spiderpig!
Monday, 6 August 2007 09:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
freckles_and_doubtMy 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my subject line refers to the Simpsons movie, which we saw on Thursday, and happy memories of which were subsequently superseded by cat trauma.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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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Re: Last night I dreamed
Date: Tuesday, 7 August 2007 12:14 pm (UTC)Re: Last night I dreamed
Date: Tuesday, 7 August 2007 02:52 pm (UTC)