intertext

Another movie based on a beloved children's book that I'm DEFINITELY not going to see! Only the trailer for The Dark is Rising made me spitting mad. (I'm not going to link to it, because it takes about three hours for the official site to load - you can Google it)

Well, no doubt, you'll love it if you haven't read the books - the screenwriters obviously haven't.

My suspicions were raised when it was clear that someone had decided it wasn't politically correct to have a sign of the cross in a circle be the symbol for the movie - oh dear, might make people think it was Christian, and put off the non-Christians, or, just as likely, might offend all the fundamentalist Christians who are potential viewers. It's quite clear that the whole thing is driven by a "paint-by-numbers" approach to popularizing the story. And Americanizing it in the worst kind of formulaic, predictable way.

Harry ... oops, no, I mean Will Stanton, is a "typical American teenager": the opening scenes of the trailer trite and predictable bits of high school and suburban family homelife. There's a crush on a girl that gets mentioned about three times. He gets picked up for shoplifting in a department store. WTF?

I was only having a bloggy conversation with brisingamen was it last week, the week before? about how essential the Thames valley landscape was to that book. Oops. It's gone. All the quiet power and atmosphere of the book - whoosh! Turned into bonzo special effects, pyrotechnics and rubbish.

My favourite scene in the book - where they go carol singing, and Will's voice falters when he comes to the verse of "Good King Wenceslaus" where the page sings "I can go no further" and then Merriman's voice, rich and powerful comes in and strengthens him - couldn't possibly happen in this world they've created.

There seem to be a couple of other teenage characters from somewhere or other. WTF?

The only good thing? Christopher Eccleston is the Rider. Excellent bit of casting.

The funniest thing? The mysterious voice-over right at the end saying something like "Even the smallest light breaks the darkness" Yikes! Haven't we heard something like that somewhere before??? (well it worked for Peter Jackson...)

The alliterative quality of the header is the only good thing about this post, which mostly consists of venting about technology. I shouldn't complain about marking, as I'm only teaching one course, but why is it that it's ONLY when I've spent about half an hour finding and annotating an enormous number of errors in an absolutely hopeless online essay and have just got to the end that Firefox decides to do the "have just encountered a fatal error and have to close, sorry for the inconvenience..."? And now I'm going to have to go back and do the whole damn thing again, because of course I'm never clever enough to save every two minutes as I should... Blah blah blah. That, of course, is why I'm in here bitching instead of being a good little teacher and marking my midterms.

I'm going to be boycotting this perforce, because I don't get the Science Fiction channel. But even if I did... A blonde blue eyed Ged? Characters I've never even seen before? Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings this definitely ain't. And to prove it, Ursula Le Guin has been disassociating herself with it publicly - here's one example:

http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-15-04.htm

I have so much respect for her that I would avoid the adaptation even if I hadn't decided to already (if that makes any sense at all). It seems to me that there's a certain amazing arrogance in doing these adaptations that bear absolutely no resemblance at all to the books! Oh, I think I'm going to make a movie of Paradise Lost and leave Satan out of it altogether... yeah, right.

"Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer!" This comment is appearing more and more in movies and television shows. Who the hell cares? Since when has the producer's hand had much to do with the artistic merit of the film? The new "serious" biopic of an Irish journalist who was murdered because she was investigating the drug trade (I think), which stars Cate Blanchett, is trumpetted as being "produced by Jerry Bruckheimer!" So what? He produces action pictures usually (like Pearl Harbour... nuff said) so -does this mean Cate Blanchett's new movie won't be too boring for those who like action pics?? Have you noticed how the new movie starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones doesn't have a director (at least, that's the impression you'd get from the publicity) but it IS produced by the same guy who made Ron Howard's oscar winning movie... The directors of that new movie are the Coen brothers, which fact actually makes ME more interested in seeing it since they are responsible for lovely, quirky films like Fargo and Brother Where Art Thou. Too quirky for Hollywood, no doubt. Hollywood doesn't want you to know they have anything to do with it. But it's produced by that guy with the spiky hair who produced that oscar winning movie starring Russell Crowe (better not mention HIM, either).