest trick is to make contempt sound like common sense, and Joel Siegel does it in two sentences. The opening feigns innocence ("I have no idea why") while actually delivering an indictment: an "original" filmmaker has squandered time on the least original labor imaginable, "translating someone else’s movie". The phrasing isn’t neutral. It frames remake culture as clerical work, not creation, and it quietly rewrites the director’s motives as either mercenary or artistically timid.

The line’s real bite comes from the double stab of specificity: "two years" makes the waste measurable, almost moral. Siegel’s subtext is that time is the only non-renewable artistic resource; to spend it on an English-language remake is to trade voice for access. The mention of "Spanish into English" points to Hollywood’s pipeline of extracting stories from other markets, sanding down their texture, then selling them back as product. It’s not a complaint about translation in the literary sense; it’s about cultural conversion.

Then Siegel twists the knife: "And it wasn't such a good film in Spanish, either". This isn’t just a review of the source material. It’s a critique of taste and judgment: not only is the project derivative, it’s derivative of mediocrity. The intent is gatekeeping with a purpose: to shame the industry’s risk-averse recycling, and to challenge an admired filmmaker to act like the original artist Siegel claims to value.