Then they cast her and decided they had to have young, pretty actors, or else it would look cradle-robby.
Right, because that kind of squick would have totally contradicted the source text.
t head explodes for the umpteenth time
What is your childhood trauma?
Cordelia ,'Lessons'
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.
Jessica - Mar 06, 2005 3:15:58 pm PST #9701 of 10001
If I want to become a cloud of bats, does each bat need a separate vaccination?
Gris - Mar 06, 2005 5:28:33 pm PST #9702 of 10001
Hey. New board.
Well, to be fair, the source text wasn't the novel, it was the original musical. And it did a pretty good job contradicting the novel all by itself. (shrug). Still, there really are young pretty people out there with pretty good tenor voices, if not many truly operatic ones. They could have used one of those.
A pretty Phantom is silly by either source text, of course, but this movie was never going to be a horror film. Sadly. And you can't really see whether the phantom is truly ugly when you're watching the play, usually.
Now I want to go watch the silent Phantom again...
Jessica - Mar 06, 2005 5:30:53 pm PST #9703 of 10001
If I want to become a cloud of bats, does each bat need a separate vaccination?
Well, to be fair, the source text wasn't the novel, it was the original musical.
In which the Phantom is still old and creepy.
DebetEsse - Mar 06, 2005 6:41:28 pm PST #9704 of 10001
Woe to the fucking wicked.
The Phantom isn't supposed to be pretty. His voice is. See, it's the whole thematic thing. Raoul's pretty (we don't much care about his voice.), but Phantom's voice should make one weak at the knees.
Nova, about Richard Gere, my gold standard for being impressed with singing and dancing by actors is "could I do better?". So, I came away unimpressed by either his singing (even more so since, having now heard Jerry Orbach do it.), or his dancing (which lots of people were very impressed with)
I fear for any Sondheim on screen. I've seen a number of movies taken from plays where the script is pretty well lifted, and the patterns are too stagey (imo) for film. Sondheim is that, with music, to the nth. Not that I don't hope it does really well. I'm just...very wary.
Gris - Mar 07, 2005 12:51:21 am PST #9705 of 10001
Hey. New board.
Yeah, and with there already being a DVD release of the actual original cast, I'm not sure it needs a film translation. Sondheim is so... theater.
Worried about Rent for much the same reason. Not sure I believe that it will translate to any larger a set.
DebetEsse - Mar 07, 2005 1:07:15 am PST #9706 of 10001
Woe to the fucking wicked.
Rent, I can see working, though I'm not as wildly in love with that show as a lot of people are. I do worry about the age of the original cast, though.
§ ita § - Mar 07, 2005 4:13:00 am PST #9707 of 10001
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.
Imagine the movies:
Actress Hilary Swank has Sandra Bullock and Ashley Judd to thank for her Best Actress Oscar for Million Dollar Baby - because the role was refused by both actresses. The movie's producer Albert S. Ruddy's first choice for the part of a tragic female boxer was Bullock, who turned down the part when she was told she could not pick the director - Ruddy next approached Judd, whose salary demands would have busted the budget. After Ruddy finally settled on Swank, Bullock's agent called him and said she would do the picture after all, but, "Al just said, 'Too late,'" a source told website Pagesix.Com.
Frankenbuddha - Mar 07, 2005 4:17:23 am PST #9708 of 10001
"We are the Goon Squad and we're coming to town...Beep! Beep!" - David Bowie, "Fashion"
The problem with him directing Wicker Man is that I've seen what his conception of feminism is, and my skin is crawling just trying to imagine what his concept of paganism is.
(Sorry, didn't mean to ask a question and disappear.)
OK, that I can totally see. Leaving aside LaBute himself, a mormon take on paganism would be...I daren't hazard a guess, actually.
Yeah, such was my blink. Mostly. I suspect we'd end up with more of a growling Sweeney than a singing one.
Didn't he do ROCKY HORROR in Autstralia for a while (like, a long while)? Granted, that's also rock rather than Sondheim, but he may have done more musical theater than that.
Vonnie K - Mar 07, 2005 4:43:27 am PST #9709 of 10001
Kiss me, my girl, before I'm sick.
Remake "The Wicker Man"? But it wouldn't be the same movie without the bad 70's haircut and the weird musical sequences and nekkid Britt Eckland having sex with the wall!
Nicholas Cage. Blaargh. Neil LaBute. Double blaargh.
Frankenbuddha - Mar 07, 2005 5:30:37 am PST #9710 of 10001
"We are the Goon Squad and we're coming to town...Beep! Beep!" - David Bowie, "Fashion"
Oh, also meant to mention I finally got around to seeing THE AVIATOR over the weekend, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It didn't particularly feel all that overlong to me. Maybe when Hughes was locked up in his screening room, but I thought that was supposed to feel interminable.
I must say, it's the first time I've ever seen DiCaprio not look like a teenager. The scary thing is how when he grew the mustache, he started to not only looking like Hughes, but also like the older Charles Foster Kane (I figure with Scorcese at the wheel it HAD to be deliberate). It was kinda unsettling seeing DiCaprio's voice come out of Kane's mouth.