… let’s just hope everyone has the sense to send them off to a nice, comfy retirement… in other words, let’s hope Hollywood has the sense not to do with the movie what was done with the books!
I know that may sound like blasphemy to some, but the incredible and fabulous success of the books also spawned loads and loads of trash literature, fantasy novels simply retreading the paces of Tolkien, but less brilliantly, with less honesty and beauty and intelligence… to the point where, if you wanna publish fantasy and it’s not at least a trilogy, I’ve heard, some major publishers won’t even take a proposal.
We do not need the cinematic equivalents of David Eddings and C.J. Cherryh Robert bloody Jordan getting out there and flooding available screens. I loved the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and the books. But the flood of imitators that followed and turned “fantasy” from a noun into a sloppily-written and stereotype-ridden genre made a bloody mess of things, and if they do the same in film, I’ll be not just sad but slightly embarrassed to see it.
Fortunately, I don’t think that can happen, but… you never know.
Er… Eddings I am in complete agreement with, but Cherryh is better known for her science fiction and her excellent depictions of humanoid aliens, a reputation which (ignoring, for the moment, the whole Cats thing) is pretty well-deserved. The only fantasies she’s written that I know of haven’t been very Tolkien-esque: the Morgaine books were dark and depressing and mostly involved the never-ending battle motif, the Sidhe books were essentially more humanoid aliens but in a fantasy setting and drew heavily on (dark and depressing) Celtic mythology, and the ones I haven’t read were out of Russian folk tales… so I’m not exactly sure where you’re coming from on this one.
Why don’t you go pick on Robert Jordan instead? He deserves it. *grin*
Right, good point. Jordan deserves a rather heavy smack and a hundred people yelling, “Goddammit, stop it now man!” until he does indeed vow to stop.
I grabbed Cherryh as an example because I knew fantasy junkies who loved trash fantasy books, read anything with a sword in it, and they really liked her. Association in my mind, I guess.
Hear hear! I’ll let Peter Jackson do Beowulf, though, if he wants.
Yeah, that’d be freakin’ cool. But only if they do it in the original Germanic-English. With subtitles… Heh.
Actually, you know, I’ve always thought that would be the best way to make movies set in ancient times. Otherwise you get the risk of modern English showing up, or even worse sometimes, the stylized modern English that’s supposed to sound sort of like period English but it sounds only like stylized modern English. I hate that.
But I imagine other people aren’t bothered by it.