Re: Re:Linklater
Camille Scaysbrook (verona_beach@geocities.com)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 13:56:02 +1100
Mr Depressed wrote
> My absolute favorite is Suburba. Nobody else seems to like it though.
> Wonder why? Maybe it's to downbeat and depressing for them? oh
> well...
I'm one of the Linklater fans who wasn't so keen on `Suburbia', for a few
different reasons. Firstly and foremostly (?) its origins as a stage play
were far too evident - just the way scenes and speeches were arranged and
the whole mise-en-scene; things such as people getting up and announcing
things in long speeches was very `theatrey' (and having written a bunch of
plays just like this one I know of which I speak (: ) I found the
characters not very sympathetic, and although I realise we were supposed to
be walking a fine line between dislike and sympathy for them, they were all
so self-obsessed that I didn't really care what happened to them. All of
this, I should emphasise, was pretty much out of the hands of Linklater who
did a great job of directing his cast and setting the atmosphere. I just
think the material he was working with wasn't ideally suited to film - it
wasn't so much a film adaptation as the filming of a stage play outdoors -
and there is a difference.
All of this I guess comes back to the central argument that we were having
about a movie of TCIR, which is this - like I said, I believe the best
pieces of art are the ones conceived for and played out in, the best media
suited to them. Therefore, the best movie adaptations are movies which
become completely different works of art to the book or play they were
based on. No piece of art truly withstands the transition between mediums
(the only notable exception I could think of would be the television
adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's `Brideshead Revisited' which almost to the
word follows the novel incredibly faithfully and successfully).
To my mind, a movie of Catcher would be extremely interesting, even
enjoyable (and *any* of us bananafishers would have to be lying if we said
we wouldn't go to see it, even just for interest's sake (: ) - but the
thing about Catcher is, we already all have our little movie of it in our
minds. We all know who would `play' Jane or Holden or Phoebe. That's the
beauty of the book - it is all of ours while still being Salingers. And I
don't know how many of us would be willing to reject this own `personal
movie' for another person's, which would never be able to meet up to our
expectations. There'd always be at least one part - different for all of us
- where we'd go `Oh GOD how could they get that so WRONG!?'
P.S. You might try sending your email in text rather than HTML format next
time as your original message didn't show up properly on my browser
initially.
Camille
verona_beach@geocities.com
@ THE ARTS HOLE http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Theater/6442
@ THE INVERTED FOREST http://www.angelfire.com/pa/invertedforest