The Da Vinci Code is inherently an interesting case study in film adaptation, since the “novel” on which it is based is so incompetently written that the most charitable thing a reader can do is think of it as the first draft of a screenplay proposal by a ninth-grade kid who once got molested by a priest. And then there is the further gamble of handing it to the most erratic screenwriter in Hollywood—Akiva Goldsman, who wrote two of Ron Howard’s better films (A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man) but also has his name on the likes of Batman & Robin and I(saac Asimov is rolling in his grave), Robot.

Ron Howard, at least, has a track record that assures us he is literate in the art of cinema, which is not something we can say for Dan Brown’s grasp of written English (grammatical enough to be published, but only that). To film The Da Vinci Code in a manner that reflects the quality of its prose would require a handheld camcorder and a monk costume from the corner shop. That the adaptation is in the hands of professionals at all is enough to assure us that the delivery is an improvement—and it is.

Less expected is how the film manages to expose some of the serious defects in The Da Vinci Code‘s story structure that the book’s breakneck pace sweeps under the rug. Dan Brown’s novel is many execrable things, but one thing it is not is boring. (It’s like Sarah Palin that way—fitting, because Dan Brown’s America is Sarah Palin’s America in so many respects.) Ron Howard’s film is boring, and it is Dan Brown’s fault.

Many filmgoing citizens unfamiliar with the language of cinema cling to the correlative-not-causative mantra “the book is always better than the movie” and expect that the role of the movie is to be as faithful to the book as possible. (You know who you are, you odd ducks who inexplicably prefer the first two Harry Potter films to the far superior Prisoner of Azkaban.) In the case of a book like The Da Vinci Code, I would maintain that it is the responsibility of a filmmaker, to the audience and to the storied history of the craft, to fix the original work.

Howard and company manage this to some degree, though they do not go far enough—I, for one, would have liked to see them redact Robert Langdon’s title (Professor of “Symbology”) to reflect what he actually is, a scholar of Religious Studies or Art History. Fortunately for educated audiences, gone are the majority of Dan Brown’s endless expository insults to the intelligence of anybody who knows anything about anything.

Nobody has to be told what the Fibonacci sequence is. There are no digressions about how Walt Disney rose from the dead to insert subliminal Grail imagery in The Little Mermaid or how the female-to-male proportion of bees in hives works out to exactly the Golden Ratio (an irrational number impossible to express as a ratio of integers). Nowhere does Langdon indulge in fond flashbacks about lecturing clueless and gullible students who gasp at every earth-shattering, life-changing revelation he presents. Nor is Sophie’s estrangement from her grandfather solely reduced to seeing him do something naughty and being scarred for life; instead, that event is the culmination of a gradual course of exclusion that sours her very relationship with history. On the whole, the characters exclaim less, and there are fewer dumb contrivances.

Somehow, The Da Vinci Code still manages to hit a running time of 149 minutes, making it the rare book-to-film that takes longer to watch than read. (I am told that in some regions, there is an extended cut of 168 minutes in length, which encroaches on the territory of the shorter historical epics.)

Say what you will about Dan Brown’s fluffy little caper—I know I have—but one thing it does have going for it is a constant sense of forward motion. It flows like a pot of gravy poured down your throat—it goes down while it’s hot, but it’s best not think about it afterwards. (Nota bene: I haven’t tried this, and neither should you.) In part, this is because the writing is so thin. Brown is an author of limited visual imagination, and his idea of character development seldom extends beyond, “He’s claustrophobic and he looks like Harrison Ford.” And that’s the main character we’re talking about. Ergo, the character work is incompressible, and there is nowhere to go but up. Brown’s characters are not people: they are data points who know only what it is convenient for them to know, and they are always in a hurry.

Howard’s film redresses some of the book’s deficiency of character, but too often at the expense of time. Neither the book nor the film understand that the way to reveal character without seeming digressive is to test and change the characters as the plot unfolds rather than crystallize them in backstory. The book skirts around the task of making anyone seem interesting at all; the film stretches too far to give its cast something to do.

Thus we go from a handful of appreciable moments where Tom Hanks expresses Langdon’s trepidation at entering enclosed spaces with an anxious look and a “Do we have to go in there?” (good), to overt revelations that he fell in a well as a boy (that’s it?), to a series of grainy and overexposed flashbacks depicting his time in the well (redundant, redundant, redundant). Goldsman’s screenplay tries to salvage this in the final scene between Langdon and Sophie, where the former brings up his claustrophobia to make a point about how there’s no escaping our history—trite, perhaps, but appropriate to the theme that Goldsman develops to prop up Sophie’s characterization as a woman afraid of but not incurious about the past. This is an invention of the film’s; Dan Brown is not a writer who knows about themes.

Until the rest stop at Sir Leigh Teabing’s mansion, the film actually moves along at a nice clip; it’s no North by Northwest, but it holds up next to your typical run-of-the-mill chase flick. It’s a little jarring to see the laughable anagrams Brown generated using Anagram Genius plastered all over a film that takes itself seriously, as they are barely a rung or two above the moment in the 1966 Adam West/Burt Ward Batman where Robin deduces that Catwoman must be involved in the villains’ treacherous plot because the Penguin’s submarine is in the sea, and “sea”/C stands for Catwoman. Nevertheless, the pace is fine, despite the occasional reliance on injections of artificial tension, like when Sophie slips her car between a pair of trucks—backwards—and narrowly avoids a hopeless future as the centrepiece of a French-cryptographer sandwich.

Then comes the pivotal exposition dump about Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the part of The Da Vinci Code that made a lot of people angry—so angry that they turned Dan Brown into a millionaire overnight. Howard at least has the good sense to give us something pretty to look at, in the form of grainy and overexposed flashbacks (see a pattern?) of the Crusades, Constantine’s Rome, and the Council of Nicea. I wager that the millions spent on Templar costumes and lavish historical sets would have seen better use in a film that was actually about the Nicene Council; here, they only emphasize how pedestrian the main plot is, as our heroes hop from one popular tourist destination to another.

The tea party at the Teabing mansion reveals a fundamental flaw in Brown’s plot design, a defect well hidden in the book. It is this: Teabing tells Langdon and Sophie everything they need to know about the Grand Religious Conspiracy at the halfway point, and our heroes spend the rest of the story confirming it. Maybe my perspective is skewed by my prior familiarity with the book, but if it is my knowledge of how everything unfolds that spoils all the fun, that is a damning indictment of the quest itself.

If the only thing that keeps the audience engaged is the promise that the road must end—if the process of discovery and revelation is a series of puzzles that the reader is invited to solve before the “expert” protagonists do, and provides nothing else to enjoy on its own terms—if the characters simply follow a trail without having to make any tough decisions—then the audience speeds to the finish, but only to get to the finish. There is no reason to revisit the story, as the architecture of the mystery is nothing to admire. If it’s not worth seeing twice, it’s not worth seeing once.

It doesn’t help that in the eyes of a non-religious observer, the stakes of The Da Vinci Code‘s treasure hunt are comically low: to shed blood, sweat, and tears over a question of whether the Council of Nicea excluded certain apocrypha for unsavoury reasons is as trivial as an Internet-forum squabble about whether Star Wars comics belong to the Star Wars canon. It’s fiction either way.

Without the hook of leaving breadcrumbs for the audience to follow by themselves, the best the film can do is substitute visualizations of Langdon solving puzzles. In this respect Ron Howard was a natural choice to occupy the director’s chair: he calls for the same tricks as John Nash’s bouts of pattern matching in A Beautiful Mind, and coupled with Hanks’ performance, we get a much better picture of how people really go about solving anagrams (picking out clusters, occasionally mouthing substrings to latch onto associations by sound, until an epiphany snaps everything into place) than anything that is offered in the book.

It is still patently absurd that anyone accustomed to puzzles can have that much trouble figuring out a five-letter word for a falling object associated with Isaac Newton, when what Langdon and company should be agonizing over is whether the solution is apple or pomme, given that the puzzle-maker was French. But I suppose the film can only do so much. To a certain extent, the Grand Religious Conspiracy subgenre is crippled by design. While the detective story is an expression of a rational, empirical worldview where reason triumphs over the seemingly inexplicable, what the Grand Religious Conspiracy thriller asks us to do is trade one tattered article of faith for another one with even less substantiation.

What we are left with is a film that is watchable but dull, and full of talented actors struggling to make something of their paper-thin, typecast roles. (Jean Reno as an angry Frenchman named Fache? Seriously?) On the downside, Howard is too reluctant to cut their superfluous scenes, and the mundanity of the main characters is only more pronounced as we spend more unnecessary time with Paul Bettany’s self-flagellating albino henchman and Alfred Molina’s Spanish bishop.

And I’m not sure that would have fixed the pacing: Dan Brown’s story is such a one-gimmick yarn that, even with fewer flashbacks and tighter (dare I say more Spielbergian?) staging, I don’t think any film could salvage the page-turning excitement of reading The Da Vinci Code for the first time without a significant revision of the story’s meagre payoff. So dark, the con of Dan.

In brief: Short, simple, and sweet, Capote’s novella is one of those stories that packs every postwar anxiety about the American Dream into one very enigmatic character. There is something mature about fiction that reflects on the idealism of the individual spirit, and asks us to do the same, through immersing us in a deep sense of wistfulness rather than outright disillusionment.

(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, keep reading below.)

I’ve never bought into the popular division of fiction into plot-driven and character-driven partitions. I think of it as an introductory placeholder, like the primary-school template of the short story (inciting action, rising action, climax, denouement): a good place to start, but completely inadequate for grasping the complexities of storytelling as they empirically appear in the literary corpus. The more publishers believe it, the more writers will do it, and the worse off we all are.

After reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s, I’m beginning to realize that the plot/character pitfall is made even rougher by what comes after the hyphen: the idea that fiction is “driven” as if pushed from behind, when it is actually drawn like a Central Park carriage or a rickshaw (depending on whether you are reading New York fiction or colonial fiction, because it’s got to be one of the two, doesn’t it). There’s no doubting that Tiffany’s is at its heart a character piece, not because interior motivation takes precedence over exterior causality, but because a particular character is the locus of interest that tugs the reader into the story’s gravitational field.

Tiffany’s is a mystery of motive. Who is Miss Holiday Golightly? What makes her tick? Is there any consistency to her behaviour? Is there anything real under the dark glasses and the funny name? What accounts for the appearance of a carving of her likeness in the middle of Africa, a place that could not be more removed from the stomping grounds of glamour girls with lost souls? (The story, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, is acutely New York and not at all colonial—though you couldn’t tell by the diamonds alone.)

When all is said and done, Holly Golightly is not overwhelmingly atypical by the standard expectations of what flighty, soul-searching socialites are like. But there’s something iconic, something instantly memorable about her because the narrator puts the reader in the position of trying to make sense of a person who makes no sense.

Holly is such a character. So it’s all the more ironic when, the first time we read her name, the narrator confesses that he saw her as anything but:

It never occurred to me in those days to write about Holly Golightly, and probably it would not now except for a conversation I had with Joe Bell that set the whole memory of her in motion again.

One thing I didn’t expect was a moment here, a moment there, where Tiffany’s evokes J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, which I don’t need to tell you is a completely different book with a voice that bears no resemblance to Capote’s whatsoever. I compare them here because I get the strong sense that Holly Golightly’s America and Holden Caulfield’s America are one and the same. They live in the same 1940s New York, breathing the same air of a genuine anxiety about phoniness, caught in an ambiguous rupture between the intense desire to be self-made and the inescapable web of social relations that manufactures them from without.

Look at how O.J. Berman, Holly’s Hollywood agent, describes his runaway client:

“So,” he said, “what do you think: is she or ain’t she?”
“Ain’t she what?”
“A phony.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.”
“You’re wrong. She is a phony. But on the other hand you’re right. She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony. She believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it. I’ve tried with tears running down my cheeks.”

And if we’re going to play Six Degrees of Audrey Hepburn, we’ll find our way through My Fair Lady and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and meander back to this:

“[...] she opens her mouth and you don’t know if she’s a hillbilly or an Okie or what. I still don’t. My guess, nobody’ll ever know where she came from. She’s such a goddamn liar, maybe she don’t know herself anymore. She’s such a goddamn liar, maybe she don’t know herself any more. But it took us a year to smooth out that accent. How we did it finally, we gave her French lessons: after she could imitate French, it wasn’t so long she could imitate English.”

Speaking of Audrey Hepburn, I’m not going to pretend that the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s didn’t colour my expectations going into the book. Some of the differences are more pronounced than others, but the imagination has only two major cognitive disparities to get over. First, Capote’s Holly is a blonde. Second, the story is set in 1943, and Capote (writing in 1958) is critically aware of its situation both in wartime and in the long-term aftermath of the Depression. Holly is running away from the flux of history, which extends well beyond her personal memory of the past.

I also can’t mention the film without drawing attention to the following passage:

Also, she had a cat and she played the guitar. On days when the sun was strong, she would wash her hair, and together with the cat, a red tiger-striped tom, sit out on the fire escape thumbing her guitar while her hair dried. Whenever I heard the music, I would go stand quietly by my window. She played very well, and sometimes sang too. Sang in the hoarse, breaking tones of a boy’s adolescent voice. She knew all the show hits, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill; especially she liked the songs from Oklahoma!, which were new that summer and everywhere. But there were moments when she played songs that made you wonder where she learned them, where indeed she came from. Harsh-tender wandering tunes with words that smacked of pineywoods or prairie. One went: Don’t wanna sleep, Don’t wanna die, Just wanna go a-travelin’ through the pastures of the sky; and this one seemed to gratify her the most, for often she continued it long after her hair had dried, after the sun had gone and there were lighted windows in the dusk.

Now, isn’t that just the perfect forecast of the future songwriting style of Henry Mancini? Not just “Moon River”, either, but the legacy of his repertoire as a whole (“The Days of Wine and Roses”, “Two for the Road”… maybe not so much “The Pink Panther”, but never mind).

I’ve always adored “Moon River”: it’s one of those flawless American songs, the kind of melody you have in mind when you waggle your cane and gripe about how the kids don’t have any music anymore and culture has all but died. But until I read the Capote passage above, I never realized how completely Mancini’s song and Johnny Mercer’s lyrics captured everything about Breakfast at Tiffany’s, from the sentence to the paragraph to Holly Golightly and all the way up to the essence of conflicted nostalgia itself. It’s as perfect a fit as “Over the Rainbow” was to Oz, but on top of that, it is an adaptation of the most spirited faith. The film may differ in many respects, but the song and scene are exactly as Capote imagined it:

I loved this song. Now I am in awe.

In this instalment, I continue to assess some of the arguments that are often raised in defence of the tie-in novel, with a particular focus on movie novelizations and the behaviour of the property licensors.

5.

“Basing a book on a movie is no less legitimate than basing a movie on a book.”

Keith R.A. DeCandido:

What this really is? Is the fact that, in this country, we view things on screen as more real than things in print. Part of it is simple numbers: more people watch TV and movies than read books and comic books. That’s why when you adapt a novel into a movie, you’ve got an entire Academy Award category to yourself (and other adapters like you), but when you adapt a movie into a novel, you’re a talentless hack who’s just in it for the money (never mind that screenwriters are far better compensated for their work than prose writers).

DeCandido aims his post at those who dismiss tie-in novels because of their irrelevance to the “canonical” continuity of the core product, arguing that when it comes to movie adaptations of superhero comics, nobody cares. (Then again, I’m not sure continuity was ever a staple of superhero comics to begin with—certainly not prior to the crisis of infinite earths.)

Mind you, the quality of the Star Wars books themselves was irrelevant to me: my pressing concern at the time was to ensure that people understood that a) in no way was George Lucas beholden to the parasitic continuity of the Expanded Universe in crafting his Prequels, nor should he be; and b) that I was going to go on seeing possibilities in the ambiguities of the films, as I would with any other film, rather than seek hard, cold answers in some tie-in product with an official stamp on it. As soon as Revenge of the Sith brought the Star Wars saga to an end, the whole matter of canonicity died a merciful death (for me, anyhow).

Let’s look at the more interesting issue, though: have we indeed discovered an arena where—horror of horrors—movies are more respected than books? How is that possible?

Prime Minister Steven Harper Piziks:

I know the answer–money. Screenplays earn scads of money, scads of people see the movie, and rave about it on TV, in movie reviews, and to their friends. As a result, money pours into the studio, and money gets attention.

Far fewer people read books than go to movies. Even fewer people read books based on movies. Movies are easy entertainment; books are more challenging. So almost no one cares about a carefully crafted novel adaptation of a movie. Readers will flock to a movie based on a novel to see the book come to life and to see how well it does or doesn’t work. Unfortunately, the opposite isn’t true. Movie viewers are less likely to pick up books because are harder to get through, and they don’t figure that the book will add anything to what they saw on screen.

I don’t buy this. Let’s ignore for a second that the Star Wars prequel novelizations sold like hotcakes. First of all, the movies based on books that people flock to see for easy entertainment are, by and large, not the ones that get nominated for Oscars. I liked Iron Man, but it’s not Schindler’s List or The English Patient or No Country for Old Men, and their markets are not one and the same. (Every now and then you get an anomaly like Forrest Gump that manages to succeed with audiences, critics, and Academy voters alike, but never you mind—and any way you spin it, there’s only one Lord of the Rings. The Dark Knight? The jury’s still out.)

I’ll tell you why some movies based on books get nominated for Oscars: because in artistry and craftsmanship, they hold their own against the best that the medium has to offer. They are responsible to the great tradition of cinema first, and their source material second. Look at Gone with the Wind or The Godfather, both of which preceded the age of the modern commercial blockbuster (which, according to the orthodox history, begins with Jaws), both of which we are quite comfortable speaking of as among the best that the medium has to offer in terms of performances and sheer command of visual language. We put them right next to works written for the screen like On the Waterfront and Citizen Kane, and the presence or absence of source material, no matter how significant, is invisible to us.

More often than not, film adaptations are mediocre. We forget about them and try again later. It’s been happening since at least the 1941 John Huston film of The Maltese Falcon, a noir classic by any measure, but not the first adaptation of the Dashiell Hammett novel. The first Maltese Falcon was made a decade earlier. Nobody cared. The only people who remember it ever existed are film history geeks writing about book adaptations and itching to pick a fight.

6.

Prose novelizations of films, on the other hand, do not have the benefits of either a safe reflective distance from the source material, or significant room for reinterpretation. If there is any stigma against novelizations, it isn’t that they add nothing: it is that our (well, my) instinct is to see them as rough drafts plus deleted scenes, and without the benefit of the visual language for which the film was designed.

I am sad to report that publishers and film distributors intend to keep it that way.

Tod Goldberg:

Max Allan Collins practically did write a book with his own blood. Collins is the undisputed king of the media tie-in, having written more than 50 of them (including 10 CSI novels and several puzzles, video games and comics also based on the program) since 1990, but he nearly ripped a hole in the fabric of the time/space continuum by novelizing the screenplay based on his graphic novel Road to Perdition. (Do the math in your head for that one.)

“The Road to Perdition novelization was a nightmare, frankly,” Collins says. “I went after it for obvious reasons—I didn’t want a ‘Perdition’ novel written by someone else out there. I proceeded to write the best novelization of my career, staying faithful to David Self’s script—which was already fairly faithful to my graphic novel—but fleshed out the script with characterization, expanded dialogue scenes and just generally turning it into a quality novel of around 100,000 words. After I submitted it and had the New York editor say it was the best tie-in novel he’d ever read, the licensing person at DreamWorks required me to cut everything in the novel that wasn’t in the script. That I was the creator of the property held no sway. I was made to butcher the book down to 40,000 words.”

It’s a tragedy, really. In Collins’ intended form, that sounds like a novelization I would read. Mind you, I would still approach it with caution. Road to Perdition is a remarkable film, but much of its success rides on strong performances, meticulous staging, and exemplary cinematography of the striking electricity that we associate with the mantra, “Every frame a Rembrandt.” In some respects, it is a film that holds its own against the very best. It invites us to judge it not only against gangster pictures or comic book adaptations, but against all motion pictures—and the comparison is not ridiculous.

In the meantime, riddle me this: even if we set all stigmas aside, are there any tie-in novels—novelizations, individual series, or otherwise—that we can truly conceive of as contenders for the Booker? The Pulitzer? Or to be more realistic—not all films get tie-ins, after all, and not all authors are willing to write them—the Hugo, the Nebula, the Edgar?

No—because nobody wants to commission one.

(In case you answered “Yes”: please leave a comment, and name the book.)

7.

I don’t think it’s conceptually impossible for a novelization to be a serious work of fiction. What is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, really, but a tie-in novel for a BBC radio miniseries?

To clear the institutional barricades against novelizations is probably a good thing. In fact, films that fail to live up to the promise of their screenplays—whether the cause be poor acting, editorial incompetence, budgetary constraints, or something completely different—are probably ripe for novelization. But the ensuing novel must be more than just an adaptation, and preferably composed at some temporal distance from its source material. For one thing, it must pay serious attention to structure and prose: why dump the content in a new form if you’re not going to excel at the form? We don’t forgive films either when they just adapt. There’s a reason Alfonso Cuarón’s interpretation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is far superior to its (literally) by-the-book predecessors.

The fact is, most of what gets novelized is not that suitable for novelization. The finest special-effects spectacles on the silver screen are the ones with that poetic choreography of clashing swords and fiery explosions that were born to be visual. Animators don’t think in words. Take away the visuals and trade them for a verbal substitute, no matter how eloquent, and the essence of the source material’s appeal is lost.

Requisite exception to every rule: perhaps the most well regarded novelization of a film is Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on an early draft from his concurrently written screenplay to the Kubrick film, itself based on a short story of his from the 1940s. It stands alone as a serious classic of hard science fiction, even though—and, arguably, because—the manner of its inventiveness is quite different from what Kubrick did to plant 2001 as a monolithic landmark in the cinematic canon. On the page, “My God, it’s full of stars!” doesn’t imitate Kubrick’s fetal montage of transcendence and rebirth. It replaces it.

8.

We must remember, too, that the prose novel had a head start on film by several centuries. The standard of achievement on the printed page is staggeringly, mind-bogglingly high. All the same, that’s no excuse for not even trying.

Or is it?

Tie-in readers are a renewable resource. The existing brand is what draws them in, not the books themselves. Familiarity with the brand’s core product—the game, the television show, the movie—is an implied prerequisite; moreover, that is a safe assumption to make. The licensors of the franchise have no incentive to expand their audience. They’re not the gatekeepers. It’s not their responsibility. Star Wars novels draft their readership from the audience that is already receptive to the Star Wars films; that’s the extent of expansion. It is a safe assumption that the percentage of Star Wars fans who read daring, intellectual literature and have yet to erect an impermeable stigmatic wall against franchise fiction is, to say the least, infinitesimal.

This isn’t to say that franchise fiction never expands it audience, or that its audience is a strict subset of the brand’s followers. I’m certain there are legions of Forgotten Realms readers who don’t play Forgotten Realms, or Star Wars readers who abandoned the films when the prequels came about.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the publishers (or property holders or book packagers or whatever you call them) produce fiction as merchandise precisely because of its reliability as a source of revenue. Their natural inclination is to play it safe. That encourages them to produce more of the same, but with just enough variation that their existing audience doesn’t abandon them. The expansion of that audience does not occur from within. Their ranks swell on the back of the brand’s core product—and that is where the perception of legitimacy comes with the money, and goes with the promotional machine that affords the brand its access to the mass consumer market.

The rest of the story

• Part the First
• Part the Third
• Part the Fourth
• Part the Fifth

This was my first time through Dostoevsky’s magisterial opus, and at more than one juncture I observed that with its high moral intrigue, impassioned cast of players and unreserved Biblical ambition—not to mention the best courtroom speeches in prose fiction (themselves capable satires of psychoanalytic narrative analysis decades before the study formally existed)—surely somebody has had the bravado to attempt a film.

As it turns out, Richard Brooks wrote and directed an English-language film adaptation back in 1958 (read the contemporaneous New York Times review) starring—get this—Yul Brynner and William Shatner. For those of you with access to Turner Classic Movies, it plays 7 February.

Thanks to the promotional stills and trailers for the film of Northern Lights/The Golden Compass, the visualization of amberpunk was the least of my concerns going into the film. The moment I saw that New Line had commissioned a cinematic adaptation, a list of Reasons to Worry flickered into being, and the visual design was the first item I crossed off the list.

Among the other, more pressing items: 1) In the novels, shapeshifting daemons like Pantalaimon retain a coherent identity before the reader because they are identified by name. How might one adapt that visually? 2) Lyra Belacqua is a role so ludicrously challenging that casting her appropriately could make or break the movie. Could Dakota Blue Richards convincingly fill her shoes? 3) Pullman’s writing consistently appeals to non-visual senses—touch, for example, as in the highly tactile experience of using the Subtle Knife. How might this work on film? 4) Will Pullman’s stridently anti-dogmatic message (which is finally poking the church in the eye with as sharp a stick as he intended, albeit twelve years late) survive commercial pressures for the filmmakers to self-censor? 5) Who is Chris Weitz, and should I be as worried as I am about his very limited directorial experience (About a Boy, Down to Earth and a co-credit on American Pie), or will he surprise me like Mike Newell did with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire? 6) Are the angels in The Amber Spyglass still going to be naked?

Now, I regret to say I’ve only read Pullman’s marvelous trilogy once and therefore don’t know it backwards, forwards and upside down the way I (used to) know The Lord of the Rings, but my initial impression after seeing the film tonight is a very positive one. The adaptation adhered to its source with the utmost respect, but not slavishly or religiously (how ironic would that be?) to a fault. Devoted readers need not worry. In fact, I had myself a jolly old time right up until the credits rolled.

Unfortunately, the end credits are precisely where a very serious problem with the film appears. (Spoilers follow for both the book and the film.)

Remember the end of The Two Towers (the film), when Frodo, Sam and Gollum didn’t get anywhere near Shelob’s Lair, where Tolkien staged an absolute monster of a cliffhanger in The Two Towers (the book)?

Peter Jackson got away with that for three major reasons. a) He warned us all well in advance that Shelob was getting bumped to the third film. b) The Lord of the Rings was simultaneously planned and shot as a single picture, so it was fairly flexible as far as editing choices were concerned. 3) He ends the film with one of the best conversations in the entirety of Tolkien’s work (and one of the most poignant scenes in the combined running time of all three movies), where Frodo and Sam discuss whether their adventure will ever be the retold in books and stories—and tops it off with a moment with Gollum that foreshadows what is to come.

As you’ve no doubt guessed, the end of The Golden Compass (the film) doesn’t take Lyra and Roger anywhere near the end of The Golden Compass (the book), which—like the last chapter of The Two Towers—is one of the great open-ended climaxes in serial literature.

I’m not impressed, and to illustrate this, I’m going to draw a parallel (which is what the film didn’t do): a) I didn’t get the memo. Strictly speaking, this is my fault—Weitz explained his decision in an open letter months ago, claiming to have Pullman’s full support—and none of you will run into this problem, if you consider this post your memo. b) Production hasn’t started on The Subtle Knife; unlike The Lord of the Rings, New Line isn’t gambling on the whole trilogy at once. Although recent reports indicate that a script is ready to go, production of the rest of the trilogy is still (as far as I know) contingent on the success of the first film. 3) Chris Weitz doesn’t have the screenwriting mojo to make the dialogue in the airship journey to Svalbard deliver a satisfying conclusion that promises more to come.

In other words: what was Weitz thinking, leaving out the end of the book when the running time left plenty of room to spare? Did he go over budget? Was he not going to make the deadline? Did he not think the audience could deal with what happens to Roger, though now, they’ll just have to face it later? Was he intentionally trying to screw over the writer hired for The Subtle Knife, Hossein Amini (i.e. not Chris Weitz)? Did he envision Lord Asriel in a tuxedo, which he can’t depict until the expiry of Daniel Craig’s contract as James Bond?

Or did he simply not feel up to the task, which was why he left the director’s chair the first time to be replaced by Anand Tucker before subsequently returning in Tucker’s stead?

From a 2 December article in The New York Times:

Fans of Mr. Pullman’s version may be surprised to learn that the movie stops before the book does, leaving out Lyra’s long-anticipated meeting with her father, who plans to wage war on the Almighty himself. Instead the movie ends in stirring fashion, with Lyra saving the kidnapped kids from what amounts to spiritual lobotomy and heading off in an airship with Iorek, an armored bear who has become her friend and protector. “There was tremendous marketing pressure for that,” Mr. Weitz said. “Everyone really wanted an upbeat ending.”

He added, “They’re looking for a franchise here,” meaning that if “The Golden Compass” does well, the studio will go ahead with films based on the two remaining volumes of the trilogy.

Well screw you too, Mr. Weitz (and I say that gently, of course, as his film was great while it lasted). I’m not a stickler for films adhering to books at all costs, as longtime readers and personal acquaintances are no doubt aware after hearing me repeatedly assert and defend at length the opinion that The Prisoner of Azkaban is unquestionably the best Potter film—but this is just ridiculous. I believe in good filmmaking—read: filmmaking that isn’t afraid to take a few risks.

Philip Pullman says:

The ending makes every kind of narrative sense. The National Theatre production ended the first part plumb in the middle of The Subtle Knife, and nobody minded that because in the only terms that mattered it worked brilliantly. Every film has to make changes to the story that the original book tells – not to change the outcome, but to make it fit the dimensions and the medium of film. I’m very happy with the work the filmmakers have done, and no-one wants this film to succeed more, or believes in it more firmly, than I do.

That’s an admirable statement, and I’m glad Pullman respects the liberties of film as much as I (usually) do, but there’s something grossly arbitrary about Weitz’s decision that does not, in my mind, do anything to make the structure of the story more amenable to cinema. It reeks of a business decision manhandling a creative decision. I’m always one of the first to defend a film’s liberties if it makes for better visual-sequential storytelling, and I’m at a loss to understand how anyone could possibly think the ending in the film is better suited for the task than a sparkling starlight bridge to another universe.

Look, you just can’t beat the experience of having an eye-level encounter with a sky-level aurora. I should know. I’ve done it. I didn’t see any cities in alternate realities, but it still counts.

In Weitz’s defence, the creative dissonance in the production of The Golden Compass remained largely invisible to me until the end credits kicked me in the pants and cast off Pullman’s magnificent ending as if it were a daemon forcibly severed from an innocent child. Apart from that gripe, the film is actually as comparable to Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire as I thought it would be. The visuals and effects work were congruous and dynamic enough to draw my attention to the subtleties in what they depicted. I accepted implicitly that armoured bears and nefarious golden monkeys ran amok in the world, and turned my eye to how they behaved. The technical aspects of filmmaking, at the very least, proved themselves ready to embrace Pullman’s imagination.

Most of my concerns were in this way assuaged. There was occasionally a bit of confusion as to when Pan was speaking, and whether his interior conversations with Lyra could be overheard by anybody else, but apart from that, the daemons figured in beautifully as an external manifestation of how characters felt and interacted. And it certainly helped that Dakota Blue Richards became one and the same as her enormously challenging character: she is the first and best argument for the New Line to go ahead with the next two films straightaway.

Visually, I actually have few concerns at all apart from the suffusion of blue that took a lot of colour out of the night shots near the end, a cinematographic issue that also detracted slightly from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The musical score by Alexandre Desplat (Oscar-nominated for The Queen) definitely had its moments, but there were more than a few scenes in which it should have backed off. It suffices, but I was hoping it would more than suffice.

In a film adaptation of this sort, there is inevitably a certain loss of exposition. As a minor case, Lyra’s endeavour to set up a duel between Iorek and the usurper king of the bears (in the book, Iofur; in the film, Ragnar) doesn’t feel nearly as risky when we’re not given the disclaimer that typically, bears can’t be tricked. But we still receive a very concise sense of more important elements, like the Magisterium’s perceived connection between Dust and sin (and all of the hermeneutic consequences for myth-readers familiar with metaphors for menstruation and circumcision), which are necessary if the motives behind their daemon-cutting experiments are to be at all coherent.

Pullman’s anti-dogmatic message is in the film, and it’s explicit to the point of almost overcompensating for the initial suspicions that Weitz would be handling the Magisterium with kid gloves. I can see why Weitz isn’t writing The Subtle Knife, though: there’s a lot of “filler” dialogue, fully interchangeable with that of any other story where the hopes and fears of adventure-seeking children are involved.

All in all, though, I admire what’s in the film, and I’m going to see it again to see if it sticks. But the ending just kills it. And I don’t think this is just a matter of being suddenly let down after 113 minutes of highly satisfying development. (And Lyra is the one who’s supposed to be let down, not me.)

The ending’s absence doesn’t take away from the quality of what’s there, but consider this model of causation: a) Someone who hasn’t read the book smacks into the ending, thinks to himself, “How drab,” and doesn’t recommend it; ticket sales drop. b) Someone who has read the book smacks into the ending, thinks to himself, “Movies have violated the memory of one of my favourite novels once again!” (not my opinion, but I’m aware of how many devoted readers overwhelmingly harbour a prejudice against movies that dare to deviate from their sources, as if they were some kind of parasite to be exterminated) and doesn’t recommend it; ticket sales drop.

In either case, the decision to lop off the ending of The Golden Compass damages the possibility that The Subtle Knife will take a pocketful of New Line’s funding and come to the rescue. And even if they do go ahead with the next film, working in the climax of Pullman’s novel is going to be a considerable challenge. Pullman’s structure is abundantly clear: the first book is set in Lyra’s world, the second book begins in our world, and the third book offers a pan-universal tour of existence itself. Are we now going to have the crossing of the worlds at the beginning of the next film, without the benefit of two hours of solid buildup, followed by a massive gap in which Will Parry runs around and does his thing while we wonder what in the blazes happened to Lyra? Colour me a concerned citizen.

With that in mind, I hope the next two films go ahead, and that the incorporation of the first book’s ending makes sense. The Golden Compass was so close to hitting the mark, and we deserve to see the story completed. They have the right designers on the project, and more importantly, the right actress. Apart from the ending, I’m very happy with the film and I want to see more. Closure would be nice.

In the famous opening passage of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams describes the human species as “so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” In this way, I am only human. I have worn digital watches all my life. I cannot live without one. It’s easy to tell when I’m fidgeting, because I check the time compulsively. As far as I am able to remember, on only two or three occasions have I been without a digital watch for more than a day, and on every one of those occasions, I panicked like an abandoned child lost on a San Francisco pier (which, come to think of it, is something I’ve also been at least twice). I have probably been without my watch more often than that, but those memories lie safely repressed.

Over the past year or so, my wristwatch dependency has loosened its grip. It still follows me everywhere, and I am still disoriented without it, but I replaced the strap a year ago and never got used to it. It wasn’t because the strap was uncomfortable; it was because I took my watch off with increasing frequency, either to time my own speeches or to permit the unobstructed handling of keyboards (both QWERTY and black-and-white), and never got so accustomed to the strap that I would be at a loss without it. But in any and all circumstances, my watch was never far.

I find that it is just as vital to know when you are as it is to know where you are, if not more so. If you are lost in space, you can find your way out, or you can stay in that spot, and develop a plan from the inferred state of your observed environment. Not so with time – certainly not here, where the winter days are but a few days in length, and the moon and stars lay hidden.

My model of choice has traditionally been the Casio Databank DB35H, mostly because I got very accustomed to its interface, feature set and display after years of use in elementary school; the segment layout is easy to read and familiar to me. It has evolved over several incarnations, and the one I purchased in what must have been 1999 or thereabouts had electroluminescent backlighting, which my first one did not, though it too has had its features extended in the latest revision. That said, given that I don’t really use the databank features, I’m open to superior alternatives like this Waveceptor model. At the same time, my current model suits my needs just fine, and I see no reason to leave it for another. Maybe an obsession with time is born of a desire for stasis and a fifty-metre resistance to change.

After roughly eight years of long service – perhaps longer, as I do not recall with the utmost precision – my battery died last week. For some reason, I don’t remember this happening before. The technical specifications for the latest incarnation of this model estimate a battery life of two years, which simply can’t be right. Perhaps my extensive use of the stopwatch features accelerated its demise. Or perhaps it was nothing more than any old battery expiring of natural causes.

I was at the university when time abruptly decided to stop, so at first opportunity, I went to the Bookstore to buy a replacement cell. Then I realized I was uncertain what battery I required, so I borrowed a screwdriver from the staff and opened up my watch on a counter. As it was already open, I decided to purchase a battery and perform the replacement myself then and there. I’d never been in the guts of one of my own watches before, so this was an autodidactic experience from the get-go. The battery housing was a veritable fortress, and tinkering about in its innards was a dextrous exercise ripe for eliciting a calm eddy of introspection, even if the device was only a digital timing implement and nothing that required me to meddle with mechanics and grapple with gears.

But irrespective of the absence of moving parts, disassembling and reassembling an electronic device and voiding its associated warranties is something I recommend everybody do at least once in their lives. Changing a lousy 3-volt lithium disc may be no big deal to those of my peers who spent their childhoods overclocking their CPUs, coiling solenoids for electric motors, or downloading instructions for building cherry-bombs from a nascent, textual Internet (and actually following them, to the chagrin of the junior-high caretakers); to them, it must seem no greater a task than the humdrum routine of replacing a lightbulb. However, I happen to be a Software Guy, a hands-off theoretician comfortable in his bubble of machine-independent algorithms afloat in the soapy bathwater of Platonic, Turing-computable ideal forms. For me, playing with little springs and unscrewing little screws and jumpstarting circuits with unfolded staples delivers a welcome pretence of handymanliness. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

In a timely coincidence, on that very same day I read about Zack Snyder’s plans for the Watchmen film.

Anyone who has been following my blog for reasonably long knows that of all the movies presently in development, this is probably the one I care about the most. More than the last three Harry Potters. More than His Dark Materials, which actually seems to be coming along very well from a design standpoint, though the jury’s obviously out on the script and will remain that way until the opening day of The Golden Compass (or Northern Lights, if they’re releasing it under that title elsewhere). Maybe even more than Indiana Jones and the Spanish Inquisition or whatever Lucasian premise it is we’re not expecting. I do not exaggerate when I say that Watchmen is the Lord of the Rings of comic books, and it’s imperative that it’s done right. I’ve seen it pass from Aronofsky to Greengrass to Snyder, and 300 will hopefully give us a good indication of whether or not Snyder knows how to strike the right balance between aesthetic special effects and storytelling mojo.

All signs are good so far. Everything he says about the direction in which he’ll take the film is exactly as it should be; it’s just a matter of whether it can be done. For one thing, setting it in 1985 as a period piece is absolutely the right choice, if not a necessary one. Everything in the story revolves around the binaristic politics of the Cold War era, and the quest for a third way, a way to undo the Gordian knot. The organizing symbol of Doomsday Clock ticking down to midnight, and all of its consequent thematic material – Dr. Manhattan’s totalizing and reductivist perception of time, relativity’s coming of age with the ushering in of atomic physics, or the temporal suspension of the apocalypse – only resonate the way they do because of a very specific milieu that we now consider historical.

If you look at the James Bond franchise, observe what a paucity of truly consequential political storytelling there was in the Pierce Brosnan era, in spite of the fact that they had possibly the very best actor in the “debonair gentleman Bond” mould at their disposal. Goldeneye is by far the best, and it’s fundamentally a Cold War film; in the other three, Bond was a fish out of water, though things started getting interesting again in the deliberately comical Die Another Day. What was compelling about Casino Royale, from an adaptation standpoint, was how the writers managed to graft a Cold War story into the immediate “post-9/11″ (post-baccarat?) present, to give a media cliché another whack on the head. I’ve always thought that the Bond franchise should be grounded in Fleming’s day instead of evolving with our present technology and geopolitical climate, but Casino Royale somehow achieved precisely that effect without moving an inch away from 2006.

It worked for Bond, and I ate my words, but it would never work for Watchmen. Too much of its backdrop depends on the relative parity that exists between two well-defined state superpowers at the zenith of an arms race, and how the iconography of the American superhero grew out of a very specific ideological landscape particular to an era where the theoretical band-aid solution to all matters of military prowess was more atomic power. While I haven’t paid much attention to how the comic-book superhero has fared against terrorists and urban guerrilla warfare in the twenty-first century, I imagine our situation is somewhat different.

But for now, let’s hope that 300 is a good film and a glorious financial success. It will keep the suits off Snyder’s back. Hopefully this time, Watchmen will motor through the production pipeline and come to the silver screen without too many complications; last time around, they only got as far as putting up a teaser website. I’d hate the job to be rushed, but I’m an impatient fellow, and the clock is ticking.

The exercise demonstrated, once again, that one of the best ways to notice new things about a story is to tell it. Here’s tonight’s curiosity: isn’t it odd that at the team’s inception, they christened it the Atlanta Flames? Were they proud of Union soldiers burning their city to the ground – or did they, frankly, not give a damn?

[Edit: According to these guys, that was a very good guess.]

Insert clever transition here.

It’s a strange experience to watch a cinematic remake immediately after the original film. It is not unlike reading a book right before you see its adaptation. When it comes to books, I know that for some people, it’s hardly ever a pleasant experience: they get all worked up about adaptation issues and never manage to get over them. For me, there is usually something unsettling that results from how the absences and changes are just as visible as what actually ends up on the screen, but this is typically outweighed by my attention to the use of film language in negotiating the inevitable gulfs. See my piece on The Phantom of the Opera for details.

Remakes, however, are a different matter. I think we often have a tendency to think of them as “new versions” of a story rather than “adaptations” in the same sense as books and stage plays. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho aside, our expectations typically extend as far as a reimagining of the holistic story and characters, and not shot-for-shot, plot-for-plot replication.

So it’s delightful when Naomi Watts steals an apple and Adrien Brody carries her down a vine in Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and it’s especially entertaining to us film nerds when the original film is hypodiegetically embedded in Jack Black’s film shoot on the ship; and then there’s the spider sequence, which is (oddly enough) a homage to a scene explicitly not in the original; but we see these as luxuries, and we could have done without them just the same.

That brings us to this weekend’s big release, The Departed.

A brief primer for those of you who don’t keep up with such things, and expect me to do it for you: Scorsese’s latest film is a remake of a 2002 Hong Kong cop thriller, Infernal Affairs, which quickly became Hong Kong cinema’s biggest phenomenon this decade not involving the farcical antics of Stephen Chow. The premise is deceptively simple: a police spy embedded in a triad (Tony Leung or, if you prefer, Leonardo DiCaprio) and a triad spy embedded in the police department (Andy Lau or, if you prefer, Matt Damon) attempt to fish each other out in a meticulous demonstration of what game theorists refer to as a simultaneous game of incomplete information.

If you haven’t seen Infernal Affairs, I highly recommend that you do. I revisited it last night, heeding a warning from a fellow film buff that it doesn’t hold up as well on a second viewing, only to discover that – while the shock value is gone, and there are two or three leaps of logic that arguably qualify as plot holes – the film is every bit as intricate as I remembered on the levels of direction, editing, performance and general craftsmanship.

A wise choice, then, for Scorsese and screenwriter William Monahan to adhere very, very closely to the sequence of actions in the original. Sure, the locales and actors are different, a few supporting characters are split and merged, and I’m told there are elements from the two sequels that emerged within a year of the original’s release. (Mark Wahlberg’s character is allegedly grafted from Infernal Affairs III.) I don’t want to spoil anything, but stack one film atop the other, and they mesh in an alignment I’d even call homomorphic.

But because the two films are so similar, and differ primarily in execution, I do feel compelled to compare them. I think my renewed familiarity with Infernal Affairs tempered my enjoyment of The Departed somewhat, and I suspect the latter deserves a second chance on a clean slate. I highly recommend them both, but neither one is free of imperfections. In that sense, I almost find that one complements the other.

Here’s what The Departed does better: onscreen violence, cinematography, verbal humour, the exchange of contraband, Jack Nicholson, clever visual motifs (I’m thinking of the final shot in particular), the budget, Catholicism, spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to flesh out the motivations so nobody is left questioning why X knows/trusts/kills Y.

Here’s what Infernal Affairs does better: offscreen violence, editing, pacing of the opening act, sting operations, Morse Code, Buddhism, not spoonfeeding the audience every step of the way to beat it over the head with clues and motivations until it resonates with the guest appearance of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb”.

Draw: stellar lead performances, use of cellular telephones, plot holes.

On balance, I prefer the original. I’ll concede that it is sometimes too subtle for its own good, just as The Departed is a bit heavy-handed when it comes to trying to explain everything (and still falling short in completely new ways). It doesn’t wave clues in your face like its American sibling, but it does indulge in the occasional redundant flashback to slap you twice with a revelation after it has been made. The two films tell the story from opposite directions, and different problems surface.

What The Departed doesn’t preserve about Infernal Affairs is its acute sense of perspective.

One of the core principles of film language is that while the audience is receiving visual data in a blinking rectangle, that does not mean films inherently work in a third-person objective point of view. Framing, blocking, the sequential ordering and timing of reaction shots – all of these elements contribute to a sense of omniscience and empathy, leading us inside a character’s point of view even as we see her face. Hitchcock played with this to no end. Hell, Scorsese plays with this to no end… just not up to his usual standard here.

It’s almost certainly an editing issue. There’s a big moment in both films that I won’t spoil, but it involves, er, gravity. In Infernal Affairs, it happens behind Tony Leung as he walks towards the camera, and it’s as much a punch in the gut for us as it is for him. (It says something that it still worked the second time through the film, even though I saw it coming.) In The Departed, the audience sees what happens long before Leonardo DiCaprio’s character; the eye level contributes to this, too. Something about it just doesn’t work: the timing and cutting feel off.

The Departed consistently opts for the visceral over what makes the most sense, perspectivally speaking. Mind you, Scorsese is still a master of the visceral; but that doesn’t always fit, especially in a film built on a concept that is all about the limited perspectives of the main characters progressing in blind, meandering baby steps.

Watch them both, though. I can’t think of a better exercise to teach yourself about the differing conventions and values of Hong Kong and American cinema, even if you presume that you’re already familiar with one or the other.

(The likely scenario is that you’ll only manage to see The Departed, which is playing in “theatres everywhere”, while Infernal Affairs is not. In that case, enjoy the element of surprise. I think that may have been missing in my experience, as there is very little in the Gotcha Department that Infernal Affairs doesn’t already do.)

It’s a whisper of a rumour, with almost no ancillary evidence to back it up, but even if it turned out to be completely false, I would remain enheartened that somebody out there shares the same crazy fanboy fantasy.

Grim Fandango is my dream film adaptation. I have devoted a lot of thought as to how I might film it myself, should I ever acquire the skill or the budget to do so, never mind the rights, and it was long ago that I came to the conclusion that it must be done in stop-motion. There is no other way. And – as I have alluded to before – when I saw the designs for the underworld in Corpse Bride, the same convergence of a smoky jazz-beat atmosphere and the calavera figures of the Mexican Day of the Dead as in Tim Schafer’s seminal masterpiece, it was clear to the point of total conviction: a Grim Fandango film should look like that.

For those of you not in the know (as I have realized that those unfamiliar with PC games are really unfamiliar with the recesses of its history, given the short shelf-life of anything that isn’t a blockbuster), Grim Fandango is, in my professional opinion, the greatest masterwork of interactive entertainment in the domains of script, story and artistic concept. If you look at the camp that continues to insist that the nondeterminism of the medium precludes it from being considered “art” (here’s looking at you, Roger Ebert – and do get well soon), I am willing to bet you that none of them have even heard of it. This is the one game I can name that is, beyond any doubt, literature.

Released in 1998, it was the last hurrah of the LucasArts adventure (cf. the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle and Sam & Max Hit the Road), the paragon of the genre and at the same time its epitaph. This was the same year that the PC first-person shooter reached maturity with Half-Life, and real-time strategy hit its stride with its own instant classic, StarCraft, so it’s no wonder that linear storytelling driven by dialogue branches and item-based puzzles fell out of vogue.

For all the attention to craftsmanship that branching dialogue is receiving again – consider Bioware’s experiments in using conversation as a concrete, outcome-affecting form of action in games such as Knights of the Old Republic – nothing comes close to the narrative design in Fandango.

In one sequence, a woman rambles on about her sordid childhood while it is your task to pretend to listen, and try to get a word in edgewise and convince her to hand over a tool you require to progress. In another, you improvise beat poetry at a club on open mic night. The range of responses available to you in a conversation is often itself the punch line.

A few months ago, I played through the whole adventure again over the course of a weekend. Thanks to its painterly pre-rendered backgrounds, the graphics have not suffered from too much aging. In the game’s final sequence, there is a haunting shot of a vintage automobile parked at the foot of a flowery meadow, a greenhouse in the distance. See, in the Land of the Dead, plants are a symbol of the final death in the afterlife.

Whenever I start talking about this game, I can’t help but get carried away. I should stop. Find it and play it, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about. Some home entertainment stores sell old PC games in jewel cases for ten-dollar bargains. I also have a copy.

I had a point in there somewhere, and I hadn’t even mentioned the flaming beavers. If a decent Grim Fandango script has indeed found its way to Tim Burton, and it is being given serious consideration, something is going right. I would be tempted to get Tim Schafer aboard the project, much like how Rodriguez got Frank Miller on the set of Sin City.

Speaking of Frank Miller, you may have heard that one Zack Snyder is currently working on 300, Miller’s graphic novel about Thermopylae. He’d better be worth his salt, because he is now the director attached to Watchmen, which got off the ground again after the modest success of V for Vendetta. Since reading Watchmen a few years ago, I have seen the film project elude Darren Aronofsky, David Hayter and Paul Greengrass, and that’s saying nothing of Terry Gilliam’s aborted concept of doing a twelve-hour twelve-parter from a decade ago. Hopefully Snyder makes it worth the wait; this is another one that needs to be done right.

There’s been a lot to say lately – busiest movie month of the year, after all, plus a somewhat amusing election campaign and about an hour a day catching imaginary fish, planting imaginary flowers and arranging imaginary furniture in my other, more rustic life. (By the way, if perchance you have the game and your town’s starting fruit is something other than apples, get ahold of me and we’ll discuss a trade.) Only now am I compelled to post, though what I have to say is closer to the shallow end of the trivia-analysis continuum.

Peter Jackson’s King Kong is a model remake. Never does it entertain pretensions of burying the 1933 original: far from it, Jackson’s film is a loving tribute, in every way made by a cineola for his fellow fans to cherish. It’s not The Lord of the Rings, but then again, he’s working off a story that doesn’t have quite so much meat on the bones, and it shows as soon as the embellished human relationships constructed before we get to Skull Island wear out and fade away. There’s no doubt that the Kong story is one of the Great American Legends and a piece of our cultural history, even speaking as a Canadian – but for all its poignancy, nobody could mistake the story for being materially complex.

But at its core, the new Kong isn’t so much a remake as it is a faithful adaptation of some of the most iconic moments in cinema. Kong rolling the sailors off the log, Kong unhinging the jaws of a tyrannosaur, Kong reeling in the vine that Ann and Jack are descending – it’s all something to behold this day in age when special effects have reached the saturation point where we can take them for granted as reality and direct our attention to how they advance the story. Merian C. Cooper’s original, as dated as the model work looks today, still holds up because of what the animators made the models do. They didn’t just stomp around trampling and devouring – they had mannerisms.

And then there are the overtly tributary moments, as lovably indulgent as Uma Thurman wearing the Bruce Lee track suit in Kill Bill. I don’t want to spoil them all, but at the same time, I can’t let them go unmentioned. When Carl Denham is escaping in the taxicab, he queries his assistant about which actresses are available as an emergency replacement. “Fay is a size four,” he suggests – but alas, he is told Ms. Wray is doing a film over at RKO. Snicker, snicker. Then there’s the scene he films on the ship between Ann and the actor Bruce Baxter (played by Kyle Chandler, who is wholly new to me and at the same time one of the highlights of the movie). It’s note for note the same scene as the one between Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot, down to the way either Bruce turns his head to the right as he mutters, “And I’ve never been on one with a woman before.” And then there’s the Broadway marquee the night Denham opens his show – an exact reproduction.

It’s very much the same approach that Jackson took with his Tolkien adaptation. The source material is not only treated with reverence – it’s taken as historical fact.

There’s no shortage of movies in the past twelve years that have wanted to be the movie that this King Kong is, chief among them The Lost World and Ang Lee’s Hulk, but as recent as bits and pieces of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. A lot of people have likened it to Titanic: a landmark spectacle that obscures a human element that pales in comparison. A fair comparison, sure, but only if we consider on top of it that the Naomi Watts’ take on Ann Darrow and Andy Serkis’ motion-capture performance as Kong make for what I think is clearly one of the great screen romances. In fact, I prefer the relationship between Ann and Kong here to that of the original film. When you see them skate in Central Park, you’ll know what I mean.

But enough praise for now. What I was most interested in going into the movie was how Jackson’s film would address the primitivist, and perhaps even racialistic assumptions inherent to the the 1933 version’s worldview.

To me, the most curious thing about the ’33 Kong was its morally ambiguous position – indeed, its refusal to comment on what to make of Kong’s ultimate demise. Is it a triumph or a tragedy? We’re never told: the Robert Armstrong Carl Denham enunciates the immortal last line as if it were a proud declaration of his own cleverness, tickled by how conveniently the fall of Kong fit the beauty-and-beast theme he had envisioned all along.

The answer to the triumph-or-tragedy question is left to depend on the attitude of the audience. Is it sympathetic with Denham and company? Or does it plead for an absent mercy when Kong, atop the Empire State Building, cowers in self-defense and wishes the airplanes would just go away so he would be left alone (and alive) with his terrified little Ann? Do we applaud when the monster falls – or is man the monster?

The answer is immeasurably complex, and I’m not going to repeat seventy years of film scholarship to establish my own thesis on the matter – at least, not on this particular December evening. But here’s a primer: it is a distinct possibility that the interpretation of the Kong myth has, since its initial release, been completely turned on its head.

King Kong ’33 presumes a chain of command between all living things, an ordering of the world from the barbaric to the civilized. In a sentence, Kong beats dinosaurs, Kong beats hooting and hollering natives, but the civilized man beats Kong, or does he. The sights to behold on Skull Island are, to quote, things “no white man has ever seen.” Denham treats the island and its inhabitants – first the natives, then the creatures – as subjects of entertainment for developed places where entertainment exists.

You can talk all you want about King Kong as purely escapist spectacle (it is) and heck, even one of the greatest films ever made (it is) – but I can’t fathom how it would be possible for anyone to ignore that its presumptions are inherently colonialist. Being a proud son of the colonies myself, I’m not passing judgment – I’m just telling it as it is. At the extreme, King Kong is spoken of as a metaphor for the black man that steals a blonde beauty, and doesn’t discard her as a human sacrifice like those inadequate native-girl offerings. It’s really not at all a stretch.

The damsel-in-distress archetype is colonial discourse, and is reflected in spades in the pulp adventure fiction of the early twentieth century, most prominent among them the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs. (It’s also deflected in the anti-adventures of Joseph Conrad, which you’ll notice Jamie Bell’s character reading in the Jackson remake.) Back in March I wrote a post about how this comes to the fore in A Princess of Mars, when John Carter travels to the Red Planet and beats back the brutes with the force of compassionate love, which he is capable of and they are not.

Or, to put it in filmic terms – it was beauty killed the beast.

So Kong’s defeat is a triumph to those who see themselves atop a ladder of civilization (or an Empire State Building, for that matter), a position worth defending against the invasive pretenses of an ascending monster. But as a tragedy, the one we sympathize with is Kong, a creature who consistently acts in defense of himself, and in defense of Ann Darrow. The central question, then, is whether or not he has the right to protect Ann so vigourously; whether it is an act of care, or an act of possession. It is, moreover, comparative: how does Kong’s right to Ann compare to that of Bruce Cabot’s Jack Driscoll, who in his initially misogynistic gung-ho masculinity makes him a microcosm of the same beauty-beast dichotomy?

The movie winds up back in New York with Kong a captive, Driscoll a hero and Ann his fiancée. But the last time we see Jack leaves him defeated in much the same way. Nobody really gets the girl, but the girl sure got the ape.

A civil rights movement, a global postcolonial backlash and a Peter Jackson remake later, I posit the modern audience that watches the 1933 King Kong almost invariably errs on the side of tragedy. When Denham announces to his audience that Kong, once a king, comes to the civilized world a captive, there is something deeply ironic about it. Kong cannot be held captive, and he dies on his feet. (Okay, so he dies on his back. But he is on his feet when they shoot him.) In that sense, King Kong is as useful an exposé of primitivist attitudes as it is a celebration, and the work itself tips the balance neither way.

It is the modern sensitivity to the civilized subduing the savage that dominates Jackson’s version, a sensitivity that puts a limit on whether or not it can be done. Observe how the new film differs.

Now the natives aren’t just a scantily-clad ritualistic tribe that lives in huts – they’re snarling, mace-wielding murderer-folk with bad teeth. Like the orcs in The Lord of the Rings, they demand no sympathy because they do not resemble anything like what we would call a human society – they’re clearly monsters, and the sailors have nothing to feel guilty about when they gun them down.

But not so with King Kong. In this one, his love goes requited. (A good thing, too, because nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter like you-know-what.) Maybe it’s Stockholm Syndrome – who knows – but the Naomi Watts Ann Darrow is thoroughly sympathetic and thankful for a creature that, by the end of the movie, turns out to be probably the most human character in the story.

Not that it’s an indictment of man, though, because the same change occurs with the new Jack Driscoll as played by Adrien Brody, now no longer such a man’s-man beast-among-men but a meek playwright thrust into romance and adventure quite against his will. And so this film, like its precursor (let’s not even bother acknowledging the 1976 one, which doesn’t fit into this comparative study), refuses to point fingers and say, “He’s a villain.” There are monsters, yes – the now-inhuman native folk, the tyrannosauri, the arachnids from the Legendary Missing Spider Sequence – but no villains to whom we can assign a face.

Denham is still in many ways reprehensible, yes, but he’s far from villainy: as in the original film, he’s more of an architect of circumstantial misfortune. And Jack Black’s delivery of the last line is telling. Unlike Armstrong, he isn’t smug about it. He says it with awe, wonder and perhaps a tinge of regret. It’s like Fortinbras surveying the bloodbath in Elsinore: the observer in the drama, and the audience outside it, are left with a characteristic aftertaste of terror and pity.

Beauty kills the beast, but man doesn’t really rescue the beauty. It’s the hero who dies, simian as he may be.

Great film, and Wellington Santa Claus has delivered a worthy Christmas present once again. I’d feel very comfortable putting the new King Kong next to my generation’s monster classic, Jurassic Park, for reasons that are not solely alphabetical.

First of all, the tombstone in the graveyard scene has been fixed. Early promotional images such as this one revealed an egregious error – that is, the presumption that Tom Marvolo Riddle’s dead father was also named Tom Marvolo Riddle, which was from the outset more improbable than the transfiguration of a pair of missiles into a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias, and then flatly contradicted by events critical to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Near the end of this trailer there are a few shots from the resurrection in the graveyard (like I said, it shows everything), and the inscription has been corrected.

Much more irritating than anything else – and I suspect this will end up being my greatest annoyance with the finished product when I see it in November – is Dumbledore’s butchered pronunciation of “Beauxbatons”, which is similar to how they pronounce “Baton Rouge” in the drawl of the former Confederate states. Seriously, William the Conqueror died for this? Oh well – I suppose they already neglected to drop the silent T in “Voldemort”, so all bets are off. Now we’ll just have to deal with the premise that a Bulgarian kid learns how to enunciate Hermione’s name but the only one You-Know-Who ever feared stumbles over his French after a century of practice. What would really be upsetting is if the francophone characters do the same.

Like Cuaron’s flying Iceman Dementors in The Prisoner of Azkaban, there are a lot of neat visual inventions on display – Mad-Eye Moodyvision, Sirius Black speaking in the form of the embers in the fire instead of a disembodied head (which makes me wonder what will be done if they keep the scene of Umbridge fumbling about for his presence in Phoenix), and the rippling Jumbotron at the Quidditch World Cup, to name a few. I can see plenty of dynamism befitting the scope of the tale, a pulse that was sorely lacking in the Columbus films. Now that we have a pretty clear idea of the look of the film, the big question mark is the pace.