Burning Questions: To Read Or Not To Read

Michael C. here to tackle a major philosophical issue. No poking fun at Ghost Rider this week. There are some questions a movie lover ponders for a lifetime. The big questions like where to sit in the theater (close enough to fill my field of vision but not so close I crane my neck) or Godfather Part I or Part II (Part I. You Part II people can have at me in the comments)

This week I thought I’d dive into one such big question the imminent release of Hunger Games has me contemplating. Is it better to read the book first or watch the movie?

For the purposes of this discussion let us assume that both book and movie are excellent. When one is clearly superior then the call is obvious. Better version first. Read I, Robot, The Road, Breakfast of Champions. Watch Jaws, Sideways, Wonder Boys. The lesser version can be an interesting bonus at best, a horrible afterthought at worst.

The real dilemma is when both versions promise to be excellent and one experience will inevitably compromises the purity of the other. I’ll state right up front that when put to it I’m a movie first guy. I watched the entirety of the Lord of the Rings not knowing if Frodo would make it back alive (I had read The Hobbit, which was made for an ideal balance of acquainting myself with the world and preserving suspense. I recommend it)

So in the interest of fairness let me play Devil’s Advocate and make the case for book first to see if I can shake my position.

Books provide context

Book to film adaptations inevitably lop off huge chunks of backstory on the trip to the screen. When entire chapters of family history are reduced to a five seconds of Lisbeth Salander scrolling through pics on a laptop, having read the book becomes invaluable.

My response:  A movie should stand on its own. “That was explained in the novel” is not a legitimate defense as far as I’m concerned. Also...

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Overheard @ Box Office: "You can't go wrong with Dr. Seuss"

Overheard on Friday:

Woman#1: (Defeated sounding) I have to take my son to see The Lorax. 
Cheerful Female Friend: Ohhh, you can't go wrong with Dr. Seuss!"  

Cheerful Female Friend has clearly not registered the atrocities Hollywood has often made from the good doctor's work. And when one thinks of the colorful wit and profound whimsy of Dr. Seuss surely mainstream heartthrobs like Zac Efron and Taylor Swift pop immediately to mind! What a, uhhhh, perfect vocal match.

But Cheerful Female Friend speaks for all of America. So testifies the box office!

BAKERS DOZEN (Estimates)
01 THE LORAX  $70.7 new  
02 PROJECT X  $20.7 new  
03 ACT OF VALOR $13.7 (cum. $45.2)
04 SAFE HOUSE  $7.2 (cum. $108.2)
05 TYLER PERRY'S GOOD DEEDS $7 (cum. $25.7)
06 JOURNEY 2 THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND $6.9 (cum. $85.6)
07 THE VOW  $6.1 ($111.7)
08 THIS MEANS WAR  $5.6  (cum. $41.6)
09 GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE $4.7 (cum. $44.8)
10 THE ARTIST $3.9 (cum. $37)

11 WANDERLUST  $3.8 (cum. $12.4)
12 GONE $3 (cum. $8.9)
13 CHRONICLE  $1.9 (60.8)

Talking Points

Reese, Amanda, and Jen have seen better box office days

• BLONDE BUT BANKABLE? Reese Witherspoon's movies are generally expensive to make but that return on investment these days. Yikes. This Means War is still a long way from recouping its budget. Jennifer Aniston movies have always had schizophrenic box office performance but Wanderlust is definitely on the weak side of her ticket-selling. How on earth was that sperm-switching comedy more attractive to moviegoers than this one? Meanwhile Amanda Seyfried hasn't been able to scare up crowds from Gone which is weirder. It's a genre flick and can't those usually open even without a name? $8 million for a serial killer picture after two weeks? Ouch. I'm sure it doesn't help that the ads totally make it seem like something Ashley Judd was making in the early 90s.

• EXCUSE ME, BUT WHO IS PAYING TO SEE GHOST RIDER: SPIRIT OF VENGEANCE? I mean, besides our masochistic Michael C. It's already made more money than 2011's "Best Picture"... which had a big uptick post Oscar of course (The Artist's co-nominees took falls but Hugo fell only 14% despite also debuting on DVD so maybe its constant name-checking on Sunday night convinced some holdouts?)

• A SEPARATION more than doubled its screen count and had its first million dollar weekend, bringing its total to $3.7 million at the US box office. That there is a big big number for a non-genre subtitled picture.

What did you see this weekend? Was it worth the money? I was having an offline recuperation weekend so I went to see a Norwegian band at The Bitter End that one of my friends recommended called Mhoo. They're so good. Have a listen! 

They told me they're going to SXSW so if you're heading to that festival check them out.

Even when I'm at non-film events I can't stop thinking of movies. While the girls were singing I kept thinking "Kiki Dunst and Leelee Sobieski should play them in a movie!" 

Distant Relatives: Limelight and Hugo

Robert here with my second Distant Relatives of the week, making sure the series covers the major Oscar contenders before the big day (sorry The Help). Plus, Hugo arrives on DVD Tuesday for those of you who haven't yet seen it.

Two weeks ago I compared The Artist to Sunset Blvd delighting in the contrasts between the inspirational modern film and the cynical classic. Hugo might have been an even better point of comparison to Sunset Blvd since both are about young men discovering titans of the silent era whom time has forgotten but a film has many fathers and I'm intrigued by the relationship between Hugo and a film like Charlie Chaplin's Limelight. Like Hugo, Limelight is a film about a rediscovered artist, that's really a film about love of silent cinema that may really really be about the filmmaker himself.
 
There must have been several things compelling Martin Scorsese to adapt the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret": Scorsese's legendary love of cinema, his passion for the cause of film restoration and preservation, and as his story goes, a desire to make a children's film that his own child could watch. But might the tale of an underappreciated filmmaker from years past held more personal resonance? In Hugo our hero Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) discovers the presence of Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) through a series of adventures in the train station in which he lives. Through further adventures the young boy attempts to bring about Méliès rediscovery.

 

In the age of the home viewing and the internet it's pleasant to believe (however optimistically) that we don't forget such brilliant filmmakers. But how often must Scorsese have heard in recent years that his best, most productive years and most influential films were behind him. In fact, any of his contemporaries from the 1970's, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, have heard the same from time to time or quite often. And while we may not forget their seminal works as the world forgot the work of Méliès, how quick are we to dismiss them as great artists of the past or bores of the present.
 
Speaking of which, Charlie Chaplin made Limelight in 1952, almost twenty-five years after the arrival of talkies forever changed his canvas. Of course he hung on as long as he could, making silent films or semi-silents until the late thirties and then scoring a couple of talkie hits. But by the time the fifties came around, Chaplin was most definitely yesterday's news. It's not surprising that he wrote a film about a long forgotten clown named Calvero (Chaplin) rediscovered by a beautiful ballerina (Claire Bloom) and eventually given the tribute he deserves. Of course the film isn't about the art of the clown as much as it is the art of the silent comedian, punctuated by final performance by Calvero and his old partner (played by Buster Keaton). And of course the film isn't about anything as much as the lost prestige of Chaplin who was being banned from the US for his "communist sympathies" just as Limelight was being released.

In these films about young characters who discover old artists, it's entirely possible that Scorsese and Chaplin feel a kinship with the characters of both generations. While it's debatable that Scorsese sees similarities between himself and Méliès, I don't doubt that he knows what it's like to be Hugo, the young boy whose life is defined by the magic of movies. And Chaplin may not be an exact match with the ballerina who falls in love with a clown, but he certainly has an understanding of being a performer whose life is altered after discovering the brilliance and art of real clowns.

What's further telling is how the young people in both films lead sad, dreary, almost hopeless lives until they discover the magic that the rest of the world has forgotten. For Chaplin and Scorsese, these films are a look back at their pivotal moments and a look forward at those who may very well be discovering them, and perhaps a plea for our own lives and our own sakes, not to forget the magic. In an odd way they're both true stories too, however embellished. Méliès was re-discovered and re-appreciated in his life. And the real-life counterpoint for Calvero the clown had his moment too.

Yet More Hardware For... The Help, The Descendants, The Artist

ACE and IMAGE statues. Why are trophies always nude men? Is Emmy the only girl among trophies?It's the last exhausting stretch of awards season and the mantles of everyone involved with The Help, The Descendants, and The Artist are about to collapse even before they take home their respective Oscars.

The ACE Awards which is short for American Cinema Editors has four film prizes each year for features and the winners this year were

Drama: The Descendants
Comedy: The Artist
Documentary: Freedom Riders*
Animation: Rango

* I mistakenly read this as Freedom Writers when I saw the release and momentarily panicked that the Hilary Swank teaching drama had resurfaced in non-fiction form. The Making Of... Now With More Swank.

The Drama winner at the Eddies generally goes on to win Best Picture, but this year may prove a semi rare exception since The Artist is expected to take home the Oscar. In the hoopla over The Artist being a silent film people keep forgetting that it's also a comedy and if it wins, we have our first comedy winner since Chicago (2002). They're all too rare on the big night.

It's also worth noting that Patton Oswalt hosted the ACE Eddie Awards, his third awards hosting gig of the season. This Just In (Inside My Head): Patton Oswalt To Host The 13th Annual Film Bitch Awards in January 2013! (Well, he does says "yes" a lot. Maybe I should ask?)

USC Scripter goes to an adapted screenplay and the book it rode in on each year and The Descendants won for what we assume was arduous carpel tunnel syndrome-laden man hours of copying and pasting the book's prose into onscreen voiceover. Yeesh. (I'm tired. I don't like The Descendants. Forgive me. Soon we'll be able to move on.) I'd feel worse for Moneyball, a far more graceful screenplay, if Aaron Sorkin hadn't just had a big year with The Social Network.

NAACP Image Awards were almost certain to fall in The Help's win column given its blockbuster status. But it was interesting to see it happen so soon after watching Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress winners Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have it out with Tavis Smiley about trophies going to black women playing maids in 2011. [Rant: When this Oscar season is over I think we need to have a long discussion in this country about class rather than race for a change. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a maid. It's honest legal work and why should someone feel ashamed about having a job and doing it? Maybe it's because I used to work in the hotel industry and knew a lot of people who struggled with people looking down on them because of the job they performed. These conversations about The Help feel very tone deaf to one particular fact: there are actual maids in the world and there always will be. These conversations always seem to be saying 'oh god. could there be anything more demeaning than being a maid?' and I'm just not sure how cleaning people's houses or hotel rooms is horrible work you should feel ashamed of but you know, it's fine if you're a white collar person destroying entire swaths of people's livelihoods with shady business practices or pension-fund robbing or lobbying the government for horribly unfair tax codes. I really wish we could over the deeply embedded notion that you're somehow a better person if you have money. The actual quality of a person's character has zero to do with the amount of dollars on their paycheck. The only thing a lot of dollars on the paycheck does, in terms of character, is make it more visible. You can do a lot of evil or a lot of good in the world when you have money but the money itself isn't the determining factor on which you'll choose. /Rant]

Ahem. Sorry. Had to get that off my chest. Speaking of...

Damn, Viola! She's proud of hers, apparently.

So...  The Help took Best Picture. Off the Oscar track, Pariah won best independent movie and Angelina Jolie's In the Land of Blood and Honey won best foreign film. Laz Alonso and Mike Epps took home the actor prizes for the wedding drama Jumping the Broom which also won Best Director. LL Cool J and Regina King won the top TV acting honors for their procedurals, one of those NCIS's and Southland respectively.

"Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter". Have You Read It?

Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly offered up a new batch of photos for Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter starring Benjamin Walker (aka Meryl Streep's brand new son-in-law, recently married to Mamie Gummer).

For those who aren't familiar with him, his star making role (of sorts) was a lead on Broadway as "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson"... so this will be his second consecutive blood-splattered US President. What an odd odd start to a career.

Stage and screen require different scales of acting. Charisma and skill in one doesn't always transfer to the other so you never know. But on stage he just popped. He unarguably had "it" and a lot of "it", too. He turned down the role of Beast in X-Men First Class -- a potentially lucrative franchise gig -- to stay with his minor hit stage show which reveals either true devotion to the theater, strict contractual ethics or real confidence in his gift. Or all three. It didn't take long for another opportunity to present itself. 

Out of accidental curiousity I recently picked up the book at the library. I wonderd about its content and if I could pick up any clues as to why this one didn't have any trouble getting off the ground while his first fiction novel Pride & Prejudice & Zombies can't seem to get out out of development hell. 

The thing that surprised me the most and I'm not sure bodes well for the movie is how earnest it was. I was expecting comedy or at least satire but it read very much like a straightforward entry into the subgenre of historical fiction that twists history with supernatural elements. It's basically Lincoln the younger years only with a backstory that involves hunting super evil bloodsucking creatures. In the book the vampires are quite powerful in the south (though their nature is a secret from most) and they're all entangled financially and socially with plantation owners which gives them a neverending supply of defenseless prey (the slaves) that no one will miss. And here is where I had the problem. I actually found the book a little offensive. No one, least of all Abraham Lincoln, should need an overlay of supernatural bloodsucking to give them an epiphany about how cruel and unfair and irredeemably evil slavery is/was.

I wonder what the movie will do with the books framing device which is a modern discovery of Lincoln's private diaries. It seems like it might be an awful lot of wasted running time in a film version but we'll see.  I haven't read Pride & Prejudice & Zombies and if its similar I can only assume it isn't filming already because Hollywood is so skittish about female leads, no matter how many hits feature them.

Have you read either of Seth Grahame-Smith's books?
Do you like the supernatural alternate history genre?