![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
More movies!
Jan. 16th, 2007 09:34 amBride & Prejudice A fun movie with lots of gorgeous colour, but this kind of adaptation tends to distract me: with a straightforward book-to-movie production, I can sit back and enjoy (or not) the ride. With a reimagining such as this one, however, I spend the whole time waiting for this event to happen or that character to show up. "Oh, that's supposed to be Mr. --!" or "Hey, they cut -- out!"
Les rois maudits The recent adaptation with Jeanne Morreau and Gerard Depardieu. What can I say? Nowhere NEAR as good as the old 1970s production, in spite of a larger budget (though not nearly large enough). The biggest disappointment was with the actor playing Robert d'Artois, who is supposed to be larger than life, in every sense of the word: a big man, with huge appetites for food, women, fighting and revenge. This guy made him look like a puny little malcontent who barely ever cracked a smile, he was so busy plotting against his aunt, cette truie de Mahaut.
The sets deserve a whole paragraph: I was very surprised to learn that art deco was alive and well in the 30s -- the 1330s. The set for the main castle was obviously shuffled and lit differntly to stand in for at least one other castle, same as the dungeon, and covered with weird geometric murals and filled with statues that looked like the Oscar statuette dressed in alien armour. Some actual medieval ruins were used, looking exactly as they do today, which seems strange considering they would have been built a scant hundred years before the action and would in no way have looked that bad. And why the hell is the Cressay family living in what appears to be a church? Other oddities include Mahaut's enormous carriage, the ridiculously huge gibbet at Montfaucon (not a decomposing corpse in sight, they all looked freshly-hung!) and the Templars being burned on a fancy platform built in what I assume is meant to be the middle of the Seine.
Also of note were the costumes, which were a bizarre mix of some pretty accurate-looking (mostly for the men, except why he hell was Philippe V always wearing the same outfit over a ten-year period?), science-fiction armour (think Chronicles of Riddick), fantasy fairy princess for most of the ladies and fantasy goth for Béatrice d'Hirson. The music was nicely unobtrusive on the whole except for two notable themes that bore more than a little ressemblance to music from The Lord of the Rings.
Story-wise, many things were cut out, which is to be expected, but I would have appreciated captions to mark the passing of time, instead of having characters remark that three or nine years have passed, especially considering that none of them seem to age at all over a period of about twenty years. Also, we didn't really need all those scenes of people riding across the often bizarrely-lit countryside, though I suppose it was either that or have Jeanne Morreau rasp and chew more scenery.
One of the reasons I found the sets and the costuming choices so inexplicable is because the series of books Les rois maudits is widely regarded as the standard on how to write historical novels in French -- and in any language, as far as I'm concerned. The amount of research that went into them is mind-boggling and so not only are they well-written, with memorable characters and a gripping story, they are historically accurate and full of all sorts of period details, in the text as well as in the end-notes.
Final verdict? Read the books.
And in other news, I'm still knitting squares! I've got about 70 now, so another 20 should do it. I'm starting to learn how to crochet so I can assemble them.
Les rois maudits The recent adaptation with Jeanne Morreau and Gerard Depardieu. What can I say? Nowhere NEAR as good as the old 1970s production, in spite of a larger budget (though not nearly large enough). The biggest disappointment was with the actor playing Robert d'Artois, who is supposed to be larger than life, in every sense of the word: a big man, with huge appetites for food, women, fighting and revenge. This guy made him look like a puny little malcontent who barely ever cracked a smile, he was so busy plotting against his aunt, cette truie de Mahaut.
The sets deserve a whole paragraph: I was very surprised to learn that art deco was alive and well in the 30s -- the 1330s. The set for the main castle was obviously shuffled and lit differntly to stand in for at least one other castle, same as the dungeon, and covered with weird geometric murals and filled with statues that looked like the Oscar statuette dressed in alien armour. Some actual medieval ruins were used, looking exactly as they do today, which seems strange considering they would have been built a scant hundred years before the action and would in no way have looked that bad. And why the hell is the Cressay family living in what appears to be a church? Other oddities include Mahaut's enormous carriage, the ridiculously huge gibbet at Montfaucon (not a decomposing corpse in sight, they all looked freshly-hung!) and the Templars being burned on a fancy platform built in what I assume is meant to be the middle of the Seine.
Also of note were the costumes, which were a bizarre mix of some pretty accurate-looking (mostly for the men, except why he hell was Philippe V always wearing the same outfit over a ten-year period?), science-fiction armour (think Chronicles of Riddick), fantasy fairy princess for most of the ladies and fantasy goth for Béatrice d'Hirson. The music was nicely unobtrusive on the whole except for two notable themes that bore more than a little ressemblance to music from The Lord of the Rings.
Story-wise, many things were cut out, which is to be expected, but I would have appreciated captions to mark the passing of time, instead of having characters remark that three or nine years have passed, especially considering that none of them seem to age at all over a period of about twenty years. Also, we didn't really need all those scenes of people riding across the often bizarrely-lit countryside, though I suppose it was either that or have Jeanne Morreau rasp and chew more scenery.
One of the reasons I found the sets and the costuming choices so inexplicable is because the series of books Les rois maudits is widely regarded as the standard on how to write historical novels in French -- and in any language, as far as I'm concerned. The amount of research that went into them is mind-boggling and so not only are they well-written, with memorable characters and a gripping story, they are historically accurate and full of all sorts of period details, in the text as well as in the end-notes.
Final verdict? Read the books.
And in other news, I'm still knitting squares! I've got about 70 now, so another 20 should do it. I'm starting to learn how to crochet so I can assemble them.
