Timewaster's Guide Archive
Departments => Movies and TV => Topic started by: 42 on July 29, 2004, 01:47:12 PM
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So I've been watching Stargate SG-1 and Alantis on SciFi and I'm finding I'm kind of looking forward to winter season. Mini-series that are coming out:
Farscape: Peacekeeper Wars (October)
Earthsea (December)
Battlestar Galatica (January)
I'm hoping the Peacekeper wars will give dome resolution to Farscape. They have the old cast coming back.
Earthsea has the hot chick from Smallville.
Battlestar Galactica didn't excite me until I saw the trailer. Now it looks cool.
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Is this the original Battlestar Galactica, or the remake? I haven't seen the preview yet.
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It's a mini-series based on the original. So it's a remake, but not a full-series like the original.
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everything I read, from SF.com itself, has made me afraid of the SciFi miniseries of BG
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I watched only one episode of what I think was the remake, and it was nothing like the original. I wasn't very impressed with the remake, but then again you are talking about a guy who owns the original on DVD. My opinion may be a little biased.
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Ya the BG remake looks horrible. They've changed everything that make the original so good, and basicaly turned it into a mindless action flick.
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The only one I am waiting for is the Farscape special. I hope it makes SciFi reconsider their decision to put the lid on Farscape.
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Okay, my excitement for the BG mini-series has been crushed.
I'm still excited about Earthsea. I liked the books when I was a kid, so I'm curious as to how the mini-series will portray them.
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did the first Earthsea book even HAVE a girl in it?
I think I read the next couple books after that, but not the more recent award-winning book...
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the Earthsea mini-series is covering the first couple of books.
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So have any of you seen previews for the Earthsea show yet? I've been following it because of this project I'm working on. Ursula Le Guin has posted a vehement objection to it on her site. (http://www.ursulakleguin.com/UKL_info.html) (You have to scroll down a little.) Apparently they didn't consult her at all, and she feels they've pretty much negated the whole meaning of the books.
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I hope no one, least of all Ursula, is surprised at that. Look at what the TV jackals did with Dune when they made the Mini-series.
(Gag, fall over, claw at throat, weep uncontrollably) http://www.timewastersguide.com/view.php?id=40
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I don't think she's surprised at that, and I'm certainly not; I think she's ticked off that the director felt he could put words in her mouth ("Miss Le Guin intended such-and-such").
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I don't known anything about the books, but if it's her book and she no say in the film then can't she sue or try to do something. Or did she take some money form who ever made the film
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Film rights are pretty complicated. Usually the options are give up control, or no movie. And when you sign those rights away, you really don't know who is going to do it or even if it's going to be done--it's just an option to produce it sometime. Relatively few authors have any kind of weight to throw around when it comes to that. I only know of a handful that had any say: Cornelia Funke, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and Louis Sachar (the author of Holes, who I believe was also a screenwriter in some part of his life).
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Usually, if the author isn't willing to write the screenplay her/himself, then it's pretty hard to claims rights. Often the screenplay rights are sold at time of publication with larger publishers. Some publishers claim the movie rights in the fine print of their contracts.
And even if the author never sells the rights, well film isn't the same medium as novels, and it gets difficult to enforce laws between mediums. The product just isn't the same though the ideas may be simular.
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It raises some interesting questions though. Is author creative control good or bad? I suspect probably the reason for being able to exclude the author from the filmmaking process is not just so the director and producer don't have to deal with another person (though I'm sure that's a major factor in many cases) but because novelists have expertise in a very different artistic presentation than film. Text and visual mediums work differently. What works on paper can often be tedious on film.
I've no specific examples of creator/author input ruining a film adaptation. So perhaps my theory, if correct, is more a fear filmmakers have than an actual reality.
I think, however, that not being able to make the crossover is becomeing less of a problem. Our culture is becoming more deeply grounded in in visual mediums. There is a lot of crossover, in both directions, in writers of comics and writers of novels, for example (Peter David, Neil Gaiman, Kevin J. Anderson, to name just three successful writers of both). One could argue that one reason so many superhero movies were complete crap before the last ten years was that the creators of those comics had no input to the films. Marvel's turned that around. DC not so much and DC films are starting to suck worse. Comics are already a visual medium though, so this may be less of a problem. There are differences one has to be aware of however. A comic can have absolutely no text and still be a great story. These days, a completely silent movie would be extremely difficult to pull off.
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I dont know, one could also argue that the reason they suck is that filmmakers care more about name recognition (and the bodies that brings in) and less about plot and story resulting in an overall schlocky idiotic farce. The result being a big bang opening weekend followed by a quiet closing a few weeks later.
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Oh, i'm not trying to be exclusive in my readings of it. I'm sure there are several reasons.
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Just saw a clip of earthsea on the daily show and it looks like they filmed it with a personal camcorder from the 80s. It looked and sounded horrible, like it was a public access show. Hopefuly it was just a bad copy of a clip or something because it was just pathetic.
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Well, that old camcorder look has become terribly popular recently. Just think of the Blair Witch Project, the Grudge, Saw, anything by M. Night Shyamalan, and even the most recent Harry Potter. It kind of says, "I'm a cool indy film," while at the same time it says, "I'm a film not important enough for a decent budget." It is also getting over-used in the horror genre.
So I'm thinking that the director wanted some kind of dark psychological sub-text for "Earthsea," which is kind of appropriate, yet may just be another one of the huge liberties that the director already seems to be taking.
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no, I don't think you're getting what I'm saying. It dosen't look like any of those movies you listed. It seriously looks like crap, like when you watch I love the 70s and they show old comercials where everything is fuzzy, hard to see and sound horrible. That's what the clip looked like.
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watching the trailers and stuff online and from what I've seen on TV, it doesn't look like the cinematography is that bad. In fact it looks like your standard TV glossy stuff.
So I'm thinking what you saw could be a dream sequence or some scene either meant to like that, or the clip was just messed up.
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Okay, Legends of Earthsea is fairly good. Not great, but good. They did take quite a few liberties with the books, but I think it made for a better story overall. They basicly took the first two books in the series and interwove them in to one story.
The biggest complaint I have against the mini-series is that it lacked flare. Everything was very nice and well done, but nothing ever got intense.
Course, I now think that the Earthsea world would make for a good TV series. Probably not with the same cast or characters, but watching a group of Wizards sail to strange islands having existential conflict would be a break from the hack, slash, and camp dominating the fantasy TV market.
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Ursula Le Guin tells the whole story on why she sold the rights:
http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/12-15-04.htm
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Wow, that was pretty neat...
I have only recently discovered Agony and now have to give the whole site a through work over.
Interestingly enough I have been aware of Le Guin, for a long long time, and even own an Earthsea book, yet I have never read one. After Strange and Norrell I think I want to start it.
fascinating women.
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That is interesting. Le Guin has a lot of opinions, which makes her fascinating to listen to her rant.
It seems to me that Le Guin is mostly hurt that the makers of the mini-series chose not to convey many of the concerns and issues that were dear to her when writing the books.
There are a lot of inaccuracies in mini-series when compaired to the books, but that doesn't make the mini-series bad in my opinion. I don't really think that movies and mini-series need to be that faithful to the source material. Partcularly since so much of novel writing doesn't translate well to the screen.
Would the mini-series have been better had Le Guin got her way? Possibly. Her ideas would have granted more style to the mini-series, which it definitely needed.
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I'm watching the miniseries on Friday, so I'll be able to compare a little better then, but it sounds to me like she's mainly just annoyed that the director made comments that he was matching her vision--and called her by her first name--when he'd never met her. Not so much sour grapes as an excuse to be able to say something about a production she hasn't been pleased with since the LotR screenwriter was dropped. From what she says, though, she felt that her story was more original than the story the miniseries created.
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I haven't watched the series yet, have it stored for spare time.
Having said that, I would have preferred a full-length movie of just Wizard. Probably the first fantasy novel I ever read, it's been a favorite book of mine for quite a long time now. Not sure what it was but I think some part of me identified with young Ged's (almost) solitary journey.
I have a feeling a lot of what I loved about the first novel is going to be lost due to compressing the books into 4 hours.
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Well, the mini-series did well in the ratings game.
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2004-12/16/12.00.sfc
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And the author of those books just wrote a rant about how Sci-Fi ruined her books. Though its mostly a PC rant how the actors weren't the right color.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2111107/
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She has that same spiel posted on her site.
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Which, I might add is a horrible website. Stupid map with no labels.
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Yeah, that's the same article I posted a couple days ago. Now in a nice format.
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Well the SciFi Channel has issued a response to Le Guin's rantings:
"We respect Ms. Le Guin's right to voice her opinion and we understand her frustrations. However, adapting two major novels down to four hours of television is highly challenging and requires significant reworking. That being said, we stand by the creative decisions we took in the spirit of her wonderful books and which made our miniseries the top entertainment program on cable over two nights, with over 13 million viewers."
http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/art-main.html?2004-12/17/11.00.books
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heh, I love that Sci-Fi list Ferienheight 9/11 as a SCIFI/Fanstasy movie.
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The didn't call it SF, just F.