Random Play: Welcome to this world
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If you're going to alter fundamentals of the book when you write the screenplay, call it "inspired by The Vintner's Luck" or something, but don't pretend you're making a film of the book, because you're clearly not.
Webweaver: I'm a huge fan of James Ellroy, but I'm not really surprised that the only artistically successful adaptation of his work is the one that took the most liberties: LA Confidential. Brian Helgeland made the correct choice to excise every sub-plot that didn't contain the three main cops, condense the time scheme from eight or nine years to months, and tone down the violence (especially the sexual violence) considerably. Otherwise, a literal transcription would have resulted in the world's longest, most incoherent snuff movie.
A good adaptation is NOT a transcript, and those that try (__Watchmen__, Claude Chabrol's inert 1991 Madame Bovary, and Atonement come immediately to mind) tend to be the ones that fail most badly.
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I completely see what you're saying, Craig, and I wonder if there's a happy medium somewhere... surely there must be, although it would probably be different for every movie, and every author, and every director, and every film-goer....
I know that, for example, Audrey Niffenegger's manuscript for The Time Traveller's Wife is 600 pages, and one page of manuscript is approx equal to a minute of screentime, so obviously something had to give in terms of the adaptation, otherwise the movie would have been 10 hours long!
I suppose what bugs me about some movie adaptations is the removal of a really fundamental part of the story - and sometimes (as in the two examples I gave in my previous post) you might say it's the fundamental point of the story - at least as far as the characters are concerned. I'd rather something that important wasn't messed with. I'm rather less worried about the loss of a few peripheral characters and sub-plots, as you describe.
Interesting... perhaps we should make some RULES about this sort of thing ;) (joke!)
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I saw Avatar today, in 3D.
It was generally a good film. The CGI bits were done so well that, like the 3D, it just felt like a normal part of the film and not a "Oooh! Lookie!!!!"
So that meant that the film actually had to be good on its own, which it was.
Now, here's the thing - I generally don't enjoy fantasy or adventure films (LOTR = bleurgh!), and when Avatar got too far in those directions I found myself switching off. During the big attack scene, my mind started to wander and I started thinking about the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, WTF.
The film left me feeling a bit hopeless for humanity in general, and wondering if maybe there were some awesome kitty aliens who'd let me morph into them so I could play with their magical trees.
Avatar feels like a watershed moment for cinema, a sort of animation singularity when the unreal now looks real.
Confidential to G. Tiso of Wellington: I would not see Avatar based on the trailer. None of the pretty bits are in there. But I would see it based on it being an awesome film.
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I've tried to let Avatar sink in. I'm now convinced my brain doesn't know where to file it. It knows about memories of "real" images, it knows about animated images, and it can't quite decide where to put some of it in my memory.
One scene near the end appears to have been mistakenly filed under "you were really there and it happened" ...
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"you were really there and it happened" ...
i'm a bit like that too. i was feeling what it was like to be sully and living in the future/past through someone else.
...and I started thinking about the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, WTF.
why that ?
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i'm a bit like that too. i was feeling what it was like to be sully and living in the future/past through someone else.
Hmmm. I'm thinking that in about five years' time someone is going to use this technology to create something wild.
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Confidential to G. Tiso of Wellington: I would not see Avatar based on the trailer. None of the pretty bits are in there. But I would see it based on it being an awesome film.
Aw, okay then. You make a good case. It's not appropriate for an eight year old boy, is it?
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One scene near the end appears to have been mistakenly filed under "you were really there and it happened" ...
I felt the same way about Battle for Milkquarious.
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It's not appropriate for an eight year old boy, is it?
I certainly won't be taking my 8 yr old no matter how much he begs.
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Hmmm. I'm thinking that in about five years' time someone is going to use this technology to create something wild.
you seen surrogates with bruce willis ?
same sort of concept but straight human, cos you have to imagine, if the humans in "Avatar" could bio engineer Nav'i they certainly did humans first, so the earth would be populated with surrogates.
still, i'd rather have one of those exo-skeleton war machines.
but yeah, total immersion 3d fantasy role playing games in real time on-line within 5 years you reckon ;)...did someone say matrix ?
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Complete threadjack but this is rather cool:
Merry Xmas y'all
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3410,
Merry Crimble, Simon.
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Did you find anything in the films that didn't look just like you thought in your head that it would look when you were reading the books?
Pretty much everything didn't look how I imagined. In most cases it looked a hell of a lot better. It massively enriched my imagination of the story. There were substantial plot diversions, most of which were justified with the aim of making an exciting movie out of a long book.
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Aw, okay then. You make a good case. It's not appropriate for an eight year old boy, is it?
I'd take an eight year old. My five year old daughter wants to see it, which I think is a bit too young, but eight should be fine. I'd rate the violence as "No worse than Jurassic Park", though there's a fair bit of it.
One scene near the end appears to have been mistakenly filed under "you were really there and it happened" ...
Several of the critics from the early previews have similar reports.
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I've tried to let Avatar sink in.
That,and now I really must exit.I gotta get outta here.For someone who didn't care to see it, it has now crept into conversations all over the place.Now I am considering going.For that I don't want to know any more .
As you were... -
Shamelessly, my two cents -- the number 7 refers to it being on my year's top ten list (link to the left if you want to see the others):
7. Avatar (James Cameron)
Both Hollywood-archetypal and deeply, personally weird, James Cameron’s Gaia-loving space opera manages to be an allegory for everything, maybe all of human history, but especially: the loss of Native American lands and cultures, war in Iraq, war in Vietnam, “the environment” and our relationship to it, rainforest clearances, Cameron’s own purported journey from gun-loving machinery-nerd to feminine-side ecologist. I think of it as Malick’s Pocahontas story The New World with Apocalypse Now battle scenes (indeed, as a years-in-the-making war film with deeper meanings, this probably is Cameron's Apocalypse Now) and it is also surely a need-to-see-it-in-cinemas overhaul of viewer expectations and technology just as The Matrix was in 1999 and Jurassic Park was in 1993. So, after all that, why do I feel like I don’t love it as I should? Maybe because the storytelling is perfunctory, even juvenile – which you could never say about Cameron’s two Terminators (it's this perfunctory: people named Miles and Grace define the militaristic and peaceful poles of its human experience). Maybe because it can feel like watching someone else play a computer game. Maybe because two hours and 40 minutes is a long time to be looking at that artificial scenery and those artificial people. But, yes, the phosphorescent jungle at night was very, very trippy in 3D. -
Maybe because it can feel like watching someone else play a computer game.
I spent the two hours of Final Fantasy looking in vain for the bloody ESC button.
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i'm going to enact the classic kiwi yeah/nah on your ass philipmathews.
yeah i hear what youre saying but nah you got it all wrong. is it so hard for you to accept what happens in, and the stories from, your own backyard without looking to validate it by comparison to some foreign story of colonisation ?
can you not see its an NZ movie made by NZers in NZ. the loss of land and culture isnt native american, it's polynesian. just accept your race based guilt, get over it and allow yourself to be assimilated into our traditional world view.
resistance is futile:)
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resistance is futile:)
I'm painting myself blue and taking up throat-singing as we speak.
But seriously, that's what I meant by it being an allegory for all human history. It's flexible and eclectic enough. The indigenous people looked and acted largely Native (North) American to me but if you're in Africa, they probably look African, if you're in South America, you're probably thinking of the Incas, and so on. That's part of Cameron's achievement, I guess.
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I went to see it again last night. Yes, I enjoyed it that much the first time (as if you don't notice).
I found the 3D-ness a bit off for the first third of the movie. I couldn't follow fast movements on-screen very well and my eyes felt slightly uncomfortable.
Then all of a sudden - at the point where Sully sees the jungle revealed in its night-time colours for the first time - the movie seemed to snap into focus and from that point on it was perfect. I wonder if the alignment had actually been off before that, and the projectionist fixed it.
A collective sigh of pleasure rippled through the audience at that moment (whether because of the beauty of the scenery or the fixing of the off-ness, I don't know) - but my friend Kurt said he experienced exactly the same thing as me at exactly the same moment, so there you go.
The night-time jungle truly is exactly like the trippiest black-light dance party ever...
I went to see it at Queensgate in the Hutt this time (the Reading being sold out until Xmas in 3D). It was interesting. I've never been to the Hutt before.
My friend Lou decided that all the avatars were based on Uma Thurman :)
Bill English was in the audience. I do not know what this signifies.
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Avatar looks like a must-see but going back to adaptations from novels. In "In My Father's Den", Brad McGann reinvented the book IMHO and made it better. A literal adaptation would not have worked - he had the imagination to modernise it and use those aspects of cinema which DO render an adaptation worthwhile: acting, music, cinematography etc
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Our friend Mr Matthews has similar thoughts about McGann's adaptation.
You can also go away without leaving, which is escapism or imagination. In the novel, Paul Prior, who as a teacher becomes a sort of father figure to the intellectual outcast Celia, escaped into books as a teenager: Gee uses Paul’s reading of Dostoevsky to signal his wilful opposition to dreary New Zealand conformism and the religious fundamentalism of his mother, a tragic figure in both book and film.
McGann’s innovation is to replace Dostoevsky with Patti Smith, whose best music has all the romantic defiance and yearning of teenagers who want to be anywhere but here – and, heard again as an adult, the same songs are suggestive of dreams that weren’t fulfilled, promises that weren’t kept (the songs are “Free Money” and “Land” from Horses).
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Grafting Smith’s Horses onto Gee’s novel was hugely inspired – a creative risk that really paid off – and I’d love to know how McGann came up with the idea. His film was one seriously impressive achievement. -
That was an amazing review of In My Father's Den, I remember reading it at the time and thinking it captured my own thoughts on the film exactly. I brought it up when I interviewed Maurice Gee for Critic a year later.
Speaking of great adaptations which have little to do with the source material, two spring to mind. The first is Trainspotting :it's a perfect adaptation partly because it acknowledges it would be impossible to make a truly "faithful" one- the original source material is, after all, less a novel than a series of discursive, dialect-heavy narratives loosely focused around the exploits of Mark Renton--and by trimming it back and focusing on the vitality and gallows humour of a few choice episodes, it nails the spirit without getting overly tangled. It also quotes the right music too (very important in Irvine Welsh novels)
Blade Runner, similarly, is nothing like the book- which is just as well, considering the book disappears into total incoherence near the end as it imagines worlds within worlds within worlds, to say nothing of the fact that it's the Replicants which are the villians in the book (in the film, they're suffering saints). But by diverting so wildly from the source material it captures something else- the weird jumble of genres and tones, the mix of benzedrine-addled cynicism and offhand wonder. Perhaps it removes the humour of the original book, but it certainly gets the sense of the unknown.
But back to Avatar.
As I expected, it's Pocahontas in Space- with all that entails.
Firstly, the dialogue is utterly dreadful- but did we think it would be otherwise. Sure, everyone remembers the catchphrases from Aliens and the first two Terminator films, but that's only because the rest of the screenplay(s) is perfunctory beyond belief. He's a step up from George Lucas, for sure, but I'm still reminded of what Harrison Ford's immortal "you can't type this shit George, you sure as hell can't say it" in regards to this flick. I was thankful when the subtitled "alien" dialogue kicked in because at least you could pretend it was eloquent.
Secondly the allegories- about a spritually and ecologically enlightened indigenuous tribe needlessly destroyed by a more craven and materialist aggressor- are thuddingly obvious. Vietnam, Iraq, the Wild West, whatever you want to make of it, you can. I mean, it's so broad as to be preposterous, and even the most complex characters- such as the marine who turns to "the other side" or Sigourney Weaver's empathetic biologist- are drawn with ridiculously broad brushes.
Thirdly, the performances- Weaver aside- are flat to non-existent, which isn't helped by the aforementioned broad character types. Even the alien people are insufferable saints. The fact we're given little idea of the back story- how long have the troops been there? what brought them there in the first place?-makes it all the more facile.
However...as odd and faintly absurd the visual aesthetic is (some of the sequences seem straight out of a Yes album cover), it's absolutely breathtaking to soak in. Many of the early sequences in the forests are like this hypnotic visual balm, you can seriously get lost in it, while as cringeworthy as the "tree of souls" cod-metaphysical hang-ups are, you've gotta give Cameron credit for chutzpah. He really goes for broke here, and as misguided as his aesthetic might be (who on earth would create these blue people anyway?), you can't mistake it for anything else. And as I said before, Cameron can really direct an action scene- let's just say the money is all up on screen without a doubt. There's something almost bafflingly old-fashioned about this flick actually- the more you think about it, the more it makes sense that this has been buzzing in Cameron's head for the last thirty-odd years. Who else would go for something so lysergic now?
So it's a trip, and I'm pleased I saw it, but...I don't know, in a year when District 9 showed a sci-fi flick could be loosey-goosey, funny, kinetic and savage, and carry much heavier subtext with little strain at (literally) one-tenth of the budget, you can't help but think that Avatar is an anomally in the best and worst sense of the word.
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i dont know that there would be sequels or prequels to 'avatar' and i'm hoping it's just cameron talking shit. i can understand the ease in capitalising on the technology that exists and churn out a couple more films but unless it was envisioned as trilogy then why bother? i'd hate to see it fall apart like the second matrix.
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This is cool ...
The world mapped for per-capita cinema-going. We go less than the Australians and Iceland tops the rankings, beating even the USA with more than five visits a year per person.
The Top 10 most pirated movies of 2009 -- Star Trek followed by Transformers and some thing I've never heard of called RocknRolla.
World by feature films produced annually: India, Nigeria and the US, in that order.
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