freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with dir(e)

Hee. The Dark is Rising film is out. Pajiba reviews it. Apparently it's "a stupid, hollow adventure romp that shares only the name of Cooper’s books and was made by a cast and crew who didn’t give two shits about their source material."

*does small dance of vindication*

*stops, because legs are sore from my virtuous Sunday morning gym session*

I shall now toddle off to put in a solid several hours of marking (Edward Lear) before dashing off to see Casablanca, a film I am ashamed to admit I have never seen. Busy Sunday.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was back at school, only it was a utopian blend of my actual high school with a sort of Hogwarts vibe - beautiful old stone buildings, lawns shaded with enormous oaks under which everyone sat to learn for exams, and a wild seafront with a stretch of beach. I was in my last few days of school, and the thought of leaving was a poignant regret throughout the dream. At one point I think I was planning to return as a teacher. At another I transformed myself into a bird, I suspect a swallow, and flew low over the waves. Then the bastards married me off to the son of the tribal chief, and I was left in the ceremonial tent awaiting the wedding night with a sort of irritated trepidation. He was an awful dweeb.

Current Mood: slightly endorphine rushed
Current Music: early David Bowie

Hee. Watch Christopher Eccleston, who seems to be a pleasingly straightforward sort of man, do a minefield-tapdance routine trying not to be rude about The Dark Is Rising movie. He's beautifully subtextually rude. I do like a man who knows how to use his subtext.

In other news, after sleeping the sleep of the stunned for four hours yesterday afternoon and another nine last night, I may possibly have started to knit up the ravelled sleeves of wossname after the frenetics of the last two weeks. Apologies to anyone to whom I have recently been distant, rude or weird as a result of sleep-deprivation.

In other, other news, it apparently costs about R600 to have a cat put down. I'm not sure how I feel about this. Other than poorer.

Last Night I Dreamed: zombie apocalypse! Alien zombie apocalypse! An alien virus or something infected absolutely everyone in the whole world except me and one other person (a sort of quiet geeky guy I didn't know), causing them to (a) lurch after us all gnashy-teeth zombie with really bad hair, and (b) ultimately to dissolve into a puddle of fluorescent green goo and then dry out into a small, sad patch of stuff. We were mostly holed up in a rather nice library, laying low and pretending we didn't exist. At one point Zombie!

rumint peered in at a window; at another we were cackled at by a particularly mad Zombie!SimonPegg with giant clown hair. Then I spent the rest of the night playing a really annoying computer game (based, I suspect, on glimpses of the Heroes of Might and Magic 5 my Evil Landlord is currently playing) in which I kept getting my armies killed because I couldn't draw complete enough circles around them to select them for movement. (An experience, I might add, curiously akin to my actual experience at playing anything Warcraft-clonal, at which I suck beyond my ability to express it. Not, of course, that that's going to stop me from wandering off to have a go at HoMM right now, on the pretext of dream-exorcism. And stuff the marking.).

Current Mood: slightly less tired

"A joke among the journalists covering The Dark Is Rising set visit in Bucharest over the last couple of days was that the movie has only changed three things from the Newberry-winning novel on which it’s based: they’ve changed the lead kid’s nationality from English to American, they’ve changed the lead kid’s age from 11 to 14, and they’ve changed everything that happens in the story." (article on chud.com).

Thanks to

strawberryfrog, who has pandered nicely to my increasing obsession with juicy links.

Many outraged links courtesy of Chocolate and Vodka, who is impassioned and articulate. I'll have to work on the latter, this whole thing is annoying me enough to make me incoherent.
Someone who lists all the differences. Oh, FSM preserve us, they've taken out the Arthurian element. How can they do that? it is the series.
Shit. David Cunningham (the director) has a religious agenda. The Arthurian stuff has apparently bought it because it's "pre-Christian", according to the scriptwriter. Um, hello? Holy Grail much?
The scriptwriter apparently also hasn't bothered to read more than the second book in the five-book series.

Aaargh! On scifi.com Merriman is now "the mischievous Merriman Lyon." Travesty!

Current Mood: grrrrrr!
Current Music: Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit

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).

( Dark prognostications, rising bile, behind the cut. )

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.

...seeing a newspaper billboard with the headline "RANGERS LOOT CRASHED HELICOPTER" makes me think vaguely, "But I thought rangers had to be a Good alignment"? (Obviously, because I'm hopelessly D&D imprinted and have no truck with Third Ed. My first ever character was a half-elven Ranger. Does that make me a bad person?)
... the phrase "make this story more accessible to today's audience and introduce a new generation to her work", applied to the filming of Susan Cooper's amazing, incredible, brilliant YA Arthurian fantasy novel The Dark Is Rising, gives me a cold, sinking feeling? Will Stanton has "a bit more drama to deal with than in the book"? Additional special effects sequences involving snakes? A love interest? And the death-knell of adaptations: Will Stanton is now American. Not even the presence of Christopher Ecclestone can save this - it's going to be Earthsea all over again. Those of you who share my fondness for Cooper's dark, edgy, perfectly-balanced and beautifully controlled narratives may wish to join me in shunning this film like the plague-pit it is almost certain to be. I could cry. This is such an atmospheric novel, and so many of its events and elements would translate beautifully to screen in the hands of a half-way decent director, preferably British. The current director may claim that "the spine and spirit of the story remain", but he lies. It'll be gutted and its back broken, and then they'll make it dance. To hip-hop. Gah.
...the universe has to follow a post-glandular Bad Day of exhaustion and nausea by hitting me with a flat tyre on the way home? Three days before payday, which means I can't afford to have the damned thing fixed until Friday? Dramatically flat, too - loud "crump" noise and instantaneous bumpy limping from my poor Mermaid. On the upside, not only was it not actually raining at the time (a near miracle given the current weather), but an extremely nice man stopped and said "need a hand?" about two and a half seconds after I'd stomped round from the driver's side to survey the corpse and give vent to a heartfelt "Bollocks!" I'm perfectly capable of changing a wheel, but the initial nut-loosening bit tends to be a bit beyond my strength, particularly given my gimpy arm and current state of health. Yay chivalrous men.

Now I shall console myself by ignoring the pile of marking currently demanding my attention, and re-reading The Dark Is Rising while mentally plotting how I'd film it. Tchah. Amateurs.