Originally posted by dandelion: How many agree this is how all of Bradbury's works ought to be filmed?
I think that Bradbury's stories should be filmed using only the basest and simplest of filming techniques, the same way he write no frills or computer edits everything should just come out and be a movie. . . .it shouldn't have to be constructed into a movie, just made.
It's one thing to say "rip the pages out of the book and stuff them into the camera" and quite another to do it. All of the "Ray Bradbury Theater" episodes were written true to the original stories and many of them came out pretty darn clunky on film. Poor casting, poor direction, poor timing, and poor special effects all contributed in various ways to this sad overall effect. A movie cannot be made by writing alone--if it could, ALL of Ray's filmed works would be masterpieces!
Posts: 7334 | Location: Dayton, Washington, USA | Registered: 03 December 2001
Well, of course, the actors have to be actors who know his stories. the director has to be intiomite with his words. The set design co-ordinator and director of photography must be dreamers on the same line of sight bradbury rests his brain in. Those would be people who would make a Bradbury movie but that's not how it usually happens.
studio gets story hires some idiot to completely rewrite it and some guy who directed two blockbusters fifteen years ago making his comeback to write it and then there's the bidding war over his returning fame and the marketing guys pick up the story and say h.g. wells is popular right now so lets take this and rewrite it so that it's like one of his stories instead and then some guy in the animation dept. comes along and says that he's figured out how to do a new special effect and so they just fill the movie with shots of that.
Ray's stories should only meet cinema under very special electric circumstances that cannot be planned.
An accurate assessment of what all too often happens the way things have been, and still are being, done in Hollywood. Despite so many changes over the years, some of the bad things do stay the same. If I haven't mentioned the recent film of E. Nesbit's "Five Children and It," just don't even get me started on it.
Someone once asked Ray if his work even COULD be properly dramatized, and he said, "You don't know until you've seen the right thing done by the right people."
Well, I've seen Narnia done wrong, once, accurately but clunkily (much like some episodes of "Ray Bradbury Theater"), once, and now pretty darn near right, so I hold out hope for Ray's work. It's just sad to see blunders such as were committed with "Something Wicked This Way Comes" (which was on its way to being a lot worse in places without a few instances of Ray's intervention) and "A Sound of Thunder" and then blamed on the author when the author was the last person who had anything to do with the end result turning out poorly.
Posts: 7334 | Location: Dayton, Washington, USA | Registered: 03 December 2001
I haven't seen it, I was never really big on C.S. Lewis but If it's as good as all that I'll catch it at the cheap-o theter after it's run off the main-line. . . .only a buck-fifty. I'd really like to see a Ray Bradbury movie, aside from Moby Dick that turns out exactly as the author had envisioned. I still haven't seen the Sci-Fi Channel's Martian Chronicles either, too many conflicting reviews of it and I yell at my teevy enough already.
Unless this is something so new it hasn't even been listed in the Internet Movie Database yet, Sci Fi was rerunning the 1980 miniseries of "The Martian Chronicles." You can ask Nard what Ray thought of that.
Posts: 7334 | Location: Dayton, Washington, USA | Registered: 03 December 2001
Yah. Some of these films are like burnt out landscapes with an occasional dandelion growing back. Got to look for them though.
Allex, I hope you do get to see “The Martian Chronicles”. As Nard said, “…it really has its moments…”This message has been edited. Last edited by: Chapter 31,
Posts: 861 | Location: Manchester CT | Registered: 13 August 2005
I saw Narnia opening weekend (trudged down to the theatre in two inches of snow for it! ^.^ ), and was very impressed with how true to the book it stayed. And with Tumnus the Faun, I loved his character.
I didn't like the ending to the movie, but, then again, I never liked that ending in the book either. It always upset me how easily the children forgot their real world. I can never imagine forgetting my mother so easily, even with magic.
~~~~~~~~~~~~ A thousand Stories Left Untold Is still a Massacre
Tumnus was a cutie. And...that ending creeps a lot of people out. Leaving/deserting mother was kind of like in "Peter Pan," but what really gets people on some of the book forums I frequent is growing up and then having to come back as kids--they were saying they'd need therapy or something for the effects of that!
Posts: 7334 | Location: Dayton, Washington, USA | Registered: 03 December 2001
They probably would need therapy. But, in later books, it's mentioned that their memory of Narnia as a whole fades into something like a dream. So that they don't even remember Narnia properly.
Heh, that Peter Pan part about forgetting mother always made me cry when I was younger. I never did get over it completely, even when I was in high school. Forgetting mother is just a concept I can't stand when I read, it's always too unrealistic for me to grasp. (My mother died when I was very young, and I still haven't forgotten her, and I only have one photo of her to remember with.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~ A thousand Stories Left Untold Is still a Massacre
Oh, that is so sad about your mother. J. M. Barrie actually had rather a fixation on his and may have written the book to help himself get over it. I thought Danny's attitude in Stephen King's "The Shining" to be one of the truest written.
Posts: 7334 | Location: Dayton, Washington, USA | Registered: 03 December 2001
