Saturday, July 28, 2007

Films and Links

Fantasy Films
I need to read The Dark Is Rising sometime soon...it's apparently one of the few books prominent in evangelical subculture that I haven't read, and now they're making a movie of it.

New Line (wow!) is doing The Golden Compass. Here's a wikipedia link about the books, the official site, and me mentioning the books two years ago. The girl they've got for Lyra feels spot-on...the site says they said looked at 10,000 girls, and I believe it. The rest of the characters I'm not as sure about.

Interesting thing -- the cinematography doesn't feel right. Too clean? Bright? Cartoony? Lyra's world has a bit more soot and grime and grittiness to it. And gobblers and soul-eating spectres lurk in unlit alleyways, preying upon the unwary. It's a bit of a grown-up place, and would be better off losing the antiseptic computer-animated feel.

I only notice this, because, recently, a lot of movies seem to have done a good (or good enough) job capturing the tone of their source books. This is the first one that's struck me as very wrong. One of the first things I noticed about the books was their "tone" -- hard to define and describe, but just as the diction of Lewis's Narnia laces the books with a sunlight and childlike joy, and Harry Potter keeps a tongue-in-cheek absurdity even as the books grow darker -- Pullman's style is a sober and achingly beautiful. I don't know if this selection illustrates it well, but it might.

I also think it's strange how many big-budget epic fantasy films have been made recently. And how many series are being tackled. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Narnia, Eragon, Golden Compass, The Dark is Rising...and just the other day I ran into Stardust, and have no idea how many other films are in the works out there. I know studios produced fantasy films made before, but they seem to have been few and far between, largely forgettable, and hardly ever given a blockbuster level budget. Big-budget (and/or memorable) sci-fi films have been going on for a long time; this seems like the first real corresponding wave of fantasy films.

YouTube
And now for two shorter clips...these guys are hilarious. Check out Rules of Sidewalk Etiquette and How to Give a Great Man to Man Hug.

2 comments:

Matthew said...

I'm pretty sure the Lord of the Rings started the market all off. When studios saw that the film made a huge profit, they jumped on the wagon. Course, now that believable epic-fantasy is cheaper to make, owing to computers, there's never been a better time for it.
Not only that, but the Lord of the Rings trilogy created our modern western idea of a fantasy world, which includes controlled magic, competing races, and the struggle of good and evil. It's laced through the D&D underworld, and my theory is that 40 years after its publication, the style began to attract quality authors, who are now providing the material for all these new films.

MJ said...

Heya!

As with Marty...yikes. It's been so long since someone actually commented, I didn't notice for almost two weeks... :0

Can't really add anything to what you said; it sounds plausible. And if Lord of the Rings did essentially start a new genre, it'd make sense of why modern-western-fantasy took off later than sf.