THESE FORUMS NOW CLOSED (read only)
Fun Stuff => ENJOY => Topic started by: variable_star on 16 Nov 2009, 19:26
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Nice. Two post-apocalyptic films in almost as many months. . .and just after I finished Fallout 3, too.
The Road (Nov. 25)
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbLgszfXTAY)
(http://i.imagehost.org/0048/the-road.jpg)
The Book of Eli (Jan. 15)
Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKfZrbS79To (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKfZrbS79To)
(http://i.imagehost.org/0660/Untitled.jpg)
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The Road looks promising, as movies based on Cormac McCarthy novels often are. The second one, well... I lol'd when "MILA KUNIS" flashed on the screen dramatically.
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I was so hyped for Book of Eli, then I saw Mila Kunis in the trailer. I don't know how to feel now.
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The first one looks pretty cool. The second one looks like a big pile of dick.
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The Road is an amazing book. Incredibly harrowing and spare. The movie looks pretty cool, probably a lot more action-y than the book and it certainly looks a lot flashier than the language of the book would suggest but I'm still excited for it. As for Book of Eli, I think I'll save my money.
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The Book of Eli seems a lot like Mad Max 2
The Road look pretty superb though
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I am sort of nervous about The Road.
on the one hand, it's one of my favorite books and it looks likethey got the dreariness and greyness spot on; but on the other hand...well...Charlize Theron. :|
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What's wrong with Charlize Theron? Remember "Monster"?
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I never saw it.
I just really dislike Charlize Theron.
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The second one, well... I lol'd when "MILA KUNIS" flashed on the screen dramatically.
I was so hyped for Book of Eli, then I saw Mila Kunis in the trailer. I don't know how to feel now.
haha I totally agree....but it's got the always reliable Gary Oldman as the villain, so I have high hopes nonetheless.
*crosses fingers*
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I was so hyped for Book of Eli, then I saw Mila Kunis in the trailer. I don't know how to feel now.
Aroused.
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The Road looks promising, as movies based on Cormac McCarthy novels often are. The second one, well... I lol'd when "MILA KUNIS" flashed on the screen dramatically.
To my knowledge there have been two films based on McCarthy books. No Country for Old Men was amazing, but the other was All the Pretty Horses
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The Book of Eli seems a lot like Mad Max 2
So it looks fucking awesome is what you're saying
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Maybe not awesome, because it has fewer muscle cars than Mad Max. But it does have Denzel Washington instead of Mel Gibson, so I don't know.
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It is Apocalypse Porn.
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what the fuck does everyone have against mila kunis
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When I think riveting and emotionally affecting post-apocalyptic action-drama, I don't think Meg.
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The Book Of Eli looks to be a dumb action film set in a very cool setting. Denzel Washington hasn't been impressing me too much lately and Gary Oldman is very much hit and miss. I wouldn't mind seeing a longer trailer but so far I'm not all too impressed.
The Road, on the other hand, looks to be absolutely fantastic. I think that Cormac McCarthy's books are absolutely perfect to translate to the large screen. I really don't like Aragorn but I think that he's going to be pretty amazing and I actually think the guy will be able to hold this film all on his own. I'm really hoping that they don't make Charlize Theron a major character, she's really not in the book all that much.
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I'm really hoping that they don't make Charlize Theron a major character, she's really not in the book all that much.
My one hope is that this is one of those "hey, let's show this well known attractive actress a lot in the preview even though she's only in the movie for a couple minutes because people will want to go see it more if they think she's in it a lot" kind of things. Please let it be one of those!
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What, do you think she is a terrible actor or something?
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I've only heard really good things about the Road (the movie). From watching that trailer it seems pretty apparent that they're trying to market what's essentially an arty mood piece to the most lucrative demographic, which is teenage boys who like going to multiplexes to watch men shoot other men, preferably in a post-apocalyptic landscape where lots of shit's been blown up, with the occasional break from the action to look at pretty women. It seems like they've crammed every single moment of action in the book into one minute of trailer.
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What's wrong with Charlize Theron? Remember the third season of "Arrested Development"?
duh
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My one hope is that this is one of those "hey, let's show this well known attractive actress a lot in the preview even though she's only in the movie for a couple minutes because people will want to go see it more if they think she's in it a lot" kind of things. Please let it be one of those!
From what I've heard, this is essentially the case.
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I've only heard really good things about the Road (the movie). From watching that trailer it seems pretty apparent that they're trying to market what's essentially an arty mood piece to the most lucrative demographic, which is teenage boys who like going to multiplexes to watch men shoot other men, preferably in a post-apocalyptic landscape where lots of shit's been blown up, with the occasional break from the action to look at pretty women. It seems like they've crammed every single moment of action in the book into one minute of trailer.
Trailers often make movies seem a lot worse than they are. I read somewhere that those scenes at the very beginning of the trailer with the news broadcast or whatever aren't even in the movie and John Hillcoat was not too pleased about their being included in the trailer.
Also, I am pretty happy that they got Viggo Mortensen to play the man. I am a pretty big fan of his performance in Eastern Promises.
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What, do you think she is a terrible actor or something?
No not per se but her character wasn't much of a factor in the book at all, a couple brief memories of the Man, and the story worked really well that way. Gussying it up with all sorts of flashbacks and explicit exposition could ruin the mood.
What's wrong with Charlize Theron? Remember the third season of "Arrested Development"?
duh
Fuck, that's who that was? Why did I not realize??
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There is no way movie The Road can be as dark as the book and still be commercially viable. I said this about the Watchmen and history has vindicated me!
America and the world are not read for a movie depicting cannibals eating babies. You heard it here first.
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The Hills Have Eyes?
They eat a baby in that, don't they?
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Yes sure but it's a metaphor. For society.
Anyway, after checking Rotten Tomatoes (http://au.rottentomatoes.com/m/10009460-the_road/) and reading a few of the reviews, I'm definitely seeing this. Also, Michael K. Williams is in it (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0931324/). Michael K. Williams and Nick Cave in the same movie. Oh baby.
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The road was a really great novel. I don't see how they could possibly get that story told in a film.
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There is no way movie The Road can be as dark as the book and still be commercially viable. I said this about the Watchmen and history has vindicated me!
America and the world are not read for a movie depicting cannibals eating babies. You heard it here first.
There's been a poem out for about 300 years now all about the consumption of babies.
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A poem?
For 300 years?
About eating babies?
Which one?
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Was it written by an ancestor of Anne Geddes? Or Eddie Izzard??
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The road was a really great novel. I don't see how they could possibly get that story told in a film.
I'm having a hard time seeing how it wouldn't translate perfectly into the film. McCarthy spends so many words describing the environment and the actions of the characters.
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America and the world are not read for a movie depicting cannibals eating babies. You heard it here first.
They filmed this scene and it was in one of the earlier cuts of the movie. Apparently they address the cannibalism thing earlier, however, and thought it would be redundant so they cut it. That's the official word anyway.
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I'm having a hard time seeing how it wouldn't translate perfectly into the film. McCarthy spends so many words describing the environment and the actions of the characters.
True, but a lot of the book's tone came from the techniques McCarthy used. Principally I'm thinking about his treatment of dialogue, which was shrunk down so much that it didn't even come wrapped in quotation marks; even if the movie retains the extreme sparseness of the words that are actually spoken, the effect of having them presented almost blank on the page, which flattened the character's voices and gave a strong impression of the man and the boy being worn down by their daily ordeals, is going to be difficult if not impossible to replicate once you have actual people on screen actually speaking the words. The film-makers could compensate for this through make-up and physical mannerisms, but it's going to be a different effect. I don't doubt that the movie will be highly faithful to the book, and from everything I've read it's apparently a really good film, but I expect it would be almost impossible for a film to replicate very accurately the feeling of reading the book.
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Harry's right, that's probably the hardest thing this movie will have to do. The characters in the book felt so hollow, almost as if they were not human but rather shells of humans who trudged forward in a combination of utter desperation and that little spark of hope that the Man kept alive in the Boy. At times I feared their interaction with other humans, because the tiny ember that kept them going was so vulnerable to the elements that it was constantly on the verge of fizzling out. I don't know yet if the film portrays that struggle in a way that makes sense to me, as I haven't seen it yet, but that's what I will be looking for when I do.
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Michael Chabon had a brilliant review in the New York Review of Books where he said that the book was better understood as an existential horror piece exploiting parents' insecurity about protecting their children from harm. I literally had to stop reading at several points in the book because I found the material so unnerving, and I read a lot of pretty fringy, existential horror stuff usually without issue. I don't expect that the movie will recreate this extreme reaction -- nor would I want it to. But all the reviews I read said it was quite faithful to the book, and a hell of a downer. I'll know better once I see the thing....
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A poem?
For 300 years?
About eating babies?
Which one?
"A Modest Proposal"
Written in 1729, so just under 300. Sorry about that.
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That wasn't a poem, it was an essay - right?
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That was just satire.
It's one thing to present an idea as satire it's another to put it into a realistic visual medium.
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That wasn't a poem, it was an essay - right?
right
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OK guys I just finished the Road and it was fantastic and everything but Cormac McCarthy needs to learn how to use a fucking apostrophe, seriously that shit was infuriating.
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(http://www.multiplexcomic.com/images/strips/multiplex-420.jpg)
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OK guys I just finished the Road and it was fantastic and everything but Cormac McCarthy needs to learn how to use a fucking apostrophe, seriously that shit was infuriating.
Apparently it's some kind of brilliant marketing strategy to really piss off word nerds (http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com/2007/06/nuke-them-darn-apostrophes.html).
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God forbid someone write a book for the sake of telling a story anymore.
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I was being snide. In the wide world of gimmicks this one is pretty innocuous. I actually remember him rattling off some convoluted and deeply felt justification in interview but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
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Here's a really good (as in it's both full of praise, and it's also very well written) review from this week of the Road, the movie:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/towards-love/story-e6frgcjx-1225805911410 (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/towards-love/story-e6frgcjx-1225805911410)
These two paragraphs in particular will be a relief to those of you who were concerned about the trailer:
The construction of a deceptive preview trailer that seeks to hide this darkness by promoting it as an end-of-the-world spectacular such as The Day After Tomorrow, using panicky newsreel footage and explosive snippets that are not in the film -- with shots of Theron looking beautiful and scared -- did not assuage concerns. A dog's breakfast seemed the inevitable outcome of these competing ambitions and pressures.
Instead the film is neither a fetishistic art-house indulgence of McCarthy's most miserable extremes or an entertainment-on-steroids compromise that bastardises the book. No, against all the odds it strikes towards the deepest core of the book's appeal and emerges as a grand cinematic poem about love, about what we give and what we teach and how this is carried on between generations. Any father, mother, or child knows this territory. And, like the book, the film's ultimate reverberations are restorative precisely because it pushes us towards love and sacrifice. The outcome in the film, then, is the same as that of the novel: hope, not despair.
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I really like McCarthy's writing style, especially the absence of punctuation. I find myself a lot more involved in the reading and I absorb a lot more of what's going on because my mind is correcting the sentences as I'm reading it. I think it works very well with the way he tells his story.
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In that case check out Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Sentences go on for weeks.
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*The Road Comic*
Aww...that's nice.
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I was being snide. In the wide world of gimmicks this one is pretty innocuous. I actually remember him rattling off some convoluted and deeply felt justification in interview but I can't for the life of me remember what it was.
Word nerds should probably avoid Selby.
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There is no way movie The Road can be as dark as the book and still be commercially viable. I said this about the Watchmen and history has vindicated me!
The Road does not have fistfights. Or explicit fucking to Leonard Cohen songs. So I don't think the Road is going to make much at all.
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It's actually doing pretty reasonable for itself. Ten days in about 100 theaters with 2.7 mil in the bank.
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One theatre in my city is playing this, thank god. Will hopefully be checking it out because the run ends on thursday. I hate movies with limited releases.
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Saw The Book of Eli the other day and it was actually pretty good. I'm not a huge Denzel Washington fan but it was good because he didn't talk much and was almost always wearing sunglasses.
The dudes behind me laughing whenever it showed Mila Kunis kind of ruined it for me though.
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to be fair, if I saw that movie I'd probably giggle at her a fair bit too. I really can't see her as anyone but meg anymore.
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I saw the Road tonight. If anyone still has any doubts about it, put them away. Hillcoat and co have done a magnificent job and have produced probably the best adaptation it would be possible for anyone to make. I can confirm that none of the newreel nonsense from the trailer at the beginning of this thread appears in the film, and that - again, despite that awful, abject trailer - the tone of the film is about as far from a Hollywood action blockbuster as it's possible to imagine. It's true that Charlize Theron is in the film marginally more than her character appears in the book, but none of her scenes have even the slightest whiff of "Quick! We need eye candy!" about them, and the brief and mostly wordless scenes with her that have been added for the movie are all effective and I would argue essential to making the film what it is.
What the film is, more so than the book, is a story about the love between the man and his son. In fact in a way the film is a mirror-image of the book: while the book was a story of horror and despair with a strong subtext of love and hope, the film is really a story of love and hope with a strong subtext of horror and despair. For this reason it doesn't really matter that arguably the two most horrific scenes in the book - the melted road and the dead baby - are missing from the film, because while the film is frequently harrowing it is nonetheless overwhelmingly about the relationship between the father and the son. In fact, I think a direct effect of verbalising the almost subliminal dialogue of the book - something we were worrying about earlier in this thread - is to bring the emotions to the forefront. That these emotions and the strong and pervading sense of love never even approach sentimentality is a credit to both Viggo Mortensen as the father and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the son. Mortensen must certainly earn a slew of awards nominations for his performance, but Smit-McPhee is no less deserving of acclaim.
So in short, it's a magnificent film. A stunner, literally: I don't think I've ever been in a more silent cinema (except for those many times when I've been the only person in the cinema, but let's not go into that). Please go and see it if you have any interest in quality cinema.
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oh i never gave my thoughts on this oh weird. (though who cares its not like im ever gonna say a thing more eloquent than harry)
i think was the most bummed i have ever been at the end of a movie than i ever have been at the end of a movie. i mean, just the sheer fact that vigo just straight up dies on the beach and his son is just left completely alone i think is enough to tear anyones heart out. i mean theres the new family that takes in the kid but still. i also have not seen that many depressing movies but my god, this one hit me hard. also there were enough horrifying images in that move to get the point across i'm actually pretty happy they didn't show the dead baby (i have never read the book but my mom told be about that scene after i watch it.)
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OK guys I just finished the Road and it was fantastic and everything but Cormac McCarthy needs to learn how to use a fucking apostrophe, seriously that shit was infuriating.
Apparently it's some kind of brilliant marketing strategy to really piss off word nerds (http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com/2007/06/nuke-them-darn-apostrophes.html).
Stephen Fry says there is no official usage that has been documented of the use of that particular piece of punctuation. If He says it, it must be true. Fact.
I'm going to see it tomorrow night. I'm excited.
But I wanted to share a fantastic conversation I overheard in the queue to get Wednesday tickets (241 HUGE queue).
The couple having the the conversation were Nottingham Uni students (you could tell by the hoodies/sweaters). This means they live outside of the city, are extremely posh & have no awareness of how the rest of the world behave. It also means they are too dumb to get Oxbridge or even one of the back up schools. (Sorry if this is mean but it's mostly true & these guys were completely that.) Having yelled into his phone for 10 minutes about his friend being in the wrong place & HOW random that was. He started talking about films he had seen....(Imagining this spoken in a very posh English accent & almost shouted)
"I saw the Road the other night, it was the worst film ever. Hardly anything happened. Where do they get the ideas for these things?"
"Why did you go & see it? I thought you were going to watch Alvin & the Chipmunks?"
"It was the only thing on apart from 44 Inch Chest, the girls thought that would be too violent."
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I saw Book of Eli this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Who is the author of the book that The Road is based on?
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cormac mccarthy
the book has the same name too
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There is a movie called 44 Inch Chest?