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Lost in Translation - Dune

Adapting complex, “talky” books is seldom a grateful job. Movie scripts are much shorter than many books in length, and adapting complex, non-visual themes is problematic at best.
I have chosen Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic Dune as a textbook-case (pardon the pun) explanation. The book is six hundred pages; the film is two and a half hours in length.
Just a few examples in where the movie fails:
The Bene Gesserit becomes bald-shaved and telepathic, instead of the hyper-awareness possessing “witches” in the books. However, we get to see the Spacing Guild’s navigators, resembling giant floating and talking vaginas.
LANDSRAAD is pretty much eliminated, and the “instable tripod of power” goes with it. The whole delicate balance of power found in the first book is all emitted, the emperor is little more than a puppet of the Spacing Guild, who fear Paul, the main character.
The Harkonnen-Atreides blood feud is never the least bit explained.
The “weirding way”, instead of a mental discipline, becomes a kinky new weapon amplifying its user’s voice.
Paul, the main character, defies every single law of probability and common sense in the very last scene in the movie, instead of the much memorable final spoken line, which was something I always remembered ever since I read the book in 8th grade.
Granted, such things would have been hard to translate for the screen in a reasonably lengthy movie.
Creating a trilogy would have been a much better choice, in all due probability. No rush to tell the story.

Persistence of Perception

“A charlatan prophet cast a client’s horoscope and told him he could never have children. 
"But I’ve already got seven!" 
"Then you’d better take good care of them!"”
Ancient Roman joke, circa 4th CE.

Good comedy does not seem to age, the jokes usually convey something about the human condition. I admit I have never seen the classic 1931 Frankenstein movie, and I have seen Young Frankenstein. The sign of a good parody is that you can laugh at it even if you have no grasp of the source material; it is funny in itself. 
Alas, allow me to demonstrate:
Frau Blücher! (Sound is required)


There were times when the genre used to spoof a target genre in general, as opposed to what runs today under the title of parody: recent blockbuster’s disjointed spoofs. Good classical comedy has characters you care about as much as you do for in an engaging drama. It’s a shame Gene Wilder never even got an Oscar-nomination for his performance in Young Frankenstein. He was brilliant. I hope comedies will manage to redeem themselves one day from the MTV-generational attention deficit syndrome.

Who Watches Watchmen?

Holy Richard Nixon’s oversized nose!

I will try to keep it shorter this time.
I admit, with all the “cult-comic” movies recently, that I would choose Alan Moore (V for Vendetta; The Watchmen) over Frank Miller (300; The Dark Knight Returns) any day in matters of storytelling and characters.
I loved the introductory montage invented by the director. (Extra added attraction: Watch it here!)

I also didn’t feel that the movie was overly long, but that’s me. Now on to the parts I found objectionable:
Gore for gore’s sake. The director seemed to add severed limbs for the sole purpose of… wait, I have no idea! The comic was about masked heroes not working in real life, among other things. What does our director do then? He expands every fight scene pointlessly, and makes them a bloodbath. Ummmh… does not compute.

All the subtle humor that made me giggle in the comics about the very gentle character of Nite Owl and his gadgets is thrown out of the window, which was all too apparent in the fire rescue scene. It got mutilated; the very meaning stomped out of it. The “Spirit of ‘77” was missing altogether, which is another thing I wouldn’t want to spoil for anyone (just take the bait). While the comic supposed to show how futile masked heroes were, here we get an all-too sugar-coated ending, with the message “Oh well, wanna beat up bums tonite?”

The ending. I don’t want to spoil it, but needless to say, the movie changes the b@tshit crazy plot-twist-climax, which in retrospect worked so much better, for one that would never work, simply because while the “solution” remains the same, the “sickness” becomes all too severe for the same medicine. 

And please, please, get rid of the woman playing “Silver Specter II”. She was painful to watch. The guy playing Ozymandias also, but he was a tad bit less severe.

You might rate the movie higher if you have not read the comic beforehand; it is also possible you will rate it lower for the same reason.

Verdict: 

6/10

Fahrenheit 1024

Classic sci-fi books have been often criticized for showing technologies that quickly became obsolete. Fahrenheit 451 was published in 1953. In this dystopian novel, books are banned, and they are burned by “firemen”. The author, Ray Bradbury, could not foresee (of course, no-one could) the advancements in the field of microcomputers, and the information-revolution; the concept of banning literature by burning paper books at 451 Fahrenheit is obsolete in an era when you can carry whole a library on a piece of plastic sized your thumbnail, and distribute it in seconds all around the globe.
 I will not talk about suspension of disbelief for now; as for myself, I never had a problem enjoying a fiction just because its technological predictions are obsolete. I try to focus on the ideas and creativity presented by the author, instead. Solitary planetary supercomputers, their vast capacity only used by a selected few scientists? Nifty. Aforementioned computers operating with data tapes? Charming. Input handled by punch cards? Delicious.
But other times, they make chilling predictions, and not on the technical side:

"More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before." 

Dead on. Can you name a country where the football coach of the university earns more than the dean?