Movie Talk

I turned in my final draft the day before Thanksgiving.
It. Is. Done.

I’ve been enjoying some R&R over the last few days and even went to see two new movies: Twilight and Australia. Maybe I was just full up on being critical of story because of my own work, but I really enjoyed both flicks. I’ll share some of my thoughts about them here–then let you in on some exciting novel-adaptation news.

My daughter has long been a Twilight fan and finally twisted both of my arms and got me to read the series. I was as curious as she about how well the book would be translated to film, especially after the early panning began. We arrived at the theater with low expectations. The meager budget was evident in a lack of special effects, and the producers really could’ve learned a thing or two by studying some Spiderman flicks (the scene involving Edward climbing a tree has become a family joke).

But.

What made Twilight such a compelling book for teen girls, IMO, was the hero.

Right now I’m in a bit of a movie glom. Books are my first love, always, but for some reason I’m slavering over watching a few good movies. This holiday season has got some toothsome choices to pick over.

Tops on my must-see list is Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. I’m a sucker for WWII movies. Throw in a corny love story, bombs, desperate choices, horses, and I’m there. I’m really in the mood to see an old-fashioned epic.

The trailer’s not out yet, but the film version of Audrey Niffenneger’s masterful novel, Time Traveler’s Wife, has a tentative November release (Therese’s interview with Audrey is HERE). Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams are in the title roles, and if you’ve read the novel, it seems like a good pairing.

Now that my daughter and her posse have satisfied their High School Musical 3 itch, they are salivating at the first installment of the Twilight movies. Me, I haven’t gotten into them yet, but I might give the movie a whirl.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button also has me intrigued. I’ll see anything that has Cate Blanchett in it.

Looking over my must-see list, I’m aware that I’m in the mood for a good popcorn flick. It’s odd, but if I go to the theaters, I want something bigger, louder, epic. I love indie movies and quiet stories, but I prefer to watch those on DVD at home. Dunno why. Maybe it’s because I can have my tears jerked in private.

In my hunt for trailers I found Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The release date has been shoved back until next summer (boo) but here are two trailers that have reignited a flame that died a little after the final book came out. Dang, Alan Rickman just keeps looking better and better.

What’s on your shortlist this holiday?

Popcorn squirrel by runnerboy49.

Last weekend, my DH and I had a rare night to ourselves and we decided to see a movie. In a sign of my old age, nothing seemed appealing. Demographically, I’m in the target audience for Mama Mia but I really didn’t want to expose myself to Colin Firth and Pierce Brosnan capering about a beach. DH lobbied for The Dark Knight, and despite the fact that I’d never gotten into the Batman movie franchise, reluctantly I agreed.

Wow. I expected killer special effects, lots of explosions, and a hero skirting the dark side. A tight script that turned conventions on their head. And I’d heard good things about Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker. But I never thought I’d be both enthralled and repelled by a super-hero’s arch nemeses the way that Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker pushed my buttons. I wasn’t alone. Every time The Joker came on screen, the entire audience in the packed theatre reacted, sometimes wildly. It’s worth studying how screenplay writers David Goyer and Jonathan Nolan re-imagined a stock superhero villain to make him contemporary and scarier—a worthy foe for Batman.

The first scene introducing us to The Joker encapsulates his manic (and lethal) mind. We start with a mundane crime, a bank robbery. In an obscene parody of the Batman t.v. show, The Joker’s henchmen carry out the crime wearing masks that are also freakish parodies of clown faces. Seconds into the heist, they begin to turn on each other as per their boss’s directive. By the end of the robbery, you’re laughing guiltily even as you’re horrified by the crime’s brutality. You’ve become complicit in The Joker’s world.

I just turned my revision of Unbounded in to Elisabeth last night, and so this week it’s going to be about balance for me. Taking my dog for a few more walks. Going for a massage. Catching up on current events (Brangelina had their baby Saturday? Where have I been?). Finishing the paint job on my daughter’s room. Making tabbouleh salad. Reading Ann Aguirre‘s Wanderlust, which she so kindly sent to me. And watching a few good flicks.

Anyone who’s hung around Writer Unboxed for any length of time knows Kath and I love film and appreciate what a storyteller can learn from the medium. I feel particularly strongly about watching the director’s notes whenever I can, especially when a film has been translated from a novel. Atonement was a deep novel, a literary and epic work. The challenges for adapting it to film had to have been immense. The director’s notes affirmed that they were, but that they were certainly overcome. How this was done amazes me.

Novelist Ian McEwan said of Atonement that it was a “very interior novel” and recognized that the largest challenge for screenwriter Christopher Hampton would be in getting that feel across. It concerned him, as did the prospect of reducing a 110,000-word novel to a 20,000-word screenplay. It would be, as he said, “A demolition job.”

But director Joe Wright loved this book. When Hampton strayed too far from the novel’s structure, he asked him to start over and stay truer to McEwan’s vision. Said Hampton of his challenge: “The job is to try to identify what makes this book a masterpiece and then preserve that.”

Staying true to the book paid off with fabulously interlaced storylines and POVs. And really interesting tricks were employed along the way–tricks I think we can all benefit from hearing about. Look at the movie and the settings throughout. Wright intended for the interior feeling of the character to be seen in the exterior, so he matched feeling to setting. Shots of death, desolation, hopelessness, elation, they’re all there in the subtle lift of a foot, in flat-lined environs, in a depleted carnival atmosphere, in a white cloud of smoke drifting over a half-dead man’s face. These are not tricks reserved for screenwriters.

Last week I blogged about seeing Lars and the Real Girl instead of my intended movie pick for the weekend, Juno. Maybe I’d been tainted by too much publicity about the preggers teen with the acerbic wit and potty mouth, but I took a pass and was glad I’d spent the evening with Lars and his kooky problem.

Welp, Netflix came through and I finally saw Juno last night. And it was . . . meh. More than meh. I fast-forwarded through the middle ’cause I started really not liking the characters much. Make that Juno. She’d worn out my nerves right around her first trimester.

I tried to keep an open mind. Really. Diablo Cody won an Oscar for best original screenplay, so I was ready for good dialogue and interesting situations.

By about the end of Act 1, I’d had enough of lines that kept slamming me in the face with ‘edgy insightfullness.’ “Look,” Cody seemed to be saying, “Isn’t Juno current and raw and vulnerable all at once? Isn’t she? Isn’t she? She says ‘dude’ and ‘holmes’ while talking about philosophy. She’s a high-school Moliere.” Each line of dialogue felt like a standup bit from Second City. Bada-bing.

Juno goes overtime in trying to milk irony and turn it into a genuine emotional moment. The overly precious soundtrack, Juno’s self-consciously grungy town juxtaposed against the stepfordish Glacial Estates where the adoptive parents live—gah! Enough, I get it. Juno’s Quirky with a capital Q. Now shut UP.

On the other end of the spectrum, I took my kid to see Wall-E over the weekend.

I don’t know what the deal is with my Netflix queue, the cycle is messed up or maybe we forgot to return a DVD and we don’t even know it yet. Thus I headed into the weekend without a movie. So I schleped down to Hollywood Video, intending to rent Juno. People raved about it. So hilarious. Ellen Page is a marvel. The screenplay by Diablo Cody (that’s gotta be a made-up name) won an Oscar. Four stars.

I dunno. I saw it there on the shelf, and knew I’d be getting a film laced with trenchant social observations delivered by a self-consciously wiseass teenager. Juno’s the kind of movie that seems to be trying too hard to not try too hard.

To the right of 17 million copies of Juno was two copies of Lars and the Real Girl. One copy was so pristine, you know no one even cracked the case open. Ryan Gosling a.k.a Lars has never landed on my radar as a particularly talented actor. But the story about a repressed man who thinks a blow-up doll is a real girl was just weird enough to entice me.

This is the sort of movie you’ll either love or hate. Set in a frozen midwest town in possibly Minnesota or Wisconsin, Lars (Gosling) suffers from Asperger’s or some other malady that makes him so socially awkward he can’t eat dinner with his brother and sister-in-law (Paul Scheider and Emily Mortimer–both really good in these supporting roles). Lars is encased in loneliness, and Gosling’s ticks and blue-shadowed eyes gives us a sense that Lars is drowning in his inability to connect with others. Help arrives when a co-worker shows him blow-up sex dolls on the Internet. Soon Lars brings Bianca, his new “girlfriend” home. And everyone around him has to get used to it.

The movie could have gone seriously south from here.

Be the hero of your own story.

It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a movie hew so closely and so explicitly to theme. Yet this little film about a girl living on a South Pacific island, and who has amazing adventures, provides writers a wonderful lesson in how theme informs story. For that reason (and Jodie Foster’s brilliant performance as a neurotic writer), Nim’s Island is worth seeing.

If you’re not a fan of anthropomorphic animals, you may want to pass.

Nim’s Island, adapted from Wendy Orr’s YA novel, is a vehicle to showcase current It-Girl child actor Abigail Breslin. It’s a light diversion for the tweener set, especially for girls who are tired of school-centered dramas or parents who’ve had enough of fantasy novels rendered into film. Other than the talking animals, it’s pleasingly free of CGI special effects and takes the power of stories and books seriously.

“A bird may love a fish, signore, but where will they live?” -from the movie Ever After

I was unsure what to write about this week until I stumbled upon a fun article titled “15 Nominees for Worst Movie Dialogue Ever.” You know I had to read it. Sure, I cringed remembering some of the lines. Amidala pleading with Anakin, “Hold me, like you did by the lake on Naboo” just plain hurts (from Star Wars, Episode III). And I, a former Twin Peaks addict, must’ve un-remembered Laura Palmer comparing her broken relationship with James to turkey and corn. Gobble gobble.

But what really struck me was that 13 out of the 15 movie quotes deemed to be the worst were either from romantic comedies or romantic dramas, or were from romantic moments in films of other genres. Were the editors at Entertainment Weekly anti-romance or were they onto something?

Things got interesting over at EW’s PopWatch Blog, where readers were invited to vent and/or add their own worst lines to the stew of dismal dialog.

I saw The Golden Compass over the weekend, and mostly I enjoyed it. As many of you know, it’s a film rendering of the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Lyra Belaqua, the poster child for Victorian naughtiness, is at the center of the battle between those who wish conformity at all costs and those who fight against it. At stake is not just their world, but the entire universe.

What made Pullman’s books so compelling were the Big Ideas about religion and humanity tucked into an entertaining story told in stripped and simplified prose. Daemons–animal manifestations of the human soul–talking bears, and semi-immortal witches weren’t cool ideas the author trotted out to keep the kids reading, they were linchpins in the plot.

Unfortunately, in the movie, they were rendered as set pieces. Don’t get me wrong, the film looked gorgeous, the acting was top-notch, and the pace clipped nicely. The writing was good, too. The Golden Compass is a far better film than the first Harry Potter movie or Narnia. The $9 ticket and the afternoon were well spent.

And yet . . .

As I sat watching one Great Actor after another mouth plot points: “The prophecy speaks about such a child,” or “There’s a battle coming,” I kept thinking, this is why people complain that movies don’t do books any favors.

Hmm, I’m not sure I believe this one. Check out THIS SITE and chime in on your thoughts after viewing. Is this a Warner Bros. flick in the making? A prequel? A sequel? Or is this “secret test marketing” all a hoax? An interesting article on the site is also HERE.