spiderpig!

[freckles_and_doubt]

My word. Driving rain is coming horizontally down University Avenue, to the accompaniment of shrieks and squeals from students. I love this weather.

Yes, my subject line refers to the Simpsons movie, which we saw on Thursday, and happy memories of which were subsequently superseded by cat trauma. I never watched The Simpsons with any consistency, but the film is still laugh-out-loud funny, as well as being self-conscious, ironic and self-referential to the point of causing geeky swoonage and occasional choking from over-giggling. Also, even if the movie had been terrible, the beautifully ridiculous a-capella rendition of "Spiderpig" would have completely redeemed it.

However, I am also using the term loosely to invoke the notion of cinematic mismarriage, the abhominable and unnatural fusing of diametrically opposed components into A Thing Which Should Not Be. I refer, of course, to the horrifying experience of the trailer to The Dark Is Rising, which was attached to the Simpsons movie. Watching this caused me to give vent to a litany of "Oh,no! Oh, god, no!" with increasing despair and volume, until firmly suppressed by the embarrassed individuals on either side of me (jo, and my mother).



I already had myself a bit of a rant about this when I first heard about the project, but now it's serious: nothing will content me but the ongoing and detailed exposure of this travesty, this sacrilegious affront to a children's fantasy classic. There will come a fateful and horrible day when I actually go and see it, the better to spit upon its manifest delinquencies. I may have to be drunk, or at the very least gagged.

Here is the offending trailer:

The only thing that could possibly do justice to the depth, restraint, seriousness and control of Cooper's narrative is a BBC miniseries. Instead, what do we have? A flashy, cheesy, Americanised bastard spiderpig cross between LotR Lite, Home Alone and the worst bits of Harry Potter. Before we even get to the plot, the atmosphere and feel of this trailer are wrong, wrong, so utterly wrong I can't believe the filmmakers actually read the book. Everything is flaming and shiny, instead of old, distant and slightly awe-inspiring. It feels cluttered, gritty and technicolour, instead of sparse, elevated and given to grey, white and weathered stone. Cooper's is the least cheesy children's fantasy on the face of the planet, but you wouldn't believe it from this trailer. I detect the fell hand of Marketing, a giant metal fist in a polyester glove, throttling the life out of Adaptation as any form of art.

I am also left grasping hopelessly for an adequate explanation of a director and writer capable of refiguring Will and the Stantons as American, when the series is so ineradicably based in English mythology and landscape. Not only this, they appear to have thrown out the actually extremely visual and cinematic elements of the book in order to replace them with far stupider, flashier and more hackneyed ones. Also, that's not Merriman Lyon. No way is that Merriman Lyon. He's all wrong: he has no depth, and his nose is insufficiently beaky.



I call upon all witterers to send me any internet references to this film across which they happen to stumble, that I may further dissect and excoriate them in righteous outrage. Behold me becoming the Anti-Fangirl. With relish.

Last Night I Dreamed: that I was on holiday at a larney hotel on a French island, with schedule5 and her family and with everymoment, for purposes of taking part in a bicycle race, in Edwardian costume, with boaters. There was much anxiety over packing.

Comments

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Hm, Suw Charman has also had rising bile from rising dark-adaptation.
Bloggery with links here: http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/
data on Suw here: http://suw.org.uk/about-me/

Last night I dreamed

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

I'll tell you all about it later, but it involved Schedule 5 trying to sabotage my honours thesis and ended with me throwing her off the roof into a swimming pool. It was great fun :P.

Re: Last night I dreamed

[schedule5.livejournal.com]

Rubbish. I wasn't anywhere near your dreams last night. In fact, I was attempting to subdue dream-offspring of the age and approximate verbal development level of my daughter, but actually looking remarkably like a mini version of my brother. Said dream-offspring-sibling composite was running riot in khoi-boi's gothic mansion, sabotaging his impressionist painting attempts. I kid you not!

Re: Last night I dreamed

[(Anonymous)]

I like your dream best of all! I can haz mansion

[(Anonymous)]

Not happy.

Here's the last Straight Dope thread on the trailer:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=428491&highlight=dark+rising

On the plus side, Stardust and The Golden Compass are looking good from what I've seen...

[(Anonymous)]

I had, apparently, core-dumped the fact that they were making this movie, for my own sanity.

Now, I know that a movie that doesn't follow a book doesn't hurt the book at all. The book still exists. We can curl up in bed with it and go right back to the story we love. But when you love a book, you desperately want the movie to be good, to be faithful. I was terrified walking into The Fellowship of the Ring. I still have issue with one scene, although I can mostly block it out--but otherwise, they exceeded my expectations.

OTOH, The Princess Bride was also a seminal book for me, and when I saw the movie the first time, I was devastated. They missed the whole point. I just saw it again, for the first time since it came out, on the big screen, and I was able to sit back and watch it as a fantasy movie, distancing myself from the book. It went okay. As a movie, there are great things and awful things, but it was a fun way to spend a few hours.

I don't know if I can do that with The Dark is Rising, though... :-(

[(Anonymous)]

Crap, that was me again, Dayle/Rhieinwen...

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

YOU, lady, need an LJ login ;>. Go on, you know you want one! Just for commenting with.

Yes, bad movie adaptations are a sort of violation of one's inner imaginative life. I still don't know how Jackson pulled off LotR as successfully as he did. I think the coherence of the film-maker's inner vision has to be great enough to offer a viable alternative to one's personal inner vision, which is absolutely and definitely not the case with DiR (or Dire, for short).

[(Anonymous)]

No, I don't need an LJ login so LJ can trumpet "look how many members we have" when they require membership just to read "private" posts, which is (excuse my language) complete and utter bullshit.

Like I said, the book doesn't get harmed by the movie, and we can always chose not to watch the movie if we fear it'll hurt our sense of the book (or, as you so aptly phrased it, if it would violate our inner imaginative life). I'd say this is one of the positive aspects of the Internet--we can be warned that the movie is going to suck rocks and make an informed choice not to see it!

Jackson and crew worshipped the LOTR series, as did several of the actors. They had the commitment and drive to honor the books. And folks seem to be doing well with Harry Potter, although I can't really comment since I haven't read the books since halfway through the second one. (Someday, I swear, I will. Just...not now. [avoids looking at TBR bookcase of more than 100 books...])

Cheers,
Dayle/Rhieinwen

[starmadeshadow.livejournal.com]

For some reason, after I saw The Simpsons Movie, I had 'Spiderpig' on the brain but to the tune of the Gummi bears song.

'Spiderpiiig, bouncing here and there and everywhere...'

Sigh. Did you survive the first teaching day? I hope so!

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

A further reason why I dislike bad book to movie adaptations is that people who have not read the book are going to think that that is what the book is about. And that's just horrible! It's telling lies!