Like look at this freaky Snow White adaptation. Not loving KStew as a Joan of Arc-y Snow White, but Charlize Theron rocks my socks as the evil queen. Plus — wowsa, the imagery!
In this trailer, I’m seeing shades of Dementro’s Kisses AND Elizabeth Bathory (the Blood Queen of Transylvania). Anyone else?
Then, just for balance, we’ve got a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT adaptation of Snow White, the Julia-Roberts-as-queen Mirror Mirror. (In passing, clearly the “queen” is the meaty role in both these films, as This trailer seems bizarre to me, like it was all a bet on Funny or Die or something. Amirite? Like it’s not a real movie? Also, how many shots of a castle balancing precariously on a stick-thin penninsula cliff over a lake can we handle?
This appears to be the year for Snow White remakes.
And, in another vein entirely, the trailer for Pixar’s BRAVE. Yay, warrior girls! However, is it me, or is this trailer completely mum on WHAT, precisely, this darn film is about?
And then, last but certainly not least, the trailer I have watched approximately twenty-bajillion times already this week. How. Awesome. Is. This. Movie. Gonna. Be?
The other night, after tucking Queenie into her crib, Sailor Boy and I sat down to watch one of the many, many superhero films we missed in the theater last year while we were busy caring for a newborn. This time, it was the Kenneth Brannagh-helmed (geddit?) THOR.
I will say right up front that I am not familiar with most of the Avengers. Indeed, when I heard that Joss Whedon was doing an Avengers film, I thought it was the kind staring Mrs. Emma Peel (to which I say, go for it, Joss. I love how you did kickass women, and the Ralph Fiennes/Uma Thurman one was not up to par).
(In passing, do y’all know I was named for the actress who played Mrs. Emma Peel? True story.)
Anyway, I did not know until recently that Thor was a comic book superhero. Indeed, my only familiarity with him was the books on Norse mythology I read in my youth.
Which is okay, apparently, because ComicBookSuperhero!Thor actually is a version of the Norse God. This was the coolest part of the story to me. Apparently, the whole idea here is that the Norse Gods as we know them are actually stories about super-powerful (and immortal???) aliens from a planet called Asgard who at one time used to visit Earth, where the locals were like, “Wow, your sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable to us from magic!” (And in case we SF folks missed, it, Natalie Portman actually quotes Arthur C. Clarke for us in the film.)
The film opens with Natalie Portman, Stellan Skaarsgard, and Kat Dennings sitting in a van in the middle of the desert. Natalie Portman is a Very Smart Astrophysicist. We know this because all of the characters, including Natalie, say she is, and Natalie Portman repeats the phrase “Einstein-Rosen Bridge” about forty-seven times throughout the film. Kat Denning is a disaffected intern, which we know because she talks about “Facebook” and “twitter”, and Stellan Skaarsgard is Scandanavian, which we know because he’s Stellan Skaarsgard. There is a big flash of light in the sky, which makes Very Smart Astrophysicist Natalie Portman very happy, and then Kat Dennings hits a dude with the van.
And that’s the last you see of any of them for at least half an hour. Because then there’s this Loooooooong introductory sequence where you learn all about the alien nature of the Norse gods. And then we go straight to Asgard.
Which, I don’t mind, because Asgard is gorgeous. It’s like the bastard stepchild of Oz and Coruscant. And in the middle of it is a giant shimmering highway that looks like it’s made of black opal. And while Natalie Portman and Kat Denning are very pretty, I preferred this to the inside of their van. YMMV.
Okay. So, Thor. Thor is a giant hot blond dude with a hammer, who smirks and winks at enough space babes in the first five minutes of the film that even James T Kirk would think it was over the top. I was getting all these weird Captain Kirk vibes from him, even with the breastplate and the long hair, and then I realized it was because the guy who plays Thor also played Kirk’s dead dad in the Abrams Star Trek reboot. So there.
Thor’s parents are a one-eyed Anthony Hopkins and Rene Russo, and his brother is a skinny guy with dark hair, which is the only way we know he’s evil, other than the fact that he frowns on the day that Thor is winking his way up the aisle in the throne room to get crowned as heir.
The brother’s name is Loki, which would be another clue even to people who do not know the comic book but are familiar with Norse myths, except they never do mention his name for like 15 minutes.
Anyway, right as Thor is about to get crowned, a bunch of Orcs break into the Asgard Weapons Museum where all the really dangerous weapons are kept sitting out on pedestals for people to take as they please. Luckily, Anthony Hopkins has put Gort in charge of guarding them, and he burns the Orcs up.
(At this point, I’m very much enjoying the way Kenneth Brannagh has not only retrofitted Norse mythology into his alien world, but also The Day the Earth Stood Still and Middle Earth, too.)
Apparently, Thor does not find Anthony Hopkins’s Gort-based defense system sufficient, however, and he throws a temper tantrum. At this point, his evil/skinny/dark-haired brother (now’s when I find out his name is Loki) realizes that he can TOTALLY get his big brother in trouble by convincing him to go attack the Orcs’ home planet.
Which he does, along with Loki, and a bunch of his frat buddies. (One of the frat buddies is a girl, and I think she has the hots for Thor.)
I’m not sure what Loki gains by going along, but he does.I mean, other than the fact that this is really the only opportunity to introduce what all their superpowers are. Thor’s superpower are mostly hammer-based. Loki can create false images of himself. The frat buddies are super strong warrior types.
Anyway, in order to get to the Orc home planet, they have to gallop on horseback (I assume it’s alien horseback) very quickly across the black opal highway to a giant planetarium guarded by Stringer Bell.
Hubba hubba, Heimdall.
There, they dismount and then ask Stringer Bell if they can go to the Orc home planet, wherupon, Stringer Bell dials in the location and shoots a beam at said planet, and off they teleport.
As Loki intends, things on the Orc home planet do not go well, the frat buddies all get their asses kicked, Anthony Hopkins has to show up to save them, and when they get home, Thor gets a whuppin’ from his pa, who promptly strips him of his hammer, his (immortal???) powers, and banishes him to Earth.
Where he promptly becomes the dude Kat Dennings hits with the van. See? Full circle.
Anyway, thus commences a long digression in which Very Smart Astrophysicist Natalie Portman is like “whatever, drunk wandering hobo we just hit, I have no time to deal with your strange injuries and raving, I have Very Important Astrophysicist Work to do” and then, oops, realizes her mistake (with the, I’ll grant you, rather clever line of “I left something at the hospital”) and hurries off to retrieve him so there can be a bunch more scenes wherein Ancient Gods-Who-Are-Really-Aliens Say the Darndest Things (including my other favorite line from the film, which is “This mortal form has grown weak. I need sustenance.” — I am so teaching Queenie to say that instead of “Mommy, I’m hungry.”).
And the Shield folks show up, led of course, by Agent Caspar. That’s not his name in the Avenger movies, but he plays a federal agent, and so he’ll always be Agent Caspar to me.
But all of that is very boring, compared to the cool crap still going on in Asgard. And frankly, no matter how pretty the mid-century retro-futuristic gas station/diner thing where Natalie Portman et al. have set up their very important Astrophysics Research Station is, it doesn’t hold a candle to Asgard. I am so glad they decided to go Full Cheese with the set design here.
And the costumes. You guys. You guys. The costumes. I wish I could find a better picture of Loki’s costume once he drops his barely-evil green casual wear and goes Full Loki. Because Full Loki is the best costume since Leia donned a metal bikini. Observe:
I would literally wear this every single day.
And that picture doesn’t even do it justice. Here’s a full length, with a drawing of what Full Loki looks like in the comic books:
Also — ALSO — in searching for a halfway decent picture, I discovered that this actor is going to be playing Cinna in The Hunger Games. I approve. I also think Cinna would completely and totally approve of the Full Loki.
Say what you will about this new trend of toning down some of the outrageous stuff they do in comic books (a’la The Dark Knight and all), I will take Full Cheese and Full Loki, please.
Speaking of Loki, when we are returned to Asgard, it is to follow Loki and see the extent of his “evil.” I mean, that’s the intent. But I was turning to Sailor Boy at this point and saying, “I actually don’t see what Loki has done wrong.” Because, yes, he (vaguely) suggested to Thor that Thor should sneak out to the Orc planet and mess shit up. And as a result, Thor nearly got his frat buddies killed and started a war with the Orcs. But Loki’s point, to illustrate that Thor is an immature hothead who has no business ruling Asgaard was totally on point.
So now the frat buddies are all sitting around recuperating and trying to figure out a way to ask Anthony Hopkins to let Thor come out and play, and Loki is all like “How weird is it that when I got attacked by the Orcs, I was totally fine?” So now we know why Loki tagged along when he was trying to get Thor in trouuuuuuble. Because otherwise he would not have known that he was mysteriously immune to the Orcs’ FrostbiteTouch.
So then Loki completely rationally goes down into the Weapons Museum to pick up the evil Orc Frost Ray in the spirit of experimentation, and as soon as he touches it, he turns into an Orc/Frost Giant.
And his Dad, who has sneaked up behind him is like, “Oh, yeah, meant to tell you, you’re really a Frost Giant. I found you, abandoned to die because you’re scrawny, and I thought, wow, that’s cruel, so I adopted you and brought you up as my own. I kinda hoped you’d be a means of uniting our warring peoples, but that didn’t work out great, no thanks to my constantly pitting you and my real son against each other all your lives.”
So, what would your response be if you were to discover, as an adult, that you were not in fact the son of the all-powerful ruler of the universe, but instead an abandoned child of your mortal enemy? Exactly. Loki totally rationally gets angry and yells at his dad, who had previously stood up just fine against Thor and the armies of Frost Giant Orcs, but who decides suddenly to have a heart attack (they call it the “Odin sleep” but it looks like he has a heart attack) and collapse.
And then Loki, quite rationally, calls for a bunch of guards to take his dad off to bed for medical assistance.
So far, I’m still Team Loki. Who can blame him? Yeah, he yells at his dad, but wouldn’t you under those circumstances? He doesn’t hate his dad. He calls for help when his dad collapses. He’s just momentarily confused and angry, and really, Odin is to blame for that. Kids should be told they are adopted long before they grow up and learn it for themselves at the hands of an evil alien weapons system. That’s all I’m saying.
Anyway, back on Earth, there’s a whole lot of boring blah blah blah about Thor trying to get his hammer back from Agent Caspar and the stone it’s apparently stuck in, King Arthur style — including this long sequence where he fights his way through all these biodome tunnels and almost gets shot by Hawkeye (I think this is because they need a scene with Hawkeye and he’s not worth a whole movie?)
Then he and Stellan Skarsgaard get drunk and talk about Norse mythology and then he and Natalie Portman cuddle and talk about astrophysics. Kat Denning does not get chummy time, but she does get to post pictures of him onto Facebook. Because she’s a hip disaffected college intern.
Then, on Asgard we find out Loki is really evil, because he was the one who sneaked the Orcs in during Thor’s coronation and he goes back to the Orc planet to tell the King Orc that he will sneak him in to kill Anthony Hopkins while he’s sleeping. Stringer Bell tries to stop him and Loki uses the Orc Freeze Ray to freeze him. Apparently, Gort only stops you from taking it out of the Weapons Museum if you’re not the Prince of Asgaard.
Speaking of Gort, it’s around this time that Loki decides that the best way to cover all his bases is to send Gort to Earth to kill Thor and the frat buddies who have gone to Earth to retrieve Thor because they have rightfully begun to get suspicious of Loki and his ram horns.
This is their suspicious face. (Girl not pictured.)
This leads to my third favorite line in the movie, which is when Agent Caspar sees Gort, and it like, “Oh, this must be one of Tony Stark’s.” Ha. Because it’s an iron man. Geddit?
Anyway, Gort is awesome, and he’s almost succeeded in achieving Loki’s goals, when Thor finally proves himself by offering to sacrifice himself for his frat buddies and Natalie Portman and is thus regranted his powers and his Hammer, which conveniently flies right back into his hand. Then he saves the day and he and the frat buddies go back to Asgard to confront Loki.
And the Very Smart Astrophysicist Natalie Portman makes out with Thor. Because apparently they are in lurve. I’m not sure why. I guess it’s because the Very Smart Astrophysicist finally found a cute guy willing to talk about wormholes with her? But I’m not sure what he sees in her. The girl frat buddy back on Asgard has more personality, no matter how many times the Very Smart Astrophysicist Natalie Portman finds a way to work Einstein-Rosen Bridges into the conversation.
See? Way more passion and just, you know, a longer acquaintance in general, than he has with the Astrophysicist.
MEANWHILE, the Orc King has arrived in Anthony Hopkins’ bedroom, where Rene Russo gets her second line in the movie, throws one punch, and then gets knocked out. The Orc King goes to kill Anthony Hopkins, and Loki jumps in and kills all the Orcs and is like, “Wow, I’m SO a savior,” and Rene Russo agrees wholeheartedly.
But don’t worry. She gets one more line in the film, when everything’s over and she and Sif the Warrior Girl talk about how down in the dumps Thor has been of late. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Point is: this movie, not so much on female characters.
Where was I? Ah, Loki. You are so clever. I honestly did not see that double-cross coming, because I had fallen hook, line and sinker into the idea that, you being willing to freeze Stringer Bell and kill your brother and your friends, you were totally evil and also genuinely interested in having your dad knocked off, too. Oops.
And everything would have worked out just FINE had not Thor showed up at that time and revealed that his adoptive brother was actually evil all along, and what else could he be, since after all, he’s really an Orc, which means he could never be as good and strong as the blonde, blue-eyed Thor could which is why Anthony Hopkins could never REALLY make him king, even though they were supposedly raised just the same.
This is when I turned to Sailor Boy and was like, “I am not sure I approve of the message of this film.”
Anyway, Loki runs off down the black opal highway to the planetarium, whereupon he immediately engages a death ray meant to fry the Orcs’ home planet, thinking that if he destroys them, it will finally prove he’s better than Thor. (???)
Thor tries to stop him and they have a big hammer-and-multiple-Loki fight on the black opal highway, and eventually Thor realizes that the only way to stop the death ray is to hammer through the black opal highway.
Yes, you heard that right.
It made no sense to me, either. But apparently, the black opal highway is like the root of the giant rainbow bridge (“Einstein-Rosen Bridge” — and apparently there’s a reason they kept having Natalie Portman go on about it) that the planetarium can sort of focus and shoot out with help from Stringer Bell. And if you break off the bridge at the point of the planetarium, the planetarium will go tumbling away into the giant black hole abyss of nothingness that APPARENTLY EXISTS RIGHT ON THE EDGE OF THE CITY OF ASGAARD.
Please note: there is no discussion of this elsewhere in the film.
So then Thor starts pounding away at the bridge, and then Loki is inexplicably like, “No! If you do that, you’ll never be able to go back to Earth!” which is supposed to be heartbreaking, because Thor supposedly loves Natalie Portman, but it doesn’t really hit, because we all know he’s going back to Earth for the Avengers movie, and plus, NO ONE believes he loves Natalie Portman, who he spent like a day flirting with.
It’s not like Captain America, who was frozen for 65 years and thus his sweetheart, who he actually knew pretty well, is ancient. Anyway, bridge breaks, he and Loki end up dangling over the side, Anthony Hopkins tries to save them, and Loki’s all, whatever, bitches, you never loved me, and lets go of Thor and goes tumbling into the abyss.
Which also doesn’t really hit because Loki is coming back for the Avengers movie too. And I am really glad of that, because he was my favorite character in this film. Plus, he’s the kind of Big Bad that Joss can actually work with. Clever, funny, unexpected.
And then it’s over. Natalie Portman is on Earth, Thor is in Asgard, everything’s kind of normal again. Which…huh. I’m not sure what was gained from that other than discovering that Loki is the bad guy? This is an interesting post about why it was the wrong ending of the film, as it requires us to buy completely into a doomed romance not in evidence (maybe it’s a big deal in the comics?) and doesn’t end up changing anything. But maybe the whole point of the Avengers will be that Loki is on Earth being difficult and the Avengers really really really need Thor’s help so they move heaven and Asgard to try to get him back to Earth?
One of the things about Netflix Watch it Now is that I keep coming across old movies from my childhood and watching them while making dinner/folding laundry/cleaning bottles and pump parts. The other day, I came across the Don Bluth cartoon, The Secret of NIMH.
I don’t know anyone from my generation who, confronted with a long list of government health agencies, couldn’t pull NIMH out of the line up due to this movie, or the Newberry award-winning children’s book it was based on (Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH). I’ve never read the book, but those Newberry folks usually know what they’re talking about, so I’m sure it’s great.
(In passing, though I knew the book title had the main characters’ name in it and specifically referenced the rats, rather than the “secret”, I didn’t know until just now that the movie had changed the character’s name from Mrs. Frisby to Mrs. Brisby. I’m guessing because of Frisbees.)
It’s very weird to view beloved old children’s movies from the other side. I actually shouted “no way!” at the screen when I saw in the credits that two of the Brisby children are voiced by Shannen Doherty and Wil Wheaton. I was also a little confused on how “intelligence-boosting” injections made Nicodemus capable of crafting magic crystal balls that can show Mrs. Brisby dramatic re-enactments of what happened to them and Jonathan capable of crafting magic amulets that convey upon the wearer all the powers of Yoda.
(Seriously, the climactic scene with the cinder block is pretty much Yoda and the X-wing in the swamps of Dagoba. The story went from Flowers for Algernon to Star Wars.)
Which is not to say I didn’t love it. Despite how little I remembered about the plot, I was surprised how many imagines I recalled, how many lines I knew by heart. What should that space in my brain be doing instead of remembering all the lines in The Secret of NIMH? I shudder to think.
Also, I might as well let y’all know right now. There’s a character in For Darkness Shows the Stars named Nicodemus. I named him that because of this film.
The news is out, and apparently my agent already has her hands on a hot copy, so I suppose I can finally, finally share the news I’ve been keeping to myself for nine months:
My SECOND full-length book this year……. ::Drumroll, please::
Yes, that’s Rachel McAdams, Harrison Ford, and Diane Keaton on there. MORNING GLORY is a new movie coming out this November from Paramount Pictures. It’s produced by JJ Abrams (Lost, Alias, Fringe, Star Trek) and written by Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada screenplay, 27 Dresses). I adapted the novel from the screenplay. The book will hit stores on October 19th.
Here’s the trailer for the film:
Now, to answer a few of the questions I know are coming…
Is this a work for hire?
Yes. I do not own the copyright to this book. It is Aline Brosh McKenna’s original idea and work. I merely adapted it for the page.
Have you met anyone involved in the film?
Nope. I was given a copy of one of the shooting scripts (watermarked with my name) to use as reference when writing the novel. When there were discrepancies between that script and the final cut of the film, I was asked to make edits. I’d love to meet people.
Have you seen the film?
No, but I’ve seen the trailer, a bunch of still shots, and one tiny scene some dude illegally recorded with his cell phone at an early screening and uploaded to You Tube. I can’t wait to go see it, though! It looks great.
How did you get this job?
My editor for the Secret Society Girl books thought I’d be a good fit for the project because of the tone and character of Becky (Rachel McAdams’s scrappy and capable up-and-coming television news producer). The script has the same irreverent yet poignant tone and larger-than-life hijinks I targeted in the Secret Society Girl books. She pitched it to me and me to Paramount. Fortunately, we all agreed.
You have always done original work before this. Why work for hire?
Why not? The truth is that there are lots of kinds of writing that I’ve “never done before” but would leap at the chance to do if anyone was interested in letting me. This year, I’ve also published my first short stories, which was something else I’ve never done before, but I had a total blast. I’ve also sold my first science fiction book and my first retelling. As for the novelization, I loved the chance to be able to adapt someone else’s characters and words, to try to do justice to the story they told and the way they wanted things presented. I probably would never have written a character like Becky all by myself, but to write her through the eyes of the screenwriter who did allowed me to stretch my own wings in terms of character creation. I learned a lot by forcing myself into those constraints, and I also learned a lot by deconstructing such a fine screenplay. To write such an adaptation was on my writer’s goal list. Check.
There are three additional reasons I took this job. 1) Yay! A job! Freelancers like me like that. 2) It was a REALLY good screenplay. Of course I loved Aline Brosh McKenna’s other films, so I had a hunch this one would be great too, but this screenplay made me laugh out loud several times. I wanted to be able to translate some of that wit to novel form. 3) I love working with my brilliant Random House editor, and this was a great opportunity to do another project with her.
I don’t live in America. Where can I get this book?
Currently, Czech, Polish, Korean, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Spanish rights have sold for this book. Everyone in the US and Canada, though, can buy it on October 19th.
I’ve recently been watching a lot of old Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn films. I adore Katharine Hepburn films, with or without her real-life love, Tracy. The African Queen, Phiadelphia, The Lion in Winter — Hepburn is a presence — regal, clever, riveting. (In fact, I think the only film of hers I don’t like is Bringing Up Baby, in which she plays a ditz, albeit a secretly clever one.) And in her romances with Tracy, I have noticed a common theme: Tracy’s character is usually quite explicitly attracted to her character because of her intelligence. In Woman of the Year, he does not want her to be a housewife — he wants her to be her high-powered, world-changing self, just with a little more consideration for him and their life together. In Desk Set, there’s that marvelous scene on the roof where you can actually see Tracy’s computer programmer falling head over heels for Hepburn’s research librarian as she nails every trick question he asks her.
It’s rare to see this trope in romantic films, but I love it. This probably comes as no surprise to anyone who knows me or has read my books. I tend to write characters whose intelligence is very important to them, and who would rather be valued for their brains than anything else. Nothing makes Amy more angry than to be called stupid. Nothing makes Astrid more frustrated than to be told that knowledge and intelligence won’t help her. And when these girls find love, part of the way they can tell is that the person who loves them is really attracted to their smarts.
I was struck by this, watching a Hepburn/Tracy the other day, that it’s not something you see so often in films or stories these days. For all the talk of “strong female characters,” they seem to focus on physical strength. I think a lot of romances fail because there isn’t that THING where the audience recognizes why character A is utterly perfect for character B — but even when they succeed, when they have that THING, it’s very rarely, “Oh, baby, you’re so SMART.”
Long-time authors talk about author theme — or they used to; these days it’s all “brand brand brand.” Author theme is often described as something you find yourself writing about over and over again, even subconsciously, regardless of what genre you’re writing in. It’s not often something you can recognize after a handful of books — you need to have a substantive body of work. (The authors I hear talking about it most have usually been in the biz for decades.) I know that my two series are feminist books — they deal deeply with modern women’s issues like sexism, sexuality, and the expectations and limitations placed on modern young women. (That they deal with them disguised as comedies and fantasies is my own little trick.) But that’s the nature of those series — even though it’s six books. I don’t think the book I’m working on now is like that, or the one-that-isn’t-Ascendant coming out in October. However, each of those books are still about women who are valued for their intelligence — and I was attracted to the latter project in large part for that reason. I don’t think this is necessarily an author theme, but I do think it’s clear that I have a “type.” I probably wouldn’t get too far if I tried to write about a ditz.
What movies or books have you read recently that present this kind of story? I want more!
I am a big, big fan of retellings, in general. I think the first time I was aware of one was when my parents introduced me to West Side Story. My dad is not the biggest musical fan, but he loves West Side Story, because ballet-dancing gang members are totally awesome. I saw West Side Story way before I saw or read Romeo and Juliet, in fact.
(My husband, Shakespeare lover that he is, is probably even now drawing up divorce papers. Nah, just kidding. In fact, last year, he got me tickets to the new bilingual WSS when it was in DC gearing up for its Broadway run.)
Anyway, thus began my long love affair with retellings. I love Clueless, I love Bridget Jones’s Diary, I love Valiant, I love O, Brother, Where Art Thou.
And of course, given my long and devoted love, I’ve come to several conclusions about what makes for the best kind of retellings,or indeed, what even constitutes a “retelling” as opposed to an “adaptation” or a “reboot.”
For instance: The Baz Luhrman film Romeo + Juliet is not a retelling. It’s an adaptation. Though set in modern day California, it uses Shakespeare’s dialogue. West Side Story, on the other hand, takes the general plot (two young people from feuding groups fall in love, igniting street warfare and death) and certain character relationships (the “Romeo” and the “Mercutio” are best friends, the “Juliet” and the “Tybalt” are closely related) from Shakespeare’s play, and creates something entirely new.
On the other hand, I think the Drew Barrymore film, Ever After would definitely count as a “retelling.” The framing device reveals that the story is going to be about the “truth” behind the legend of Cinderella. There’s no magic, and the fairy godmother is really Leonardo Da Vinci. (Oh, and the prince recognizes a heck of a lot more than Cinderella’s slipper!)
It starts to get a little sticky at times. Now they’ve even got these “remixes” — stuff like Pride & Prejudice and Zombies, which takes the actual text of P&P and mixes it up with original material. (And no, since i get asked this all the time… my book is not one of these.)
Adaptations (by their very nature) and “reboots” (due to the rights issues involved) are much more common in film than in books. (I say, just as John Scalzi announces his sale of the “reboot” of the Little Fuzzy series.) So what differentiates these things? Might be one of those “I know it when I see it” things. It usually requires a very different setting. Batman Begins is a reboot, because there have been other Batman film franchises. Otherwise, it would have been an adaptation, because it was adapted from the comics.And yet, Ever After, which takes place in a frocks and swords European fairy tale-ish setting, is a retelling.
Gah, now I’m even confusing myself. Perhaps I should just stick with “I know it when I see it.”
How excited am I about the movie adaptation of the Beauty and the Beast retelling BEASTLY, by Alex Flinn? 1) I totally loved the book, 2) I love how many adaptations are coming out of YA novels these days, 3) Neil Patrick Harris.
Also, dudes in hoods are hot. I think I spent four books detailing that little insight into my psyche.
In passing, is it me, or does Beauty and the Beast, in particular, lend itself very well to retellings? I can’t tell you how many romance novels I’ve read that are retellings of that book, and one of my favorite YA novels of all time, Valiant (my troll love is vast), is also a retelling of that story. I think because it has a really great theme about loving someone for their insides, and the magic in that story is so metaphorical in nature, that it can truly be whatever you want it to be.
Speaking of Holly Black, I definitely credit a few conversations I had with her in Ireland last year with my decision to move forward with this project. Holly has tacked several retellings, and done it so skillfully that more than one person I know has said to me, “Oh, yeah! Valiant *is* Beauty and the Beast! Now I see it!” Her newest retelling is, of course, White Cat, which is based on the (rather obscure) fairy tale by the same name. Having read both Holly’s incredibly awesome fantabulous book and the fairy tale, I would argue that even fewer people would make the connection. You know, if they’d ever read the fairy tale. Which most people haven’t.
My point being, is that Holly’s way of thinking about retellings freed my mind from some of the doubt demons I had about tackling my own. And basically, what I got from the conversation was this: fair game. No matter what the source material, that’s THEIR story. Your story is your own, and you can feel free to jettison, combine, and remix whatever elements you need to to make your story the best it can be.In fact, the more it is your own, the better I like the retelling.
For instance, the troll in Valiant (unlike the boy in Beastly) is not under a curse. He is, in fact, a troll. True love will not make him “beautiful” again. Because that wasn’t the point of Black’s retelling, which was more about Val (the “Beauty” character) and her personal journey. Whereas it is the point of Flinn’s retelling, because her story focuses on Kyle’s (the “Beast”) personal journey and how his “curse” was the catalyst for that to occur.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s not Bridget’s little sister who runs off with a disreputable man, thereby ruining the family’s reputation, it’s her mother, whose lover scams the Jones family friends out of their savings. (If you’ve only seen the movie, you are probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about, since they cut this plotline.) But in both cases, the fact that Darcy (it’s so convenient when characters get the same names in retellings, isn’t it?) tracks down the scoundrel in order to save Bridget/Lizzy’s family is the catalyst for them to reunite. In West Side Story, Tony (Romeo) still kills Maria’s (Juliet’s) beloved relative after the man kills Tony/Romeo’s best friend, sending him on the run and forcing Maria/Juliet to make a horrible choice between her family loyalty and her one true love.
The point is, in a retelling, you are taking a particular part of a story (a plot, a character, a story question, a theme) and using it as a jumping off place from which to create something entirely new. West Side Story used the plot and characters of Romeo & Juliet to talk about race relations in mid-century Manhattan. Valiant took plot elements and themes from Beauty and the Beast to tell a story about dark fairies, murder, and drug addiction. Clueless cut and combined and jiggled around character relationships from Emma to fit into a late 20th century lifestyle. And you can do those things because you are serving the needs of your story, and in order to create that omelet, well, you might have to break a few of the old story’s sacred eggs.
In other words: No fairy godmother? No problem. Use Da Vinci.
There has been a lot of chatter on Twitter lately about the role of gender in YA books. On one hand, women writers and female-centric books dominate the YA market. (An interesting phenomenon given the “general knowledge” that a girl will read a book by or about any gender, but most boys will only read books about–or sometimes by–males.)
On the other, there’s still a lot of sexism. Female characters are held toridiculousstandards (especially by female readers!) and vilified for having faults. In YA fiction, as in adult fiction, male writers are showered with praise and awards while comparable books written by female writers are not. Year after year, critics “best of” lists are all about the men. In that post, critic Lizzy Skurnick writes:
I got a glimmer of an answer last year as I sat in a board room hashing out the winners for one of the awards for which I am a judge. Our short list was pretty much split evenly along gender lines. But as we went through each category, a pattern emerged. Some books, it seemed, were “ambitious.” Others were well-wrought, but somehow . . . “small.” “Domestic.” “Unam –” what’s the word? “– bititous.”
Oh, those damn scribbling women and their little domestic novels!
A few months ago, I visited the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Library in New York City. The exhibit displayed some of Austen’s letters, first editions of her works, things like that. But the exhibit that stuck with me the longest was on on Nabokov. Seems he wasn’t such a fan of Jane (along with Emerson, Twain, and other males):
“I dislike Jane, and I am prejudiced, in fact, against all women writers. They are in another class. Could never see anything in Pride and Prejudice.”
He was called out by Edmund Wilson, a famous literary critic. Great, huh? Well, wait until you see the manner of the calling-out:
“You are mistaken about Jane Austin. I think you ought to read Mansfield Park. Her greatness is due precisely to the fact that her attitude toward her work is like that of a man, that is, of an artist, and quite unlike that of the typical women novelist, who exploits her feminine day dreams . . . She is, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest English writers.”
So she’s good, but only because she writes like a man. Astounding, huh? Because no male writer (and certainly not Nabokov), ever made a great work of literature out of exploiting his own daydreams. Right? Anyway, Nabokov revisited Austen, found an appreciation for Mansfield Park, and proceeded to teach it in his lit classes at Cornell. All’s well that ends well, I suppose.
As I said in yesterday’s post, I watched the new PBS version of Emma. I have to say it won me over in the end, but only because I am a sucker for the proposal scene and the way the two characters, who have had such an unequal relationship throughout the entire book come together in a moment of true mutual respect. Yes, it’s due to a big misunderstanding, but it’s quite moving, and it makes you realize that when they are married, he won’t treat her like the child he spent the first half of the book treating her as.
But I digress. My point here is that each episode of the mini-series began with actress Laura Linney addressing the screen and lecturing: “Is Jane Austen too ordinary and narrow for today?” she asks us. Linney’s point turns out to be that Emma Woodhouse is not Harry Potter or Edward Cullen or Wolverine. That she’s just a normal human with normal flaws. (Those magical guys all have “normal flaws” too, though.) However, the use of the word “narrow” is suspect. Ordinary? Fine. But narrow far too closely echoes another famous critic of Austen’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson:
I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seems to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in their wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched and narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer is . . . marriageableness . . . Suicide is more respectable.
Oh, Ralph, tell us how you really feel!
It must be nice to live in a world where your options are wider than “marriageableness” or not. I feel like Emerson must have read the first line of Pride & Prejudice, took it at face value, and then went for a walk in the woods. The women in Austen are concerned about marriage because marriage was the only “business” they were allowed to conduct. And Austen’s characters do in fact realize the folly of bad marriages. Elizabeth Bennet would rather risk the kind of poverty that ends up befalling the Dashwoods than wed Mr. Collins. Her friend Charlotte decides that the stigma of being an old maid rates higher on the humiliation scale than that of being married to a fool with good prospects. In Austen’s novels, the onset of love goes hand in hand with the onset of respect. They are romantic within the realm of practicality. Talk about a woman’s daydream! Those were high hopes for the 18th century gal. (And if you want to read about how easily it can all go wrong, check out Millenium Hall by Sarah Scott.)
So Austen is narrow. But it doesn’t stop in the 18th century. I recently read a New York Times profile of the writer/director/producer Nancy Meyers. Meyers is famous for her women-focused domestic comedies. She writes about affluent women and their families and their romances. Sounding familiar? Something’s Gotta Give, The Holiday, It’s Complicated — these are hers. The first page of the long article is devoted to talking about how Meyers was asked to move from her table at a tony LA restaurant. Ha, see? Even powerful Hollywood moguls get no respect — you know, if they’re women.
Then the writer goes on to talk about how important and influential and successful Meyers is — never letting go of the fact that gosh, it’s hard since she’s a chick. In response to a complain about the number of takes she likes to do of every scene, her (male) agent is quoted as saying there wouldn’t be a complaint if Nancy was Mike Nichols. And gosh, Jack Nicholson respects her, too! I especially loved this bit:
It would be tempting to attribute Meyers’s uninflated manner to her being female — to having been trained from birth in the art of the soft sell — except for the fact that she is more straightforward than girlish, more clear than coy. “She’s just really smart and doesn’t seem to be impeded by all the weirdness that everyone brings to whichever gender they are,” says Helen Hunt, who starred in “What Women Want.”
In other words, just because she’s powerful, don’t fear that she’s that horrible, aggressive kind of female. Don’t fear that she’s a bitch.
Later, the writer, Daphne Merkin, calls Meyers’s women-centric, romantic films “retro” and “post-feminist” — tags I find rather shocking. Because they are romantic? The women in Meyers’s films are successful and (usually) wealthy from their own accomplishments. Diane Keaton’s character in Something’s Gotta Give is a hit playwright with a tenured professor (in Women’s Studies, yet!) for a sister. Cameron Diaz’s character in Holiday owns her own movie trailer production company (and a mansion in Beverly Hills). Diaz puts it bluntly in that film when she tells Jude Law’s single-dad character that she feels comfortable telling him about her success because she knows he won’t be intimidated, having been raised by a mother who was a high level executive editor at Random House. The romantic elements of the film do not detract from the feminist ones.
And the writer momentarily agrees:
“These women are self-sufficient and notably energetic. They may not have men, at least when we first meet them, but they make do with friends and children and siblings, for whom they whip up tasty dinners and homemade pies and laugh over their own situations. When men do appear on the scene, whether in the form of a babe-chasing player like Jack Nicholson’s Harry or Alec Baldwin’s renewedly impassioned Jake (or Dennis Quaid’s Nick Parker in “The Parent Trap,” for that matter), they awaken dormant desires that nevertheless have to be fit into pre-existing, busy lives.”
But then she spends a few pages obsessing over the filmaker’s focus on set dressings. She criticizes the thread count in the upholstery as being needlessly lush and overindulgent. Let us unpack the following quote:
“Whether her insistence on “softening the message” [Meyer's quote, which I for one believe was taken out of context] through plush surroundings ultimately weakens the films — renders them more glossy and insular than they need be, even for a genre that is inherently fizzy — is a question I have debated with myself and others.”
So, because women-centric romantic comedies are “inherently fizzy” we should make doubly sure to grit them up in a visual sense? I wonder how many other filmmakers are asked not to put their characters in fancy cars or film in exotic locales in order to, you know, make something real. These damn domestic female stories!
“At worst, her films can give off an air of tidy unreality — and it is this unexamined aspect, I think, this failure to even hint at darkness, that most fuels critical ire. Richard Schickel condemns Meyers with faint praise, hinting that she and the studios have struck a devil’s pact of sorts. “Clearly there is an audience for sweet little middle-class romances of the kind she makes, and it pleases the studios to indulge a woman, whom they would not trust with more vigorous projects. It’s as if they’re trying to say: ‘Hey, we’re not sexists. We make Nancy Meyers movies.’ ””
“Sweet little middle class romances.” (First of all, anyone who lives in a house like the Hamptons mansion in Something’s Gotta Give is NOT middle class, fwiw.) But can’t you just hear Emerson’s or Nabokov’s dismissal of Austen in those words? Can’t you hear the dismissal of that roomful of critics deciding on literary awards? Why is domestic a dirty word? Why is a character driven movie about a successful person dealing with their personal lives a Best Picture nominee if it stars George Clooney, but not if it stars Meryl Streep? I think I’m inclined to agree with Meyer’s agent. An article like this would never be written if Nancy was Ned.
I leave you with this (there’s a little bit of language at the end):
There’s been a lot of talk around the blogosphere recently about the general love of bad boys. I’ve seen a few folks saying that nice guys can work too (and a few more actually claiming “bad boy” status on characters I would certainly categorize as “nice guys”) but it’s pretty much nothing compared to the wave of bad boys taking over books.
My writer friends have been noting the phenomenon as well. One writer was bemoaning the current trend of “the badder the better” and saying it used to be the bad boy hero was some dude who’d just killed a man. Then it became an assassin with a heart of gold. Then just an assassin. Then just a murderer. Another writer wondered if this onslaught was a factor of readers wanting to live vicariously through the exploits of a fictional heroine who walks on the wild side with a lover who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But, hasn’t that always been the case with bad boys in fiction? This isn’t a NEW trend. So why now are books filled with ever more reprehensible men?
Bad boys never did it for me. I never had a thing for Heathcliff (abusive, horrible puppy-killer!) or Mr. Rochester. I liked Gilbert Blythe and the fine, upstanding, stick-in-the-mud (if jerky) Mr. Darcy. (Actually, I *really* liked Captain Wentworth, who I suppose had the technical bad boy edge of being a privateer.) I thought Angel was a sociopath, and though I liked Spike as a character, I was never attracted to him and found his relationship with Buffy to be utterly laughable (as opposed to his relationship with Drusilla, which I actually found quite effective and moving). Me, I liked Riley — til they ruined him, that is.
(It is important to note that I do not think that angst=bad boy. Edmund Pevensie, upon whom I have a crush I’ve actually been paid to write about in detail, is angsty — but not a bad boy. He had one little lapse in judgment, and proceeds to spend the rest of the books atoning for it. A lot of bad boys are, however, angsty, which is usually our entry into sympathizing with them.)
So the only bad boy I ever fell for was Logan Echolls of Veronica Mars. And I fell hard. Perhaps it helped that Logan was still a child, and it was possible for him to rise above his abusive father and horrific home life that was making him into a psychotic jackass (See above re: angst and sympathy). I watched the end of the first season of VM with my heart in my throat worried/terrified that Logan had murdered his ex-girlfriend Lilly in a fit of jealous rage. And through it all, I loved him. My one bad-boy crush.
Perhaps my love for Logan helped when I found myself crafting my own bad-boy love interest — or what one reviewer (positively, if you can believe it) called “the asshole love interest.” It certainly hadn’t been my intention to write that guy, and it was really challenging too, to make it believable — to me — that a reasonable woman would take that kind of risk with her heart or with her safety. It took the better part of a book to set up a situation where I could even get her to a point where she’d initiate it, and another book entirely to get the relationship off the ground. It had to be believable for me.
And it worked, if the reader responses are anything to go by. People love Poe. I sometimes wonder how much they love him, and how much they love the trope of the bad boy. I worked hard on him, but most folks were on board right from the start. There’s something about bad boys that gives them that capital. Ironically, though bad boys have a population of readers ready to love them from the word go, good boys have to work five times as hard.
Here are the struggles they face:
If they are sweet and considerate, they are perceived as weak.
If they are steadfast, loyal, and sure of their feelings for the girl, they are perceived as desperate, lying, or too good to be true.
If they are fine upstanding citizens, they are perceived as bland and goody-two-shoes.
And to those naysayers, I present Mr. Lloyd Dobler:
Let’s face it, we all want John Cusack standing outside our house with a boombox.
And the whole point of Say Anything, really, is that Lloyd embodies everything that a bad boy is not. He’s sweet, and considerate, and unassuming, and steadfast, and stand-up, and absolutely, unequivocally in love with a girl that everyone thinks outclasses him.
MIKE: I wanted to ask you: how’d you get Diane Court to go out with you? LLOYD: I called her up. MIKE: Yeah, but how come it worked? I mean, like, what are you? LLOYD: I’m Lloyd Dobler. MIKE: This is great. This gives me hope. Thanks.
Lloyd isn’t boring or weak (he can manhandle drunks at a party pretty handily), but he’s also pretty accepting of the fact that his general lack of ambition and his vague idea of being a “professional kickboxer” doesn’t hold a candle to Diane’s future and destiny. So why do we like him so much?
A friend of mine told me it’s because Say Anything is, ultimately, Lloyd’s story. It’s not the story of a high-powered ambitious girl who accepts the gentle love and devotion of a nice guy like Lloyd Dobler. It’s about Lloyd, everyone’s favorite everyman, who through true love and devotion wins his prize of the beautiful girl. We’re with Lloyd. We really want him to get his heart’s desire, and when he does, we cheer.
But what if this was Diane’s story? Would we then perceive Say Anything as being about a very successful girl who takes pity on the class slacker, has a little summer romance, and when her life goes all topsy-turvy, settles, knowing this guy is willing to be her house-husband and general shoulder to lean on in England? Comforting, sure, but not exactly the stuff of high passion.
Heck, even Lloyd’s cadre of girlfriends (a delicate balancing act, from a writer’s perspective, to present Lloyd as being platonically beloved by women without coding him as someone who is not boyfriend material) have to have a discussion about his catch-factor:
REBECCA: Hey, I know this is a strange thing to say, but maybe Diane Court really likes Lloyd. COREY: If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd? (long pause) Yeah. DC: Yeah! REBECCA: Yeah.
And maybe it also helps that Lloyd is so in love with Diane — standing-outside-the-window-with-a-boombox kind of love. But of course, that kind of thing can backfire on a nice guy. In high school, my friends and I used to say that a romantic gesture had nothing to do with the gesture — it was the guy doing it. If you liked the guy sending you secret notes and flowers, it was romantic. If you didn’t, it was lame and stalkery. If it wasn’t cutie-pie John Cusack — Lloyd Dobler who we were all rooting for — standing out there with the boom box, we’d probably recommend that Diane call the cops.
I ran into that problem myself with Brandon. The sweeter and more romantic Brandon was to Amy (and, most importantly, the less that Amy responded to it) the more his actions were viewed by the readership as lame and desperate. So maybe it’s that Amy actually likes the equally lame (from an objective standpoint) stuff that Poe pulls. I mean, a half-eaten pack of LifeSavers as a present? Not exactly diamonds and chocolates.
As the reactions to the boys in the SSG series came in, I was fascinated by what readers chose to believe of Amy’s narration and what they discarded. All first person narrators are to some extent, unreliable, in that the reader only sees what they see. Even if they are telling the absolute truth to the reader, they are not omniscient, and they bring their own biases into the situation. Take, for example, Amy’s initial reaction in SSG to Clarissa’s overtures in the library. Because Amy hates Clarissa, she thinks Clarissa is trying to be bitchy to her and to question Amy’s right to be tapped by Rose & Grave. Later, of course, we discover that Clarissa was honestly curious. Readers assume Amy’s version of events, and are corrected only when Amy is.
(Of course, some of them are never corrected. I am always surprised by the number of letters I get from people who hate Clarissa, even though Amy grows to love her.)
So perhaps readers’ disdain for Brandon’s romantic efforts is a result of Amy’s disdain. And yet, Amy is plenty disdainful of Poe through both SSG and UTR, and I got lots of letters at the end of UTR that were pro-Poe. (Which, honestly, was a relief, given what I was about to do with the storyline.) It’s hard for me to say, since I’m the writer. Were there subtle manipulations coding the reader to root for Poe over Brandon? Sure, why not? Are my skills as a writer, then, not up to snuff if I haven’t succeeded in making you root for the romantic coupling of my choice?
Now there’s a question to get neurotic over.
It’s interesting that there seems to be a definite line between “steadfast” and “obsessive”. The former is the realm of the good boy, and it’s apparently boring and desperate. The latter is the realm of the bad boy (he climbs in your bedroom window, he stalks you, he’s always there, watching you). It’s apparently sexy. Spike is an excellent example of this. He chased after Buffy no matter how much she told him to stop, no matter how much his obsession with her became increasingly desperate and pathetic (first making his real girlfriend, Harmony, dress up like Buffy for sex games, then later, making his own Buffy sexbot), and viewers still found him incredibly attractive and cheered him on. Now, tell me truthfully. If you found out that some dude had a crush on you and when you rejected him, he dressed up a sex doll to look just like you — ummm. Hot? I don’t think so.
(I found the most lovelorn pic of Spike I could for this part, and, sidebar, do you know if you just google the word “Spike” this is most of what comes up? No actual, you know, spikes.)
There are some old screenwriting tricks writers sometimes use to create sympathy for an otherwise unlikeable character. If he’s mean, show that other people — people we’re inclined to like — like him. Have him be sweet to children or small animals.This is called “save the cat.”
When we see Logan going to get the belt his father will beat him with, we understand there’s a reason behind his jackass nature. When Spike risks death to protect Dawn, we see that he really does care about both Summers girls. Personal sacrifice, vulnerability, unshakeable interest in the heroine (who can’t help but be at least flattered, though returning the interest is the brass ring)… these are all games that you get to play with the bad boy. But the good guy? He’s not otherwise unlikeable. The readers already know his vulnerabilities. They like him.
They just don’t lurrvvve him.
Except when they do? Why do we swoon over Lloyd Dobler when he’s nothing like Logan Echols?Or are they different populations entirely that do the swooning? Are some of always going to be Team Bad Boy and some of us always going to be Team Nice Guy? And what does that make of me, Team Nice Guy, except for that one little dalliance with Logan?
The Winners of the Jeri Smith-Ready Giveaway are: B.E. Sanderson and Rhiannon! Please email me about your prizes. The way this will work is, the first winner to email me gets their choice of either Wicked Game or Bad to the Bone (include your choice in your email). The second winner to email me gets whatever is left.
Last night, SB and I went to see Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Now, I’m not very familiar with HBP (Or Deathly Hallows, to be perfectly honest). I listened to HBP on audio twice, and read DH once. Compare that to multiple readings of the the first five, including dozens (probably) of 3&4. So I may just not be remembering things correctly. I’m not as familiar with the book, so I’m not always aware of when a script makes changes for the better, or are able to bypass things that might work in books and tell it differently for the sake of the visual medium (something that the Lord of the Rings movies, for example, did brilliantly). Also, I felt that HP6 was a tad problematic on a fundamental level (Harry spends half the book on a mission from Dumbledore to discover a secret that, eventually, it seems that Dumbledore already knows — not to mention that the whole Half-Blood Prince’s anticlimactic reveal). I do, however, feel that the film didn’t necessarily solve these problems (it really could have been an easy fix) and introduced others that were entirely unnecessary. I’m not super familiar with Yates’s work (I saw OOP and liked it, but pretty much any opinion of mine would have been a step up from the book), so maybe it’s just that his story sensibilities are UTTERLY different than mine. But. Yeah. His story sensibilities are utterly different than mine.
For instance, was there any particular reason that we needed to spend about as much time on Hermione’s charmed birds when she’s crying in the courtyard as we do on, oh, I don’t know. Dumbledore’s death scene? Throughout the movie, there seemed to be this odd focus on story elements and scenes that didn’t, in the end, seem to have much bearing on the entirety. There were a LOT of shots of the overacting Lavendar Brown going all mooney-eyed over Ron. A. Lot. It was funny the first few times. Then it got old. Also, was it me or was Ron shunted almost completely to the side in this film? It would have been easier to buy Hermione’s vast unspoken love for him if he were actually included in some of the serious scenes. His character has entirely been reduced to a comic relief. (Compare to Sokka of Avatar, who manages to be both goofy and a contributing member of the team.) He just sits there, staring dumbly into the distance, out of earshot of their very important plot conversation at the big end sequence where Hermione promises to be there for Harry when he says he’s going to drop out of Hogwarts.
And let us not speak of the mishandling of the entire Half Blood Prince plotline. It’s awkward in the original, but it COULD have been integrated so much better. The true horror of Sectum Sempra is not simply that Harry doesn’t realize what a horrible spell it is (after all, this is after Malfoy breaks his nose with his boot), but also that it reminds Harry of the torture that he himself underwent at the hands of the evil headmaster in book 5. Thou shalt not cut with invisible objects. (And thou shalt not cast spells thou dost not understand, either, but whatever.) And then, Ginny Weasely recommends hiding the book? Ginny Weasley, who knows from evil books by mysterious authors? Guys, we already saw you burning newspapers in the first scene. I think that’s a gun on the wall.
Speaking of the Weasely house — what was up with that whole Christmas thing? Does Ginny Weasely really go around tying boys’ shoes in the book? There was a lengthy sequence I could have done without. And the Death Eaters came to… do what exactly? Make sure everyone was well out of the house before they burned it to the ground? Speaking of what the Death Eaters come to do — and again, this might be betraying my bad memory of the book — but don’t they have a huge battle at Hogwarts? They come in and start attacking people? The werewolf guy bites all kinds of folks, including one of the adult Weasely’s who came to help in an OOP capacity? These Death Eaters in the movie — I’m not sure why they were there. To back up Draco? I mean, what was the whole point of the yearlong, laboriously detailed and repeated struggle with the Vanishing Cabinet? So Bellatrix could come in and break some windows? Srsly?
In passing, moviemakers, one of the benefits of being able to cut away to the villain doing villainous things throughout the entire film is that at the end you don’t need that scene you often have in books where the heroes and the villain talk about what the villain had been doing the entire film. Also, the idea that Harry just sits around while the Death Eaters kill his mentor is a lot harder to swallow when Harry is, in fact, just sitting around, and not immobilized, invisible, and wandless as he is in the book.
So that was the bad. It is a testament, perhaps, to the mythic/epic qualities and my love of hte series that despite these drawbacks, I did enjoy the film. I am moved by the story. I guess it’s a question of whether I want to watch these movies as movies in their own right or whether I just think of them kind of like fan art — I watch them to be reminded of how much I liked hte books and to be reminded of my favorite things about the books. A few of my favorite parts:
Jim Broadbent. In general, I love everything this actor does, but I thought he was a particularly good choice for Slughorn, who is one of the juiciest parts in the entirety of the series, if you ask me. Bellatrix may be sexier and more fun to play, but it’s difficult to pull off what Slughorn must — as the only “good” Slytherin in the entire series, he’s got a big burden, and he’s an incredibly complex, flawed character. Broadbent nailed it. Soooooo good. Every scene he was in was positively riveting.
I do like the new Dumbledore. He was so good here.
I like how they KINDA made an argument for the whole “go be friends with Slughorn” thing, making it about Dumbledore trying to figure out how MANY horcruxes Tom had made. Though they probably could have hit that plot point harder. (Though, honestly, wherefore the new Damienesque Tom? He looked so off. Was Christian Coulson not available again?)
The expanded Draco scenes. That actor is also shaping up rather nicely. They give a lot of credit to the main three, but some of the other kids are great. (More Neville, if you please!)
Luna Lovegood is my hero.
The Katie Bell sequence was fantastic and terrifying. It was terrifying in the book and just as terrifying in the film. Kinda had a Japanese horror-film quality to it, don’t you think? Like something you might see in The Ring?
I did not go see the midnight showing of WATCHMEN last night. Too much to do. I didn’t even make it up until midnight, let alone 3 a.m.
Sailor Boy, who first attracted my attention doing a Spawn impression (long, long story involving Tim Curry, and not the way y’all think) and has introduced me to many a comic book and graphic novel since then, has dropped hints that he may wait to see it until my return from Ireland. But I’d owe him one. In the meantime, we’ll have to content ourselves with this brilliant, subtle, and incredibly perverted little bit of parody (The Scooby Doo Bubastis might be my favorite part).
I’m not sure how funny (and/or disturbing) this is to people who haven’t read the book. But trust me, it’s a doozy.
I’ve recently been watching a lot of old Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn films. I adore Katharine Hepburn films, with or without her real-life love, Tracy. The African Queen, Phiadelphia, The Lion in Winter — Hepburn is a presence — regal, clever, riveting. (In fact, I think the only film of hers I don’t like is Bringing Up Baby, in which she plays a ditz, albeit a secretly clever one.) And in her romances with Tracy, I have noticed a common theme: Tracy’s character is usually quite explicitly attracted to her character because of her intelligence. In Woman of the Year, he does not want her to be a housewife — he wants her to be her high-powered, world-changing self, just with a little more consideration for him and their life together. In Desk Set, there’s that marvelous scene on the roof where you can actually see Tracy’s computer programmer falling head over heels for Hepburn’s research librarian as she nails every trick question he asks her.
In Bridget Jones’s Diary, it’s not Bridget’s little sister who runs off with a disreputable man, thereby ruining the family’s reputation, it’s her mother, whose lover scams the Jones family friends out of their savings. (If you’ve only seen the movie, you are probably wondering what the heck I’m talking about, since they cut this plotline.) But in both cases, the fact that Darcy (it’s so convenient when characters get the same names in retellings, isn’t it?) tracks down the scoundrel in order to save Bridget/Lizzy’s family is the catalyst for them to reunite. In West Side Story, Tony (Romeo) still kills Maria’s (Juliet’s) beloved relative after the man kills Tony/Romeo’s best friend, sending him on the run and forcing Maria/Juliet to make a horrible choice between her family loyalty and her one true love.
My writer friends have been noting the phenomenon as well. One writer was bemoaning the current trend of “the badder the better” and saying it used to be the bad boy hero was some dude who’d just killed a man. Then it became an assassin with a heart of gold. Then just an assassin. Then just a murderer. Another writer wondered if this onslaught was a factor of readers wanting to live vicariously through the exploits of a fictional heroine who walks on the wild side with a lover who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But, hasn’t that always been the case with bad boys in fiction? This isn’t a NEW trend. So why now are books filled with ever more reprehensible men?
It’s interesting that there seems to be a definite line between “steadfast” and “obsessive”. The former is the realm of the good boy, and it’s apparently boring and desperate. The latter is the realm of the bad boy (he climbs in your bedroom window, he stalks you, he’s always there, watching you). It’s apparently sexy. Spike is an excellent example of this. He chased after Buffy no matter how much she told him to stop, no matter how much his obsession with her became increasingly desperate and pathetic (first making his real girlfriend, Harmony, dress up like Buffy for sex games, then later, making his own Buffy sexbot), and viewers still found him incredibly attractive and cheered him on. Now, tell me truthfully. If you found out that some dude had a crush on you and when you rejected him, he dressed up a sex doll to look just like you — ummm. Hot? I don’t think so.
