Published: Thursday, November 27, 2008 at 9:00 a.m. Last Modified: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 at 3:30 p.m.
By now I'm sure it's safe to assume that most people have either read at least one of Stephenie Meyers' best-selling "Twilight" series or have at least heard of the phenomenon whose popularity reached a fever pitch in the last few months with the release of the final book in the series, "Breaking Dawn," and film adaptation of the first installment, "Twilight."
I won't belabor the plot points for very long as popular culture has become so saturated with it recently. The film introduces us to Bella (Kristen Stewart), a shy, awkward teenager who moves from Arizona to Washington to live with her father. There she is greeted as an exotic outsider by the other youths in town, but she never really fits in until she meets Edward (Robert Pattinson), an enigmatic hunk who turns out to be a vampire. He comes from a family of "vegetarians," vampires who have eschewed human blood to only hunt animals. But Edward's newfound attraction for Bella comes with a price; he must grapple with his thirst for her blood and his equally fiery passion for her. The danger is compounded by the arrival of a trio of vampires whose bloodlust extends to humans, and they set their sights on Bella.
After avoiding it for as long as possible, I read "Twilight" over the summer to see what all the fuss was about and found it to be an enjoyable, if lightweight, read - an entertaining piece of teen pulp fiction fluff. However, I had tempered expectations for the film version. Movie adaptations of popular books almost always pale in comparison to their literary counterparts. The only factor that gave me hope was the presence of director Catherine Hardwicke, who (despite the dull "Nativity Story") has always impressed me with her gritty sensibilities and visual prowess in films such as "Thirteen" and the severely underrated "Lords of Dogtown."
This time, however, one of her biggest weaknesses has come to the forefront. "The Nativity Story" hinted at it when she took a more mundane visual approach, which left her without her greatest strength. Hardwicke may be a talented visual stylist, but in many ways she is a weak storyteller. There are some beautiful moments in "Twilight," but they are often hampered by intrusive and inappropriate use of music and an overall lack of narrative movement. It just doesn't flow well. When you add that to the fact that many moments that seemed wondrous and magical on the page seem hokey and contrived on the screen (Edward's supersonic running is especially laughable), then "Twilight" fails to live up to its full potential.
Not that there was much to begin with. Quite honestly, I feel it's a story better suited to the page than the screen, or at least to a director whose storytelling skills match their visual prowess.
"Twilight" never had a very strong narrative in the first place. It is filled with long passages of breathless, enraptured descriptions of Edward's beauty and Bella's burgeoning love for him. Hardwicke attempts to up the ante and keep things moving by pulling the film's villains that don't appear until the end of the novel into a series of interludes that keeps a sense of danger over the film and a semblance of a plot that really doesn't exist.
It doesn't really add anything to the film, but it's a commendable effort. But ultimately I just didn't feel it the way I did in the book, the deep sense of longing just isn't there, nor, strangely, is the sense of danger despite the strengthened efforts in that area.
While I admit to liking the book, I'm far from a "Twilight" groupie. I hated the second book, "New Moon," so much that I stopped reading it after 200 pages and moved on to something else. It just didn't do anything for me. So I didn't have a very big emotional investment in whether the film succeeded or failed.
For my part, "Twilight" is not a massive failure, but it just doesn't work separate from the page. Anyone who has not read the book may find themselves bewildered, or at least a little confused, without some of the nuances of the book to fill it out. It will doubtless please the legions of fans who have devoured Meyers' novels. But discerning filmgoers may find that "Twilight" the movie leaves much to be desired.
Matthew Lucas, a student at Appalachian State University in Boone, is a correspondent for The Dispatch. He also has a blog site where he posts movie news, buzz and commentary at fromthefrontrow.blogspot.com.
With Wednesday, April 23, marking William Shakepeare's birthday, let's all raise a flagon of ale and wish a happy 444th to one of our favorite screenwriters.
Sure, the Western canon's greatest playwright may have lived centuries before movies came along, but he has proved himself time and again as one of our most prolific and popular writers for the big screen. So to commemorate his birthday, let's go to the DVD shelves and find a few of our favorites that ask "What light through yonder movie break?"
Kenneth Branagh's Henry V (1989)
With gritty realism and lavish production values, this directorial debut of 29-year-old actor Kenneth Branagh reinvigorated Shakespeare's great play of history and warfare for a new generation -- and made Branagh a darling of critics and audiences on two continents. The Bard's dialogue remains largely intact, and the strong top-to-bottom cast -- including Brian Blessed, Ian Holm, Christian Bale, Paul Scofield, Emma Thompson, Robbie Coltrane, and Judi Dench -- are fully equipped for the task. There's something about Branagh's delivery of the famous St. Crispin's Day speech -- issued to his battle-weary troops in the French countryside, as king and soldiers alike are covered in sweat, blood, and earth -- that sends a thrilled shudder up my spine every time.
Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1996)
Of course we can't pair Branagh and Shakespeare together without giving a nod to Branagh's production of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy. The first unabridged theatrical film version of the play, the running time is just over four hours, but it is spellbinding and powerful cinema. Branagh is, naturally, the thoughtful prince out to avenge his father's murder, supported by Derek Jacobi as King Claudius, Julie Christie as Queen Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Richard Briers as Polonius, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio, and -- in this clip -- Billy Crystal as the grave digger.
(Branagh's movie version of Much Ado About Nothing is pretty good too.)
Ian McKellen's Richard III (1995)
For some of us he'll always be Gandalf. For others, he's the evil mutant Magneto. But before Sir Ian McKellen was immortalized in a line of action figures, he was one of England's most respected Shakespeareans. His Richard III casts McKellen as the charismatic, murderous, clever, subtle, and often slyly humorous villain ascending to the throne in a Nazi-inspired 1930s England. In this brazen, fast-paced adaptation, the machine-gun pocked opening credits climax with McKellen driving a tank through a wall to kill King Henry VI and his son. One of the play's most famous lines -- "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" -- was recontextualised by the new setting: during the climactic battle, Richard's scout car becomes stuck, and his lament is cast as a plea for a mode of transport with legs rather than wheels.
In this clip, among the supporting cast we see Robert Downey Jr. as Lord Rivers, Annette Bening as Elizabeth, and Maggie Smith as the Duchess of York.
Perhaps no other title on this page better proves that Will Shakespeare would have loved writing for the movies.
Roman Polanski's Macbeth (1971)
Starring Jon Finch as Macbeth, Polanski's interpretation of "the Scottish play" is as bleak and bloody as they come. You can feel the dank misery of the Middle Ages in every scene. But of course it's most remembered for the nude scene with Lady Macbeth (Francesca Annis) freaking out and looking for a really good bar of soap. That's not this clip, alas. Still, we have Finch's "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech (ah, flashbacks to high school English class) and a bloody good fight scene.
Julie Taymor's Titus (1999)
In Shakespeare's day, his early revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus was a hit "slasher film" of the era. This most gruesome of all Shakespeare's plays -- a real "Itchy & Scratchy" of the First Folio -- was a smash success that his company trotted out many times over the years to give the groundlings brutal, over-the-top thrills -- mutilations, beheadings, even a mother tricked into eating her own children that have been baked into pies. (Step aside, Sweeney Todd.)
Director Julie Taymor adapted her own tricked-out stage version for a powerful and wildly weird film starring Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, and Alan Cumming. As one of the unfortunate sons, also here is Jonathan Rhys-Meyers (now TV's Henry VIII in The Tudors). The setting is an anachronistic "all times, all places" world that uses locations, costumes, and imagery from many periods of history, including ancient Rome and Mussolini's Italy. This clip is from the "Iron Chef" scene:
Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968)
Whoa. After all that death and debauchery, let's move to some lighter fare. This movie adaptation of Shakespeare's most famous romance was directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Best Costume Design, with nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. Shakespeare scholar Stephen Orgel describes the film as being "full of beautiful young people, and the camera, and the lush Technicolour, make the most of their sexual energy and good looks." Made at the height of the "British invasion" in U.S. pop culture, and aimed straight at the era's counterculture youth, a generation of teenagers thereafter grew up on this film. Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet is notable for being one of the first filmed versions of the play in which the main actors are near the ages of their characters -- Leonard Whiting (Romeo) was 17 during filming, and Olivia Hussey (Juliet) was 15. Zeffirelli had to get special permission for Hussey to appear nude in the film. Hussey later amusingly recalled that she was not permitted to view the film because it contained her own nudity.
On the other hand, if you like your Romeo and Juliet with a modern pop edge, there's Baz Luhrmann's Romeo+Juliet (1996) starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Claire Danes, and a soundtrack that successfully targeted the "MTV Generation."
Akira Kurosawa's Ran (1985)
Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa's Oscar-winning adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear, moved to a sixteenth-century Japan of warloards and fierce battles, was the famed director's last great epic and remains one of the most gripping and beautifully made of all "Shakespeare movies." With a budget of $12 million, it was the most expensive Japanese film produced up to that time. Ran was hailed for its powerful images and use of color -- costume designer Emi Wada won an Academy Award for Costume Design for her work. Kurosawa loved filming in lush and expansive locations, and most of Ran was shot amidst the mountains and plains of Mount Aso, Japan's largest active volcano. Kurosawa was also granted permission to shoot at two of the country's most famous landmarks, the ancient castles at Kumamoto and Himeji. For the castle of Lady Sué's family, he used the ruins of the Azusa castle.
If you like Kurosawa's Ran, follow that film (after you recover) with his 1957 Throne of Blood, which transposes Macbeth to medieval Japan. It's one of Kurosawa's best films, and for many critics it's one of the best film adaptations of Macbeth, despite having almost none of the play's script. Washizu/Macbeth's famous death scene, in which his own archers turn upon him and fill his body with arrows, was in fact performed with real arrows, a choice made to help actor Toshiro Mifune display realistic facial expressions of fear.
And talk about pop culture cool! In an episode of TV's Smallville, Lex Luthor claims that a sword hanging on the wall of his study is a prop from Throne of Blood, his "favorite Akira Kurosawa movie."
King Lear with James Earl Jones at the New York Shakespeare Festival
There have been so many King Lears on film. There are versions set in post-Chernobyl Russia, at a Yiddish seder, and in the cornfields of Iowa. We've seen existential Lears, a Soviet Christian Marxist Lear, and a punk-apocalyptic Lear. Orson Welles was a fine screen king, and at 75 Laurence Olivier won the International and Primetime Emmy awards in a 1984 TV production co-starring Diana Rigg, John Hurt, and Stonehenge.
Then again, you may prefer your King Lear served straight up. In that case, I suggest the Broadway Theatre Archive DVD starring James Earl Jones (before he became Darth Vader), from a performance filmed before an audience in New York City's Central Park and broadcast in 1974 as a PBS Great Performances presentation. The supporting cast showcases Raul Julia as the seductive villain Edmund, Rene Auberjonois as Edgar/Tom o' Bedlam, Rosalind Cash as treacherous Goneril, Lee Chamberlain's loving and steadfast Cordelia, Douglass Watson as loyal Kent, and Tom Aldredge (The Sopranos) as the Fool, Lear's voice of observant wisdom. (The only weak link is, oddly, Paul Sorvino's lackluster Gloucester.) Here's a no-fripperies, full-speed-ahead King Lear that's accessible, exciting, haunting, moving, and crowd-pleasing in ways that merely reading the play in English class will never achieve.
Al Pacino's Looking for Richard (1996)
Al Pacino self-produced this terrific fly-on-the-wall documentary because, basically, he's a Shakespeare buff. In it, Pacino explores not just the gold and dirt within Shakespeare's text -- we watch him also dip into the well of his own skill and craft as an actor to see if he has what it takes to make the vile (but layered and nuanced) Richard III live for modern American audiences. Pacino embarked upon Looking for Richard by recruiting fellow actors -- such as Kevin Spacey, Alec Baldwin, and Winona Ryder -- and shooting small excerpts on film, be it conversations, debates, table-readings, or informal scenes in casual settings. Michael Mann lent some of his film crew from Heat to shoot the climactic Battle of Bosworth Field just outside of L.A. The result is a meditation on the value of the play, and of Shakespeare in general. It's a master class in acting, with behind-the-scenes conversations illuminating how much thought and planning goes into this sort of production.
Shakespeare in Love (1999)
Okay, sure, it's not strictly speaking "a Shakespeare movie," but this romance-comedy-drama does a great job taking us back to the days when Will Shakespeare -- just 29 years old with his career on the rise -- might forsake it all for the love of a higher-born woman. The witty script by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard overflows with in-jokes for Shakespeare fans and theater buffs. Shakespeare in Love left the 1999 Academy Awards with seven statuettes, including the one for Best Picture. Joseph Fiennes (Ralph's brother) is Will, and Gwyneth Paltrow (ah, my Gwyneth, shall I compare thee to a summer's day?) has never been better.
Forbidden Planet (1956)
In 1956 with Forbidden Planet, MGM did for science fiction what it had done for musicals four years earlier with Singin' in the Rain. The studio took the stuff its audiences loved, gave it that high-polish MGM razzle-dazzle, and produced an enduring best-of-breed favorite, a CinemaScope spectacle that's terrifically entertaining, smartly written, memorably cast, briskly paced, and production-designed to the hilt. Instead of Gene Kelly's tap shoes or Debbie Reynolds' pertness, this time we get Leslie Nielsen as a proto-Captain Kirk, special effects photography that still knocks our socks off, Hollywood's most famous robot before Star Wars' less imaginative and interesting droids, and (the stuff space-kids' dreams are made on) leggy Anne Francis ably modeling miniskirts a decade early. It has aged well, and any dated elements -- that great flying-saucer design of the starship, the crew's baseball-cap uniforms, the casual Rat Pack-era sexism -- only add a quaint charm to the film's robust retro-future vibe. Oh, and its plot points -- and even some dialogue -- come lifted with an Amazing Stories spin from Shakespeare's The Tempest.
The 50th Anniversary Special Edition DVD is the one to get here. For a few bucks more you can get it in a big tin box with your own Robby the Robot miniature.
Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare Style
And finally, it's not a video clip, but it's too good to not mention. Via Boing Boing, we now know that Livejournal's Ceruleanst has given Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction the Bardolator treatment. Forthwith, here's the "Royale with Cheese" bit as written by William Shakespeare:
ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.
J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie? V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue? J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike Are strange to ours, with their own history: Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house. V: What say they then, pray? J: Hachis Parmentier. V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream? J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème. V: What do they name black pudding? J: I know not; I visited no inn it could be bought.
A N Wilson pays tribute to the skill involved in turning books into film
Addicts, not merely of Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece, but also of the 1981 Granada Television version of Brideshead Revisited can only look forward to the new screen version with diluted enthusiasm.
We are told that the new version has Charles Ryder and Sebastian snogging; that the story turns into a "love triangle" between Charles, Sebastian and Julia. Religion is played down. And how could it be Brideshead without Geoffrey Burgon's superb music?
Still, it would be stuffy to say that no one should ever be allowed to adapt our favourite books for cinema or television. Think of the number of enjoyable Sherlock Holmes films, for example, starring Basil Rathbone, which bear only small relation to the books.
The reason Jane Austen films are so deadly is that they remove the chief attraction of the books - which is Jane Austen's own voice. Without the jokes in Pride and Prejudice, there is a sort of inevitability that you will end up with the flavourless Keira Knightley as Elizabeth Bennet.
Something of the same kind operates with Dickens. It takes real skill to adapt him, since there is so much more in the books than just the "characters".
The best Dickens adaptation, however, is also my favourite film - it is Christine Edzard's Little Dorrit, with its total faithfulness to the book, and its extraordinary line-up of great actors, including the totally unknown Sarah Pickering as the child-woman.
Joan Greenwood - Sibella from Kind Hearts and Coronets - never gave a finer performance than she did as Mrs Clennam. Max Wall and Patricia Hayes make the most superb Flintwinch and Affery. The sublime Miriam Margolyes simply is Flora Finching, and Derek Jacobi and Alec Guinness create marvellously understated Arthur Clennam and Dorrit.
The film looks as if it was made on a shoestring. When I speak of its total faithfulness, that is not to say that they have not made judicious cuts - all the lesbian intrigue between Miss Wade and Tattycoram goes, and so does the opening in the French prison and the plot which goes with it. The film is in two longish parts - the first Nobody's Fault sees the story from Clennam's viewpoint, and the second is Little Dorrit's Story.
I remember when it first came out spending almost all week in the cinema, viewing it repeatedly. I suppose I've watched the videos - and now a DVD is available - any number of times. Rather than starting in Marseilles, the film comes immediately to London, and it comes intimately indoors.
The interiors are beautiful - tiny, panelled rooms, sparsely furnished. Mrs Clennam's dark house, from whose black shadows Max Wall sinisterly hobbles, or Little Dorrit flits with her baskets of darning or trays of oysters, is a place which, once you have come to inhabit it, will haunt your dreams for ever.
The outside shots, Shotter Boys prints brought to life, are done in almost toy-theatre fashion. Dreamy shots of Borough High Street suggest the background that leads to the Marshalsea Prison, which is just a small yard when you get inside it. The roofscapes of London have a similar near-amateur brilliance. And crowd scenes are suggested by comparatively few actors passing and repassing shop windows.
Little Dorrit, my own personal favourite among Dickens's novels, is a sort of fairy story. Yes, it is "about" money - but not in the sense that Trollope or Balzac would have written about it, with their knowing worldliness. The exact nature of the Clennams' business transactions in China would have taken up pages of Balzac's time, but in Dickens, Arthur merely comes home with the uneasy sense that his father's money was gained unjustly.
Likewise all the Dorrit money arrangements - both Dorrit's ruin, and the sudden restitution - come about quite arbitrarily. Clennam and Mr Pancks could as easily have been fairies with magic wands, for all the interest which Dickens takes in the actual details of the debts. (In Trollope, we would be rummaging about looking for lost cheques and promissory notes).
The point of money in Little Dorrit - as in the last few weeks of excitement in the world markets - is the effect it has on the lives of human beings whose values are out of skew. That is why, though we have no Marshalsea prison any more, figures like Dorrit and Merdle are perennial, and the love between Dorrit and Clennam remains so hauntingly touching.
Superman Leaped 40 years' worth of tall buildings on the printed page before he landed his first feature film, in 1978. In 2003, Wesley Gibson, the cubicle-dwelling assassin in Mark Millar's nihilist graphic novel Wanted, had producers circling before his first issue even went to print. Millar's work is unlikely source material for a big-budget movie; one of his obscenely named villains is made of fecal matter from 666 evildoers, including Adolf Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer. Nevertheless, Wanted is now a glossy summer action movie starring James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman, directed by new-to-big-studio-movies Russian Timur Bekmambetov.
Graphic novels--long comic books for grownups--have always had mostly cult appeal. Last year's most successful, the 13th volume in a Japanese manga adventure series--Naruto, by Masashi Kishimoto--sold 80,000 copies, far short of 2007's hottest novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, which sold more than 1.5 million copies. The point of the comics was largely their transgressiveness. "They're the last pirate medium," says Millar, a Scottish writer who consults for Marvel Comics on more mainstream fare, like Iron Man. "They're the last medium for a mass audience where you can do anything you want."
But the creations of oddball loners like Millar scribbling at drafting tables have also become the movie industry's most reliable development tool. Thanks to the box-office success of A-list superheroes like Spider-Man and the X-Men, Hollywood's appetite for comics-fueled material is insatiable. Titles from the darker corners of the genre, including gritty graphic novels like Wanted and Alan Moore's watershed deconstructivist superhero tome Watchmen are getting the big-screen makeover. Stories and characters first written for an audience of a few hundred thousand geeks at most are reaching, at the box office and on DVD and cable, popcorn-chomping crowds that number in the tens of millions. "The dalliance between Hollywood and comics is becoming a marriage," says Frank Miller, creator of the graphic novels Sin City and 300. "The downside is in the heads of people who make comic books. Everybody wants money and fame."
Times weren't always so flush in Toontown. In 1997, "George Clooney killed comic-book movies," says Millar. Joel Schumacher's joyless Batman & Robin, in which Clooney legendarily donned a bat suit complete with rubber nipples, left fans feeling abused. Studios turned their attention to fantasy literature like Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. But when Spider-Man bested two wizard movies and a Star Wars prequel in 2002 and X-2: X-Men United broke $200 million at the box office in 2003, hand-drawn heroes swung back into favor. The joke in Hollywood now is that in a risk-averse era, comic-book adaptations have a distinct advantage: the drawings mean studio execs can see beforehand what the movie will look like.
At first, it was the family-friendly superheroes who made the leap to multiplexes, with the help of directors like Bryan Singer and Chris Nolan. Slowly, lesser-known comic books got a shot. Some, like Sin City and Hellboy, became modest box-office successes by adhering to the distinctive spirit of their creators. Others, like Road to Perdition and A History of Violence, attracted audiences with sophisticated stories that few people knew were derived from graphic novels.
Then came the spear that pierced the industries of comics, movies and ab videos: 300. "I was pretty sure we were making a boutique movie," says director Zack Snyder of his R-rated, blood-spattered retelling of the Battle of Thermopylae. With no stars and a lot of leather bikini bottoms, 300 grossed more than $200 million in the U.S. alone. "The movie struck a chord because it was unapologetic," says Snyder, who is directing Watchmen for release next March. "It's difficult to find a movie that feels true to itself. You feel the hand of Hollywood, the moviemaking by committee, on everything."
In the case of 300, the hand audiences felt was really Miller's, since whenever Snyder made a creative decision, he asked himself, What would Frank do? Comic-book-movie directors like Snyder, who see themselves as stewards of another person's vision rather than architects of their own, have made comic-book creators Hollywood's latest big-budget auteurs. Because they work with such low overhead compared with moviemakers, comic writers and artists can take many more creative chances than directors. "You don't have endless development meetings that turn your brain into milk," says Miller. "You get to at least see what an individual has to offer." After co-directing Sin City with Robert Rodriguez in 2005, Miller is completing his comics-to-movies arc by directing The Spirit, an adaptation of a 1940s crime-fighting strip, for a December release.
The other axiom 300 proved to Hollywood is one the comics industry has known for decades: "The audience for comic-book movies is overweight guys in their mid-30s," says director, comic-book-store owner and overweight guy in his late 30s Kevin Smith. Actually, the average age of a comic-book buyer is 23, but Smith's point--that there are fans aplenty to support R-rated comics franchises--has been digested. Even PG-13 comic-book movies are maturing. Batman keeps getting darker scripts, like Nolan's The Dark Knight, starring Christian Bale and Heath Ledger (in his haunting last performance, as the Joker). Marvel Studios' first two movies, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, star Robert Downey Jr. and Ed Norton, Oscar-nominated actors with indie credibility. And Hellboy, who is back this summer for a sequel, is hardly your standard man in tights. He smokes cigars, drinks Red Bull and collects kittens. "Kids aren't kids anymore," says Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. "They're so exposed to everything. They wouldn't accept really simplistic superheroes." It's likely that a superhero movie like Watchmen or The Dark Knight couldn't be appreciated by audiences without the simpler fare that came before it. You can't deconstruct the superhero until someone has constructed him, rubber nipples and all. "Watchmen is thick and complicated and violent and political and critical of America," Snyder says. "It's huge."
If you're going to see a movie based on a book you think is worth reading, read the first book. You can never read the book with the same imaginative responsiveness to the author once you have seen the movie. Pauline Kael (For Keeps: 30 Years at The Movies, p 165)
