Friday cause of inappropriate amusement: I've stumbled across three posts now which complain that Hollywood plans to film The Never-Ending Story again and call this a desecration of "the original film/movie". Why does this amuse me? Well, because Michael Ende, the author of the original novel, which happens to be one of my favourite novels full stop, hated that movie. And when I use the term "hate" I do not speak in lj hyperbole. He was absolutely horrified by it, raged in every interview he gave after seeing that film about how it managed to get the characters wrong, the themes, and how it completely cheapened and hollywoodized (his term) everything. He cursed the director and the producer (Peterson & Eichinger, respectively), he hated the set design and the way the creatures looked (especially the dragon, because he had been rather specific in his descriptions of Fuchur; second in his authorial ire came the palace of the Child-Like Empress and the Child-like Empress herself - "they made that poor girl look like as if she was in an American beauty pageant"), and his editor at the time, Roman Hocke, told me how rage about the movie contributed to Ende's failing health. He didn't quite blame it for Ende's death, but you get the general tendency.

Now, given this, I can't quite decide whether our late author upon hearing this news would react with "not again" or "revenge at last!"

Personally? As a reader of the novel who was a teenager by the time it was filmed, I found the movie mildly disappointing, both because Bastian Balthasar Bux wasn't the fat bespectacled boy described but your avarage thin good looking movie kid, and Atreyu didn't have green skin, but most of all because it only covered half of the novel. But there were sequences that worked for me, and on the whole, I didn't come out raging, I just never felt a need to watch it again. The radio production, btw, was superbly done, by contrast. Now I rather doubt a new film version will be closer to the book, though I might be wrong here, but I certainly don't feel it would be sacrilege. The book already made it through the first film and two sequels who looked horrid even in the trailers, which is why I didn't watch them. So another film version really doesn't make a difference. They do it to Jane Austen all the time.

From bitterbyrden. I went to imdb.com, and looked up the keywords for ten of my favourite films. Now you guess which ones they are. I tried to avoid the keywords that would have made it too obvious, and some I included because they, while accurate, completely cracked me up when I found them used for these particular movies.



1) Dysfunctional Family + Italian Food + Catholic Church + Fish - The Godfather, first guessed by wychwood

2) Plundering + Clock + Personality Cult + Interrogation + Illegitimate Son - Lawrence of Arabia, first guessed by estepheia

3) Murder + Experiment Gone Wrong + Owl + Box Office Flop - Blade Runner, first guessed by elyssadc

4) Chicago Illinois + Toothache + Technique + Dying Words - Citizen Kane, first guessed by elyssadc

5) Loss of Mother + Employer Employee Relationship + Fire + Landowner - Gone With The Wind, first guessed by gehayi

6) Dysfunctional Marriage + Power Struggle + Christmas - The Lion in Winter, first guessed by estepheia

7) Loss of Friend + Typewriter + Male Rear Nudity + Injustice - The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), first guessed by faroutgal

8) Interracial Relationship + Desert + Moral Ambiguity + Drug - The English Patient, first guessed by ide_cyan

9) Movie Director + Washed Out + Cross Dressing + Smiling - Ed Wood, first guessed by bwinter

10) Flat Tire + Tuxedo + Delusion + Famous Line - Sunset Boulevard, not guessed by anyone!

fannish5: Five books that could be great movies:


Child of the Morning by Pauline Gedge. My favourite novel about Hatshepsut, the most remarkable of Egypt's female rulers (yes, that includes Cleopatra). Could be adapted without falling into the traps of biopics (i.e. too many characters, events just name-checked), and offers several great roles.

Wilde West by Walter Sattherwaite. Which is many things at once - a mystery with young Oscar W. - during his tour through the American West - as one of the detectives, with your proverbial alcoholic sheriff being the other one - and a play with archetypes, Western and detective ones alike. Doc Holiday shows up as one of the suspects and is suitably enigmatic. I think the biggest stumbling block for the audience would be that Oscar Wilde has a love affair with a woman here, which will undoubtedly result in cries of "no way", but he did have several het affairs in his youth, and him figuring out he might be interested in other directions is a minor subplot of the novel. You have sparkling dialogues, suspense, great characters and a length that's easy to adapt.

American Gods by Neil Gaiman. A challenge to the scriptwriter because of the gigantic cast which would have to be trimmed, true, but at its heart a road movie, and I so want Ron Rifkin to play Mr. Wednesday, aka Odin. That is his role, I tell you. Born for it. Much as I'm not a fan of his celeb antics, Russell Crowe could be Shadow.

Bride of the Rat God by Barbara Hambly. Perfect tongue-in-cheek mystery thriller set in the 1920s, a deliberate homage to the old film serials and Universal horror movies, and has two great female roles in the form of the silent picture film star who gets a Manchu necklace that pledges her to the Rat God of the title from her evil producer, and her sensible English sister in law. The best thing is the way all the clichés are avoided: both women are sympathetic and allies - Christine embraces the shallow and loves her film star luxury, her booze and her boy toys, but she's not condemmed for it, and Nora, our point of view character and future script writer who is the intellectual quiet type, isn't transformed into a fashion queen by love but remains her geeky self.

The Beerkeeper's Daughter by Gillian Bradshaw. Byzantium at its peak, with a great take on Theodora who comes across as a captivating, three dimensional character, through the eyes of her illegitimate son Johannes. It has romance, politics and a limited time frame, and a director should be able to indulge in cinematic opulence. Also, given the universal domination of father-son relationships, mother-son should be a refreshing alternative...
***


And a fanfic rec: Hell Is Where You Meet The Person You Could Have Been by stoney321 is described by her as "four bible stories with a Jossian twist - Angel, Wesley, Gunn, Connor" - short and incredibly powerful.

It must be a curse, cast at either the city of Bamberg, my parents' house or myself. For lo and behold, on Saturday there arrived another surprise parcel, this one by hmpf, also containing CDs, though with picture scans... and they're also unreadable on any of the computers in the house, of which there are several. Were it not for the fact that the CDs and DVDs I brought along from Munich work perfectly well, I'd be tempted to call a technician. As it is, I'm still baffled.

I went and saw The Island. Ho-hum. The first part and the basic concept were well done and intriguing, but then it degenerated into action set pieces. (If I never see another car chase again, I'll be happy. Ewan McGreggor was solidly good, Scarlett Johanssen was wasted as her role was severely underwritten and basically your standard late 70s action movie love interest but did what little was required, and Sean Bean was a competent villain. I've seen all three of them both giving more memorable performances and in better movies. What might have made the difference: script and direction like Gattaca, a film which manages to deliver a dystopia, suspense and an ending that doesn't feel too Hollywoodian.

Trying to avoid online spoilers for 2.04 of BSG, I also delved into an old favourite, a little-known novel set in ancient Rome which deserves a wider audience. It got published in the early 70s, and is called The Conspiracy, written by John Hersey. Like Thornton Wilder's The Ides of March (an obvious inspiration), it is a novel consisting of letters and reports. The historical background is the so-called Piso Conspiracy against Nero around 65 AD. Now Hersey, like Wilder, pulls off the trick of not only writing letters that read as if they could have been written by Romans but also to give the letter writers individual voices. As opposed to Wilder, he pulls off an additional tricky feat - one of the main characters of the novel is never presented by a single letter or direct message. He's quoted, talked about and debated incessantly, but we never hear his direct voice, and yet he comes across as vividly as the other main characters whom we "meet" via their letters - i.e. Tigellinus (Nero's right hand at the time) and his chief investigator Paenus on the one hand, the poet Lucan and the philosopher Seneca on the other. (Playing the ventriloquist for Seneca, btw, is no mean feat in itself since we actually have a lot of his letters intended for publication.) This powerful offstage presence is Nero himself, and here Hersey manages to present a credible alternative to the entertaining caricature found in Quo Vadis (or for that matter in the last episode of I, Claudius). His Nero is guilty of the usual offenses (murder of stepbrother, wife and mother; the question of the big fire is left open, as it is with most historians today) but is no madman or stupid tool. What makes him far more interesting and chilling is that he had the potential for being a good ruler but chose, and keeps choosing, the other way. (Considering that the first five years of Nero's reign, the "Quinquenium" under Seneca's and Burrus' influence get called five of the happiest in Roman history, you could say Hersey has an argument there.)

This must be one of the very few treatments of the period in which the Christians get hardly mentioned, again a refreshing difference. The period of the big fire is past, and the main characters just aren't interested. All of them are layered; Seneca, for example, is neither the stoic saint nor the greedy hypocrite he has at various times been painted at - that letter format comes in really handy to present pros and cons and leave the readers to make up their minds. Same for Tigellinus; Hersey gets far more effective by not making him a moustache-twirling villain but someone who is sincerely convinced that the ever increasing tyranny, deaths and degradations are all to the benefit of the state and the Emperor.

What probably makes the novel less accessible to some readers is that there isn't a "hero" in sight, nor a happy ending. (If you know your history, you know how the conspiracy ends anyway, and if you don't, you're not seriously expecting it to go differently, either; the very premise of the novel is that everyone has been under surveillance from the start.) But then, "what is the task of a writer in a dictatorship" (something which Lucan, the poet who used to be Nero's friend, and his uncle Seneca keep debating) is what interests Hersey, not "how to get rid of a tyrant in five practicable steps". So, Quo Vadis and The Gladiator, this is not. But if you want to read a novel which has lots of atmosphere, interesting characters and very topical questions, go for it.