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An Open Letter To George R. R. Martin and the Producers of Game Of Thrones

An Open Letter To George R. R. Martin and the Producers of Game Of Thrones

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game-of-thrones-daenerys-stormbornDear George & Co.,

I was wrong.

Back in 2011, when the first season of Game Of Thrones aired, I watched up until the episode where Ned Stark gets speared in the leg during a street fight. (His opponent? That bastion of modesty and ethics, Jaime Lannister). And then I gave up. I stopped watching despite the fact that the storytelling was excellent, the acting superb, the locations first-rate, the camera and tech work all but faultless. I gave up because I was tired of seeing the female characters on the show abused, one after the next. I began to suspect the worst of both you and the show runners.

Call me a pig-headed liberal progressive if you must, but I’d like to see the arts, both commercial and fine, be aspirational, which I realize is a very millennial sort of term, but I like it. I’m with Gene Roddenberry: I want at least some of our creative output to showcase what we could be as a society, not merely depict what we are (i.e., barbarous and brutal). Of course the particular world of A Song Of Ice and Fire and Game Of Thrones demands its share of brutality, but it became my position, following those early episodes, that the show was reveling in the violence rather than merely depicting what was necessary to develop the story. It was my considered opinion that I was once more in the throes of a TV show where female agency was, at best, a limp afterthought.

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My Top Ten Novel-to-Movie Adaptations

My Top Ten Novel-to-Movie Adaptations

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3-musketeers-posterLast time I was having a look at William Goldman, both his screen and novel writing. You can see the whole post here, but for my review of my top ten movie adaptations, I’d like to repeat what Goldman says about writing screenplays:

Here is one of the main rules of adaptation: you cannot be literally faithful to the source material.

Here’s another that critics never get: you should not be literally faithful to the source material. It is in a different form, a form that does not have the camera.

Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.

— from Which Lie Did I Tell?

In another spot, and I’m paraphrasing here, because now I can’t find the quotation, he tells us how a book has maybe 400 pages, and a screenplay has around 135 pages, and not full pages at that, so what do you think happens between one version and the other?

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The Love Witch Opens in New York City

The Love Witch Opens in New York City

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The Love WitchLast July, I was lucky enough to see Anna Biller’s film The Love Witch at Montreal’s Fantasia International Film Festival. After screening there and at various other festivals, it opens today in New York, with more cities to follow. Here’s how I described it back in August:

The Love Witch is a mix of horror, satire, and melodrama which follows Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a witch and murderess, as she moves to a new home and seeks love. Unfortunately for the men she desires, she’s both unforgiving and possessed of high standards. Any sign of weakness or emotional neediness is a sign of her partner’s unfitness, which she puts to an end both swift and fatal. Will Elaine finally find the man of her dreams? Or will her interest in Richard (Robert Seeley), the husband of her friend Trish (Laura Waddell), bring about her downfall?

I was tremendously impressed with it. As I wrote:

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Goth Chick News: Why, Universal Studios? Why?

Goth Chick News: Why, Universal Studios? Why?

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the-mummy-tom-cruise

In the midst of my favorite time of year, I must hang my head and sigh over the undeniable fact that Universal Studios plans to continue its reboot vendetta against its own iconic monster catalog.

This, in spite of the proverbial box office stake being driven straight through the heart of Dracula Untold back in 2014.

Never heard of it? Nope, and you probably never will after this.

Still, to date we have pseudo-confirmations of everything but The Mummy, which has a confirmed release date of June 9, 2017.

  • The Mummy (2017), starring Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella
  • Untitled Invisible Man film (TBA), starring Johnny Depp
  • Untitled Wolf Man film (TBA)
  • Untitled Creature from the Black Lagoon film (TBA)
  • Untitled Bride of Frankenstein film (TBA)
  • Untitled Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (rumored), starring Russell Crowe
  • Untitled Frankenstein film (rumored), starring Javier Bardem

Why you ask?  Or at least that is what I ask as I mix up another pumpkin spice martini.  I mean, its one thing for Hollywood to be bereft of any novel ideas, and quite another to mess with classics of this magnitude.

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Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek: Generations (1994)

Star Trek Movie Rewatch: Star Trek: Generations (1994)

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I think the statute of limitations on spoilers has probably run out 22 years after this movie was released… but be advised that there’s a sort of big spoiler ahead.

I suppose I should also mention that I was a TOS guy back in the day and didn’t even get around to watching the other Star Trek series until about a decade ago. I ended up liking The Next Generation well enough, although oddly it always seemed to me that it might have been more dated than its predecessor. But that’s neither here nor there.

What I’m getting around to, perhaps awkwardly, is that even though I’m mostly a TOS fan, I thought that six TOS movies were enough and perhaps even a bit too much, and it was probably a good time to switch things up a bit. But not before some TOS crew members appear on the scene, early on in this movie.

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The Man Behind The Princess Bride

The Man Behind The Princess Bride

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goldman-11111“It’s an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.” Wm. Goldman

Anyone who has been reading my posts over the last few years already knows that The Princess Bride (TPB) is one of my favourite – if not my favourite – movies. Family and friends quote from it all the time. “Morons!” we’ll exclaim when faced with any, or, “Murdered by pirates is good,” we mutter as we walk away from someone who should be.

And I know there will be some who disagree with me, but I think TPB is one of the few examples where the movie is actually better than the book. And why not? They were both written by the same person, one who understands clearly what he’s doing:

Here is one of the main rules of adaptation: you cannot be literally faithful to the source material.
Here’s another that critics never get: you should not be literally faithful to the source material. It is in a different form, a form that does not have the camera.
Here is the most important rule of adaptation: you must be totally faithful to the intention of the source material.
— from Which Lie Did I Tell?

Which, by the way, is the perfect answer to people who complain when movies turn out to be different from books. It’s only when screenwriters fail in that last rule that they’ve done a bad job.

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Goth Chick News: Polish Up the Sword and Buff the Leather, Blade is (Maybe) Back

Goth Chick News: Polish Up the Sword and Buff the Leather, Blade is (Maybe) Back

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blade-poster-small blade-3-poster-small

For years now fans have been waiting for something to come of all the rumors regarding the Wesley Snipes, day-walking, bad-ass known as Blade.

In case you haven’t been keeping track, we last left the story back in 2004 with Blade Trinity, where personally I first learned to appreciate Ryan Reynolds on many levels, not to mention Dominic Purcell. Add in a fairly good storyline, an awesome soundtrack and a strong female character in the form of Jessica Biel laying waste with her compound bow and what you get is a movie that stands up quite well, a dozen years later.

But a lot of water has flowed under that particular dam in the interim, and Marvel may have trouble committing to another movie with Snipes in the lead role.

According to Patton Oswalt, who played weapons master “Hedges,” Blade Trinity was a troubled production indeed and Wesley Snipes appeared to have had some sort of mental breakdown during the shoot in Vancouver. He refused to speak to director David S. Goyer and often would not come out of his trailer; he would only respond to the name ‘Blade,’ and if he communicated with anyone, it would be via post-it notes. Ryan Reynolds corroborated this while promoting the film; saying that Snipes would ignore the entire cast, but he once acknowledged Reynolds by saying “Keep your mouth shut. You’ll live longer.”

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Fantasia 2016, Day 16: Two Fish Stories (Collective Invention and Too Young To Die!

Fantasia 2016, Day 16: Two Fish Stories (Collective Invention and Too Young To Die!

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Collective InventionBy July 29, the sixteenth day of the Fantasia Festival, I was beginning to feel exhausted. I’d had some thoughts of watching three movies that Friday, but in the end could only manage two. I made it down to the Hall Theatre in the afternoon to watch the Korean satire Collective Invention (Dolyeonbyuni), then came back right after for the raucous Japanese comedy Too Young To Die! (Too Young To Die! Wakakushite Shinu). Neither struck me as flawless, but both in different ways were interesting experiences.

Collective Invention tells the story of Park Gu (Lee Kwang-soo), a Korean man whose head has been changed into that of a giant fish thanks to unexpected side effects from medical tests. We get his story through the eyes of Sang-won (Lee Cheon-hee), an aspiring reporter who breaks Park’s story and makes him famous. Park’s not entirely happy about becoming a major media figure, and the medical company behind his transformation isn’t happy about the bad publicity they get. Their counterpunches, and the ups and downs of Park’s life and public profile, make the spine of the movie — along with the moral choices Sang-won and the others around him find themselves making, balancing the exploitation of Park against their own careers and ideals.

Directed and written by Kwon Oh-kwang, Collective Invention is a wide-ranging satire. It reads to me as though it takes on specific targets (the media, fame, the medical industry, the law, and more) as part of a general social critique. And at this point I need to repeat something I’ve mentioned before in these articles: I’m a North American with no particular insight into Korean society. So I can’t speak to how people with more knowledge than I will react to this movie; the point of my writing this review is that perhaps what I write may be relevant to an international audience. On the other hand, I get the distinct impression that this movie is primarily concerned with speaking to the Korean media landscape, to the concerns of Korean youth, and to Korea in general. That’s appropriate for a satire, but does it work for an international audience?

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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Back to the Television

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Back to the Television

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sherlock_season4So, episode 98 of Elementary aired weekend before last. That, of course, is the modern day Sherlock Holmes show, set in New York City, featuring Johnny Lee Miller as the brilliant, socially challenged detective, and Lucy Liu as a female Doctor Watson. The show, which began in 2012, just kicked off season five.

Meanwhile, on January 1 of 2017, BBC’s Sherlock FINALLY airs season four. Set in modern day London, it has launched Benedict Cumberbatch to superstardom and also escalated Martin Freeman’s (that Bilbo guy) career. There have been nine episodes since the show began in 2010, plus one television movie, The Abominable Bride. It’s no surprise, with two year and eleven months between episodes, that rumors abound that season four will be the end.

Do you want the bad or the good first? The bad? Ok, we’ll open with Sherlock. Among my top five all-time favorite shows after season two, season three was a self-indulgent, “we can do better than Doyle” and “look how clever we are” claptrap. Somehow, The Abominable Bride won an Emmy for best television movie. The ending of it was worse than Matt Frewer’s Hound of the Baskervilles.

I think Sherlock is now a bad show and hope that it gets put to rest after these three episodes.

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Fantasia 2016, Days 12 through 14: Afterlife, Life-in-Death, and Madness (We Go On, Aloys, and Therapy)

Fantasia 2016, Days 12 through 14: Afterlife, Life-in-Death, and Madness (We Go On, Aloys, and Therapy)

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We Go OnI had errands keeping me away from the Fantasia film festival on Monday, July 25. Now, interruptions are a sad fact of life, but sometimes it’s easy to get back into the swing of things; and as it happened the next day I made it back to the De Sève theatre to watch an American horror film called We Go On, which served to get me back into the Fantasia spirit. Then the day after that I saw two more movies at the De Sève, an odd Swiss romance called Aloys followed by a French horror film called Therapy. The latter had been directed by 16-year-old Nathan Ambrosioni — his second feature film. Together the movies made an odd meditation on life, death, and horror.

We Go On was written and directed by Andy Mitton and Jesse Holland (the IMDB credits Holland with “story,” while Mitton gets credit as “writer” as well as for screenplay and story). Miles Grissom (Clark Freeman) is an adult man in Los Angeles suffering from a crippling fear of death. He therefore offers $30,000 to anyone who can prove that there’s life after death — reincarnation, ghosts, anything. Deluged with people who claim to have proof, Miles and his cynical mother (Annette O’Toole) begin a quest to investigate the most promising responses. Things do not go as Miles might have expected.

Nor do things go as the audience might have expected either, and in this case I mean that in the best way. We Go On is thoroughly unpredictable, with an unusual structure and a story that moves between horror and character-based drama. Miles and his mother almost alternate as leads, and one can make a strong argument that the crucial choice shaping how the climax plays out is hers.

More than that, when Miles first gets responses to his offer, he’s able to eliminate most out of hand except for three or possibly four. He then investigates those few contacts one by one; as you might expect he has no luck at first. Also as you might expect his early investigations end up returning to become relevant to the movie later on. But how they become relevant is interesting. In one case it’s plot-related, but another is more thematic, putting forward ideas about fear and the supernatural that inflect the rest of the movie.

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