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And Delillo hasn't? Which part are you only fucking with us about? |
Yeah, cuz book publishing is totally divorced from business and economics. Just wish for a book and blam! It materializes. Ah... poets! Of course DeLillo gets no money from the publisher or the production company. He needs only ambrosia from Mount Parnassus and his day job as a busboy.
.. I hope this movie is successful so that Cronenberg can (finally, someone who can) make White Noise. Because Barry fucking Sonnenfeld was supposed to make it, but luckily didn't. |
The only problem I see with anyone adapting DeLillo is his dialogue. I love how he writes but his dialogue is always awful.
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DEEP IMPACT
yep. for the second time seeing it. it still sucks, but it was on t.v. |
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i've never noticed this but my guess is that in such case adaptation would actually be helpful, no? damn, i'm looking for that movie everywhere-- i hope i didn't miss it. |
Yeah, I don't see a reason why it couldn't be changed at the script stage but I imagine he's a particularly difficult writer to adapt anyway. I think of him primarily as a stylist, even more than Burroughs, or Ballard. I've never been particularly into his plots or even his ideas but love the way he can describe a scene. There's a kind of precision to them that's really literary, in a way that reminds me a lot of Ian McEwan - another novelist whose books I generally really like but which don't seem to translate very well into film, at least for me. I am fascinated to see how Cosmopolis turned out, though.
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His characters always seem like they're giving a speech rather than having any kind of conversation. He's at his best when describing an event but I don't think he's particularly interested in people, as such, except on some kind of conceptual level. That's not really a criticism, more just a personal prejudice of mine, I suppose. And it's more noticable in some books than in others. White Noise (which I otherwise really like) has probably the worst case of it but I don't remember it being that bad in Cosmopolis, although I may just have gotten used to it by then.
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But Donny D (as I call him) is not a realist. He flaunts this in LIBRA and UNDERWORLD where we find him gleefully juggling paranoid visions compiled from fact and fiction. And he tosses realism totally out the window with elliptical prose-poems like BODY ARTIST and POINT OMEGA.
Everything in a well-crafted novel should be raised to the same stylized pitch, whatever that pitch, dialogue included. (Although I admire and prefer the delicate touch it takes, say Updike, to transfer something from my own life onto paper.) |
He's not a realist, you're right, but most of his most celebrated passages (say the opening chapter in Underworld or the description of the mass wedding in Mao II) definitely qualify as a very heightened form of naturalism, which his dialogue invariably seems at odds with - which I'm sure he would say is key to his overall message (whatever that may be).
Incidentally, I really couldn't get into Libra. No particular reason, I just couldn't get interested in it. I never finished Underworld, either, but I think that's kind of standard, even with a lot of DeLillo fanatics. I think the idea with Underworld is just to read the first chapter, declare him a genius and then quickly move on to something else before the rest of the book starts to inspire any doubts. (See also the first chapter of Ian McEwan's Atonement.) |
-picture-MOV_ff55dbb9_b.jpg) Less Than Zero I love this film. It's not particularly good but nonetheless. |
 The Virgin Suicides  Lost in Translation |
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Just got back from going to see a film in a cinema for the first time in 13 years and it was fucking terrible. Was it always this LOUD?
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That's a film I'd love to see on a big screen. |
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You absolutely must see his American films. Not his Westerns so much but his crime films. The Big Heat, Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window are some of the bleakest films Hollywood has ever produced. I actually prefer them to most of his German films, although I do think M is a masterpiece. Metropolis bored me silly, though. Quote:
Yeah, I really must. It tends to get shown quite regularly so I've probably just taken it for granted a bit. Plus I've now seen it so many times on TV that I can pretty much repeat the dialogue line for line. But there are certain scenes that I imagine would be amazing on a big screen, like when he goes back to Brooklyn or the scenes in LA. Oh well, until the next time it's screened, "la di da" |
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I just watched it again. The first time I saw it I had a really hard time taking Ryan Gosling seriously but for some reason he clicked with me this time around. Excellent film. |
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Is that any good? A friend keeps trying to get me to watch it but I'm really put off by the poster. |
Yeah, no arguments on any of those points from me. A massive Cary Grant fan, too. England's Marcello Mastroianni, only better. (I'm only half joking with the Mastroianni comparison.)
Just watched ...  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I don't think this is a bad film but I do think it pretty much says everything it has to say in about the first 30 minutes and that everything after that just seems like more of the same. |
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Yeah. It's done in a very slick and stylistic way. |
Does no one else think that Hitchcock is one of the most over-rated fucking directors is the history of over-fucking rated directors?
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I think what it is that pisses me off is that the story is moot. I always feel he's going "fuck the story, here's a new camera trick/overblown scene". Vertigo and North By Northwest for me was him at his absolute worst. Yes I realise I'm committing heresy by saying that, but they feel to me to be one big set piece after another with LOUD music to set tension another 10 more notches. I guess it's fitting that the only two films of his I really enjoyed was Rope and Shadow Of A Doubt. Him at his most restrained (next to Lifeboat I suspect although I haven't seen that so can't say) and most enjoyable. In my opinion anyway. |
Oh and Tippie Hedren was so annoying in the Birds. She was NOT good in that film.
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I can completely see what H8kurdt is saying, even though I'd still consider myself a Hitchcock fan. He's definitely one of the flashier directors and there's a lot of truth to claims that he always put style before substance and as such I've never found him to be the most emotionally involving of directors. If nothing else though he was technically superb.
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticising Hitchcock but I do think his style of making films isn't necessarily for everyone. Although I prefer him to Kubrick I put them in a similar category. They're both very 'technical' directors.
Anyway, from the sublime to the ridiculous ...  Sex and the City I'm not gonna criticise this movie, it is what it is, but did it really need to be roughly the same length as Stalker?!? |
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Sex and the City I actually enjoyed it but did keep checking the 'time remaining' display and thinking, "are you serious?" also just watched ...  Erin Brockovich I've decided I like Julia Roberts far more than I thought. |
 Clash of the Titans I give up on this movie. I've tried to watch it all the way through a load of times since I got it but I just can't seem to do it. I always either fall asleep about a third of the way in or I just switch it off about half way through, out of sheer boredom. I can't think of many movies that I find downright impossible to sit through but this is definitely one of them. |
 cataleya is fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine |
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 Magnolia  Pretty Woman |
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The book I've read, ''The Beautiful Beast: The Life and Crimes of SS-Aufseherin Irma Grese'', generally gets positive reviews and personally I thought it's an interesting read in terms of getting to know how far ''regular'' people will go in order to inflict atrocious pain on fellow human beings and get some insight into their own attitude towards physical and mental suffering in general. That's pretty much the only interest I have in this sort of stuff, and it was sort of brought up by watching some of those ‘’New French Extremity’’ (I know, terrible term which doesn’t do some of these directors any justice) movies. Other than that, I have never really liked the nazi/fascist/totalitarian/wartime dominatrix/s&m look. I am all for floral and polka dot motifs and eternal peace and well-being for everyone. |
Savage Streets (1984)
The Boy Who Cried Bitch (1991) Happy Birthday To Me (1981) Born Innocent (1974 - TV Movie) House of Flying Daggers (2004) Precious: Based on the Novel ''Push'' by Sapphire (2009) Mondo Trasho (1969) |
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I always enjoy re-watching that. |
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Yeah, there's something about it. My only problem is that Richard Gere plays such an irredeemable cunt in it that I just can't take his supposed change of heart seriously. The hotel manager is cool though, and I do like Julia Roberts pretty much unreservedly. Quote:
Yeah, it blows my mind. The scene 50 mins when Ringo follows Dallas outside and tells her about his ranch kills me every time. Every Ford film seems to have 'that' scene, where everything he's trying to say is captured in a single moment. Like the walk to the church in Clementine or Haillie's cactus rose speech in Valance and obviously the final scene in The Searchers. I dunno, Ford just blows me away. |
 Sex and the City 2 I quite like the first one but this really is just rubbish. |
just watched BIG MONEY HUSTLAS
then picked BIG MONEY RUSTLAS to follow it up |
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Stupid as it may sound, I'm quite a big Don Johnson fan, especially the stuff he did before Miami Vice. A Boy and His Dog, Zachariah, Harrad Experiment. He was very much part of the 60s San Francisco thing which got downplayed once Miami Vice was a hit and he started getting straighter roles but it's all a lot more interesting than anything he did afterwards. It's like he had two entirely seperate careers in the same industry. |
 Ocean's Eleven (remake) Bloody excellent film. |
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