Buffista Movies 3: Panned and Scanned
A place to talk about movies--Old and new, good and bad, high art and high cheese. It's the place to place your kittens on the award winners, gossip about upcoming fims and discuss DVD releases and extras. Spoiler policy: White font all plot-related discussion until a movie's been in wide release two weeks, and keep the major HSQ in white font until two weeks after the video/DVD release.
I want to see a miniseries adaptation of Pullman's "His Dark Materials."
New Line has been talking about making His Dark Materials into 3 movies for a while now. Don't know if it will actually occur; the story is complex and difficult, and that's before you get to the controversy of the topic.
Chris Weitz, director. Tom Stoppard, screenplay.
2005.
Wet 'em if you got 'em.
eta: P-C, Brooks wants to re-make the producers because he sees a new audience for it and he likes the acting of the Broadway cast (i.e. Nathan Lane) so much. Someone did an interview with him about it and Spaceballs II.
Tom Stoppard, screenplay.
Huh. Stoppard's involvement in the project might get me to see at least the first movie despite the fact that I disliked the books (liked the first well enough with reservations, heartily disliked the second for a number of reasons, have yet to try reading the third.)
I don't know -- 2005 (data not updated since 10/2003) does not sound like a movie in the hand, you know? Sounds like a movie-idea. When the thing is cast and filming, I will believe it is actually going to happen.
Well, at least we know New Line has the technology to create believeable CGI protagonists. Considering that the Panserbjorne, all of the daemons, the cliff-ghasts, the ghosts in Cittagazze, the harpies in the underworld, and the Mulefa wheelie-people will have to be CGI. This is not counting the tiny people, dead souls, and angels who can be done with makeup, filters, and normal filming tricks.
That's a lot of post-production to schedule! (Even if just for the ones that show up in the first book.)
I am sorry I did not see the 2nd half of the National Theatre version of HDM, because I did not see whether they dealt with the wheelie-people at all. They used lovely silk-panel puppets for the daemons and cliff-ghasts, and costumes and hand-held masks for the panserbjorne, but it would be really hard to make a bicycle exude the right kind of "this is a sapient consciousness" feeling. Maybe they rewrote that whole section to be something less physically ambitious.
I agree with Beverly--The Last Starfighter is nothing without Robert Preston.
"You're walking away from history--history, Alex! Did Chris Columbus stay home? Nooo. What if the Wright Brothers thought that only birds should fly? And did Galoka think that the Ulus were too ugly to save?"
Love that movie. ("Terrific. I'm about to get killed a million miles from nowhere, and a gung-ho iguana is telling me to relax!")
Then if/when they read, say, LOTR, they'll be seeing Viggo Mortensen and Orlando Bloom instead of Aragorn and Legolas. They've had their imaginations hijacked, essentially. It makes me sad because I can read the books and still see the images I conjured when I was eight, ten years old.
I saw the movies first, then read the books. (Well, some of them. I got bogged down about 3/4 of the way through reading The Two Towers a few months ago, and kind of lost interest.) For the most part, the world I'm seeing when I read the books is not the same as the world in the movies. There are a few exceptions -- Gollum being the major one -- but mostly, all the characters and places look different.
I liked the book of Gone with the Wind better than the movie.
The second half of Two Towers (the book) didn't really interest me until I was somewhere in my 20s--that's when the whole Frodo/Sam storyline really started to resonate with me. Before then, my favorite part of the whole trilogy was the first half of TTT; I loved the Ents and the whole royal intrigue at Edoras (I was also a complete Eomer fangirl at the age of 15, whereas Aragorn was a real bore, IMO).
The best book-to-movie adaptations usually take the framework of the book for the plot, but concentrate on the more cinematic aspects instead (The Black Stallion comes to mind--love that book, but the best parts of it are barely in the movie, which I loved for a completely different reason).
Stoppard's Dark Materials script was reportedly scrapped. (Alliteration!) Chris Weitz is directing and, it sounds like, writing.
Though it's entirely possible he'll incorporate Stoppard's script into whatever he's doing.
The second half of Two Towers (the book) didn't really interest me until I was somewhere in my 20s--that's when the whole Frodo/Sam storyline really started to resonate with me. Before then, my favorite part of the whole trilogy was the first half of TTT; I loved the Ents and the whole royal intrigue at Edoras (I was also a complete Eomer fangirl at the age of 15, whereas Aragorn was a real bore, IMO).
Ha! Kathy is me. Except I didn't feel strongly about Eomer vs. Aragorn.
ETA: Oh, and I have to admit my very favorite part was Moria, with the Barrow-Downs coming in a close second. But for multiple chapters, the first half of TTT was it.
Great movies from great books: David Lean's Great Expectations, Kubrick's Clockwork Orange, really there are plenty.
That Jane Campion Portrait of a Lady certainly is excrutiatingly bad, although I don't loathe it quite as much as The Piano which could possibly be my least favourite film of all time.
A great movie from a decent novella--The Shawshank Redemption. Although I do think that, since they have less plot that have to be stripped away for the film version, short stories and novellas probably have an edge when it comes to adaptation.
