Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into weak adaptations of great books

Hi all, Tim here. Like a lot of you, I’ve been waiting on Baz Luhrmann’s brand-new, all-3D, all-CGI version of The Great Gatsby with a kind of curious dread, on the assumption that the no-doubt overwhelming style and glitz would leave F. Scott Fitzgerald’s excavation of the limits of American ingenuity and self-invention a little bit lost amidst all the eye candy. And this seems to have been exactly the case, sadly.

But let us not come down too hard on Baz. There’s also the possibility that Gatsby simply isn’t a novel that’s meant to be filmed, and as evidence I’d like to call upon the last feature film adaptation, and certainly the best known prior to now. Of course, I mean the 1974 Paramount production starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carroway, and a general sense of lifeless ennui as the stimulus-crazed Roaring ‘20s. Other than a fixation on production design and costumes (it won the Oscar for the latter), there’s not much that the ’74 film has in common with Luhrmann’s screamingly excessive vision; if anything a bit more of a willingness to push against the book, rather than to so dutifully illustrate it in the driest way possible, might have benefited it. Movies are not books, after all, and this version of Gatsby badly loses sight of that truth.

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The State of the State of Cinema

Hey everybody, it’s Tim, here to add my two cents to what has been, incontestably, the film story of the last few days: the sprawling, self-described “rant” delivered by Steven Soderbergh as his keynote speech on the State of Cinema at the San Francisco Film Festival on April 27. The San Francisco Film Society has made the video of his entire speech available, accompanied by a not-quite-accurate transcript; it’s worth checking it out in either form, though I found it easier to puzzle out what the director was getting at in the text version.

By all means, it takes some puzzling. I yield to no-one in my love of Soderbergh, but there’s no denying that his speech is very much a rambling, discursive piece, meant to be enjoyed as conversation, rather than analyzed closely for a structure it very much does not possess. It’s pure stream-of-consciousness (it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to find out that it was predominately improvised), and that’s okay: anybody who has listened to one of Soderbergh’s DVD commentaries is well aware that when he gets to rambling, some very keen insights on the nature of the art form tend to come tumbling out...

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Some thoughts on the language barrier

For some people who live in the United States, this weekend will be their first opportunity to see Norway’s 2012 Best Foreign Language Film nominee Kon-Tiki in a movie theater. Sort of. In point of fact, nobody in the United States, not this weekend nor during the film’s limited roll-out, is going to see the film nominated for that Oscar, unless it’s because they’ve imported the unsubtitled DVD from Europe. Because the version of Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg’s movie playing in the States is a combination of footage from the “real” version that played in Norway, with dialogue sequences re-shot in English. It is, literally, a different movie, with the exact same plot and shot setups.

(The New York Times had a nifty little demonstration of the two versions a couple of weeks back)

We’re not here to rip apart the Weinstein Company for releasing that version (though seriously, it’s pretty dumb – the audience for Kon-Tiki in English is certainly not significantly larger than the audience for the original version), but to consider the greater questions it raises about watching foreign language movies in the first place. I assume that you, like me, are at least a little bit offended by this bit of Anglophonic pandering, and would all things considered, rather see Kon-Tiki in its original version, and the question I ask both you and myself is: why?

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How Rob Zombie is saving cinematic horror

Tim Brayton here, to talk to everybody about something particularly close to my heart, and particularly useless even in the grand scheme of cinema: the crushing lack of artistry and personality in American horror movies these days.

The issue is brought to mind by the release this week of The Lords of Salem, the fifth film directed by sometime heavy metal rocker Rob Zombie. I have not, at this writing, seen The Lords of Salem, and based on Zombie’s previous work, it’s very likely that I’m going to think it’s pretty terrible. But I am, anyway, more excited to see this than I have been for any other wide-release film in 2013, no matter how bad it’s going to be, because Zombie the filmmaker has consistently been responsible for horror films of the rarest sort: ones where you can actually tell how much the person making them cares about the work.

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Annette Funicello (RIP)

Tim Brayton here again. With the cinephile world still reeling from the passing of irreplaceable film critic Roger Ebert a few days before, and The Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher’s death the same day sucking up every available scrap of oxygen in the news cycle, the loss of Annette Funicello on 4 April to the MS that had forced her into retirement over two decades ago was generally reported as a sort of afterthought. A sad thing, but not remotely surprising, and not of particular importance in the grand scheme of things.

While it is true that Funicello’s death doesn’t represent the end of an epoch in quite the same as Ebert’s, it’s still worth stopping and reflecting on her career and what it represents. 

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