YES, my laptop has become totally uncooperative, refusing to e-mail on any server so it's back to the typewriter and back to trudging up to the cybercafe to send in my scribbles.

It's been quite a bit since I've darkened their door and the place is obviously making money -- complete makeover, a good 40 machines and all new. Clientele remains the same; students bashing away at games and young and not so young ladies chatting to their cyberpals.

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There's quite a ritual here before switching on the webcam. Make up is freshened, hair rearranged, cleavage adjusted -- there's always cleavage -- and bosoms plumped like a pair of bolster pillows.

Inevitably there'll be round-eyes at the other end. Casually dressed, expensively barbered (when they've hair), delicately cologned (I swear that's Brut leaking down the cables) and plainly not poor. Our girl plumps her bosom a bit more and hushes mom sitting to one side, out of camera view, hanging on to her four grandkids.

Saturday, I was disappointed to learn from the entertainment pages that moviemakers Ethan and Joel Coen plan a remake of the film True Grit. Doubly disappointed because the Coen brothers are favorites of mine and the novel written by Charles Portis is one of the greatest Western novels ever.

Remakes -- do they ever work? Discounting modern computer effects, are they ever a patch on the original?

The Day The Earth Stood Still, last year's remake of a 1951 sci-fi thriller is hopeless. How about the new Thomas Crown Affair? A reprise of the 1968 Steve McQueen original - Pierce Brosnam takes McQueens place in the new movie, an adequate Bond, but for me forever tainted with Devil's Peak.

Russel Crowe stars in the modern 3-10 to Yuma and what a mess it is compared to the 1957 original. Or Shaft, a makeover lacking Richard Roundtree and Isaac Haye's exhilarating music.

Remakes don't work.

The Coen brothers, before they cleaned up at this year's Oscars, have produced a mixed bag of movies. I like the ones I've seen -- No Country For Old Men, The Man Who Wasn't There, Bad Santa, O Brother, Where Art Thou? -- but then I like their dark humor and the trademark twists in the tale.

True Grit is the story of a precocious 14-year-old girl who sets out to avenge her murdered father. She hires a federal marshall to track down the killer, asking not for the best but for the meanest. This turns out to be the one-eyed Rooster Cogburn (Played by John Wayne). Tagging along with the pair is a flash young Texas Ranger, all Mexican spurs and pearl-handled revolvers who, in the end, saves the day.

The novel is a treat -- shying away from nothing. Neither the bleak frontier humor, the privations on the trail nor the seemingly casual and brutal violence of 1880s Arkansas and Oklahoma. The 1969 film, viewed a long time ago, I remember was faithful to the novel and re-reading the book today the unshaven, paunchy, irritable Rooster Cogburn automatically becomes Wayne.

How on earth will the Coen brothers improve on an already great movie?