Why we just can’t get enough of ‘Alice’

Almost 150 years after its creation, Lewis Carroll’s delightfully weird Wonderland world continues to fascinate — and to spawn merchandise. Jewelry, trinkets, clothing, cosmetics: We want it all.

March 07, 2010|By Adam Tschorn, Los Angeles Times

When Lewis Carroll popped Alice down the rabbit hole in 1865, he had no way of knowing that the girl in the pinafore dress — along with the creatures that populate "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and its 1872 sequel "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There" — would become a permanent fixture on our pop culture landscape.

 

Alice (Mia Wasikowska) joins the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and the White Queen (Anne Hathaway) in director Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. (Walt Disney Pictures)

The phenomenon encompasses more than the 100-plus versions of the book – the most recent of which, published last month, pairs Carroll's text with illustrations by Camille Rose Garcia and recently hit the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestseller lists. It's something beyond the more than two dozen feature film incarnations, ranging from a star-studded 1933 version — in which Cary Grant played the Mock Turtle, W.C. Fields was Humpty Dumpty and Gary Cooper, the White Knight — to the Tim Burton take that opened Friday. And it's greater than the nearly dozen TV versions (the most recent a Syfy miniseries that included Kathy Bates as the evil Queen of Hearts who happens to run an emotion-emptying casino and Harry Dean Stanton as a shadowy operative code-named "the Caterpillar").

Adaptations From Book to Movie: It was a Mook!

Written by Reena Tabita
Published October 08, 2007
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/10/08/124346.php

Inspiration comes from many sources. For many filmmakers, the inspiration can come from the written word. Books — and in some cases, short stories — have been adapted into movies. This has been such a trend that bookstores have a section where they display books that have been made into movies, advising, "Read the book before you see the movie." People have debated which version is better. Which really is better? Is there even an answer to that question, as a general rule?

The thing that sparks these debates is that the books people choose to adapt are timeless and popular to a certain degree such as The Harry Potter series, Running with Scissors, The Green Mile, Secret Window, Atonement, and The Devil Wears Prada. A significant part of the population is familiar with these books, have read them (sometimes even multiple times), and hold opinions about the plot, characters, and much more.

Readers have formed images and ideas about how they see the book as a movie. Disappointment or excitement happens when the movie either matches or diverges from what they imagined. In discussions, they would voice their opinion on whether the book or the movie is better.

Is it fair to compare? After all, books and movies are different types of media. Everyone has their own imagination and has thought about how that scene is supposed to go, or what that character is supposed to look like. Not everybody will be pleased. Some things do get lost in the translation and transition from page to screen.

Comparison, while inevitable, is rather unfair at times. A fan will not be able to influence the actor, the director, or the animator. The only comparable things are theme and atmosphere. Did the movie capture what made the book interesting? Did the movie have the same tone and atmosphere as the book? If the answer is yes to both, then it's fair to say, in comparison, the book and movie are as good as each other.

When other aspects are brought in, however, comparisons become unfair and the question of which is better becomes unanswerable except by opinion and on a case-by-case basis. Look at Jurassic Park and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Jurassic Park is an excellent movie and an excellent book. It helped a lot that the book's author, Michael Crichton, co-wrote the screenplay and was willing to change things around to suit the film media. He made the action of the story move faster and gave the characters more depth and emphasis on a personality trait to create better tension on the screen.

The movie version of Alan Grant wasn't too fond of children (he claimed they were "smelly"), but the book made it clear that Grant was someone who didn't mind kids and recognized a shared excitement for dinosaurs. The movie version of Grant worked well for adding some tension in the movie, as Grant got stuck with the kids, and provided a challenge for the character that was funny to watch at times.

Steven Spielberg was the perfect passionate director to channel all of these elements. He made the action and characters faster, crisper, and tighter. The flawless, careful casting for the movie contributed to its success. I am not be ashamed to admit that I hear Sam Neill's voice whenever I read Alan Grant's dialogue in the novel.

The Harry Potter movies, specifically Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, while perfectly cast as well, suffer from having had different directors. Chris Columbus, Alfonso Cuaron, and Mike Newell all had their own visions. David Yates is the latest director to have his own vision about the material, and it feels like he changed the tone of some of the relationships in the fifth movie, especially between Ron and Hermione, and Harry and Ginny.

At times, the relationship and action become so manipulated, confusing, and awkward that it became hard to watch. Take Emma Watson's Hermione. The most natural performance of hers was in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (with that in mind, please bring back Alfonso Cuaron!).

In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Emma sometimes does what the fans have termed "eyebrow acting," and it makes it look like she's trying so hard to get Hermione's lines out. I think that's either due to bad direction or a conflict between the translation of the character in this particular book to how she was to come across onscreen.

Suffice it to say, the movie is a good movie, but an incredibly disappointing adaptation, but what do I know? The film won a National Movie Award, and Emma bagged the National Movie Award for female performance.

Maybe that is the case for most adaptations. By itself, a film might just be that - a good film, but as an adaptation, it might be disappointing and lackluster. It can also happen the other way - the movie might be better than the book!

Everyone has their own opinions about books and movies, but if one goes into a movie or tackles a book with a clean, open mind cleared of (most) expectations, then maybe you might just enjoy it for what is it and not mind the price.

'Austen Book Club' disappoints

The Virginian-Pilot

© October 6, 2007


You're invited to attend a book club meeting in which five women whine and complain about how badly they've been treated by men. That's about the level of the somewhat disappointing "The Jane Austen Book Club."


We expected more. For one thing, it is based on the 2004 best-selling novel by Karen Joy Fowler. For another, Sony Pictures Classics, the releasing company, can usually be depended upon for above-average, somewhat literary movies.


We celebrate any film that has such great respect for the written word, but the characters in this book club seem to have particularly ordinary and cliched lives. A husband (Jimmy Smits) leaves his wife (Amy Brenneman) for another woman. The wife goes into trauma while he is noticeably regretful about the whole thing. Even in the first scene, we have an idea that they'll probably get back together.


A prissy, uptight high school French teacher (Emily Blunt) is upset that her insensitive husband has called off their trip to Paris just because he has a business meeting. She has her eyes, reluctantly and blushingly, set on a little teen stud muffin (Kevin Zegers) who is one of her students. But she's fighting the urge. We lose interest in this subplot before they do.

An older woman (Kathy Baker), married five times and still jolly about it all, proposes a Jane Austen book club for the girls to get together and discuss the author's plottings about love and such. They are joined by a rich but lonely guy who wears tight bike shorts (Britisher Hugh Dancy, who stole what there was to steal of the underrated "Evening"). There is considerable speculation given about which woman he'll end up with. Each member is assigned a different Austen novel as a special ty when they meet in what amounts to, even though they won't admit it, an attempt to relate Austen's plots to their own lives.


This is a chick flick supreme, although I had sworn not to use that term again because several women told me it is tasteless and derogatory and if I did it again they would beat me to death with their bras. But, dang it all, there's no other way to describe "The Jane Austen Book Club."


The trouble is that nothing much happens to these women. Maria Bello, who was so good in "A History of Violence," is added to the mix as a dog breeder who is such a control freak that she has no time for her own life.


There is, however, one hilarious performance that makes it all, almost, worth watching. That is the very droll and pretentious creation of actress Blunt as the French teacher - occasionally blurting out lines in French and always diminishing the others' supposed lack of literary knowledge of Austen. Blunt stole every scene she had as the secretary in "The Devil Wears Prada," and she does it again here as an uptight, superior phony who has to put up with a macho husband. She's a light in the darkness. We can't wait to see Blunt in other movies - elevated, we hope, to star status.

Lynn Redgrave has a brief bit as the over-the-top hippie mother of Blunt's character. She chews up the scenery and is promptly ordered to get out. (Fine. The movie needs some color, but not badly enough for us to put up with this character.)


Robin Swicord, heretofore a writer of such movie adaptations as "Little Women," "Matilda" and "Memories of a Geisha," makes her directorial debut here and is, still, obsessed with things literary. Those who don't know Austen well will be needlessly intimidated by the degree of detail put into the discussions. Those of us whose familiarity is centered mainly on the Austen movie versions will feel just as wanting. Movie fans may well remember the several versions of "Pride and Prejudice" as well as "Sense and Sensibility," "Emma," "Persuasion" and "Mansfield Park." Titles of the novels serve to divide the movie into "chapters," but this also serves to remind us that we don't know as much as these characters. (Actually, we aren't missing much, because efforts to compare these little subplots to the Austen novels yield only the most skimpy rewards.)


There is something encouraging, if not altogether believable, about the way these characters are obsessed by Austen's writings.


We only wish Robert Altman were still living, and making films. He was the master of creating believable, involving little moments while juggling five or 20 subplots. He could have made a classic out of "The Jane Austen Book Club." As it is, it's merely a suitable refuge for those who want to escape the violence and tastelessness in other theaters. It will take that kind of alternative to drive audiences to this "Club."

Mal Vincent, (757) 446-2347, mal.vincent@pilotonline.com

Shakespeare in Translation: Foreign Film Versions of Shakespeare's Plays

Shakespeare is unquestionably one of the most distinguished writers of all time, possibly even the most distinguished.

Since the time when he wrote his plays, however, they have been interpreted in many interesting and unique ways. This is a result of the varied ways in which Shakespeare’s plays resonate with their directors, and each of these directors, despite their differences of interpretation, can justify their interpretations of the text based on what each of them has discovered written between the lines.

The last eighty or so years have seen a new medium for these interpretations, that of film. Since the early days of silent film, directors have sought to interpret the words of Shakespeare into the heavily visual medium of film, with varying success. An additional problem presents itself in the very language, however. What if the director literally does not speak the Bard’s language? How then do the plays of Shakespeare speak to these directors?

A translation, no matter how good, always changes the original in some way. A foreign director also has another problem. The culture of Renaissance England often differs greatly from modern English culture, let alone the modern culture of foreign nations. Thus a foreign film director who wishes to film Shakespeare is presented with a three-fold problem; transferring the dialogue-heavy Shakespearian text into the visually intensive film medium, translating the English text into an accessible form for the foreign audience, and making cultural concessions in order to keep the context of the play understandable to the audience.

I intend to examine these problems in the context of two directors and three plays: Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet (Gamlet, 1964), Akira Kurosawa’s Macbeth adaptation, Throne of Blood (Kumonoso jô, 1957), and both directors’ adaptations of the play King Lear, Kozintsev’s King Lear (Korol Lir, 1969) and Kurosawa’s Ran (1984). At times these can be extreme examples of the problems in translating Shakespeare, but I often find that extreme examples are often the most informative.

Read more http://www.filmint.nu/?q=node/18

© Copyright Film International 2001-2007. Legally responsible: Pär Linnertz.

Two Takes on "The Postman Always Rings Twice"

According to one critic, there are no fewer than six film versions of James M. Cain’s novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (Yakir). This 1934 American roman noir was so influential, in fact, that the existentialist author Albert Camus penned his classic L’Etranger after reading Cain’s text. 

The novel tells the story of a drifter who goes to work for the owner of a roadside restaurant and gas-station and his younger and fatally attractive wife. Frank, the drifter, forms an obsessive attachment to this woman, Cora, and the two embark on a torrid affair that results in the murder of Cora’s husband, Nick. When the two are caught and taken to trial, however, they turn on each other, and the story spirals to a climax in which the lovers reap their own self-destruction. 

The novel’s shocking violence and unbridled sexuality has repeatedly caused scandal in its various adaptations to the silver screen. This paper will examine two of these versions, the 1946 film directed by Tay Garnett and starring John Garfield and Lana Turner, a classic film noir that relies heavily upon symbolic imagery to depict sex and violence; and, the 1981 film version adapted by David Mamet, directed by Bob Rafelson, and starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, a “neo-noir” which reflects the relaxation of industry censorship in its graphic depiction of sex and violence. It would not be unusual to assume that the liberalization of Hollywood’s censorship codes would reflect a general liberalization of cultural attitudes, but as the following discussion will show, both film versions work to mediate their particular cultural concerns, and neither can be so easily classified as more liberal or progressive than the other. 

By investigating the filmic representations of concerns over sex and violence, gender roles, and race in these two films, it can be shown that despite a decreased censorship in the more contemporary filmmaking era, there are still many cultural issues and anxieties that are not made explicit but are symbolically present and problematized in the text of these films. Read More...

© Copyright Film International 2001-2007. Legally responsible: Pär Linnertz.