BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

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cdnchris
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BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#1 Post by cdnchris » Mon Jan 03, 2011 3:05 am

Enter to win Oscilloscope Laboratories' latest BD/DVD release HOWL, which stars James Franco as Beat legend Allen Ginsberg and will be available in stores and online January 4th. Directed by Rob Epstein (THE TIMES OF HARVEY MILK, soon to be released on Criterion) and Jeffrey Friedman (THE CELLULOID CLOSET), HOWL is a cinematic kaleidoscope - part courtroom drama, part confessional, and part animated psychedelic.

Courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories:

Which two films are your favorite and least favorite literature to cinema adaptations and why? Our favorite answer will receive a Blu-Ray + DVD of HOWL. Please limit responses to three sentences max, and please, only one response per user. A winner will be announced via this thread Tuesday, January 11, so check back!

Please post your response in this thread. Thread will be open until 9 p.m. (PST) January 10th.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#2 Post by matrixschmatrix » Mon Jan 03, 2011 3:20 am

My favorite literature to film translation is Scott's Blade Runner; I love the Dick novel, but the film recognizes something that nearly all adaptations seem to misunderstand, that an adaptation doesn't need fundamentally to be the same work. Blade Runner jettisons nearly every part of Dick's work, including any number of things that work brilliantly in the novel, and creates something new and entirely cinematic from a single thread of the book- yet it feels perversely faithful, and Dick (touring the set before his death) was fascinated and astonished at what was coming out of his material.

For similar reasons, the most irritating adaptation that comes to mind is Zack Snyder's Watchmen- it takes a brilliant work, slavishly adapts as much of it as it possibly can, and seems nearly illiterate and a violation of the source, as it repeats without understanding, and adds less artistry than a motion comic.

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Jean-Luc Garbo
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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#3 Post by Jean-Luc Garbo » Mon Jan 03, 2011 1:21 pm

My favorite would be Iain Softley's Wings of the Dove as it manages to respect the text while being a compelling drama. It doesn't overstate the novel, but instead enhances it to make James' concerns and characters cinematically lucid. Rather than giving us Cliffs Notes on 35mm, the film-makers gives us a novel rendered effectively for the cinema.

My least favorite would Portrait of a Lady as Campion really doesn't seem to have read the novel at all. It misses the point of anything James tried to convey and utterly misrepresents Isabel Archer. It's a confused film with hardly inspired visuals and a cast who deserved much, much better.

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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#4 Post by ezmbmh » Mon Jan 03, 2011 3:11 pm

My favorite would be Huston’s The Dead, which I like for the same reasons I do his Wise Blood adaptation—the way he brings not only the characters and milieus to life, but retains enough of the language and sensibility of the original to make you feel you’re watching something unique and utterly engaging, as you did when you read the books.

My least favorite would be Angel Levine, a thoroughly botched take on one of Malamud’s weaker stories to begin with, making the worst parts—shallow sixties liberalism and a dose of corn—prominent and tanking the language entirely in favor a of a bloated and badly rendered script, Zero Mostel trying too hard to salvage the thing.

Not sure what to do with my third sentence.

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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#5 Post by LloydK » Thu Jan 06, 2011 4:27 pm

Best: Alice in Wonderland (1951 and 1976), one is pretty and the other one pretty dirty.
Worst: Alice in Wonderland (2010), because it's not pretty and 3-D-sploitation is worse than sexploitation.

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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#6 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jan 06, 2011 5:50 pm

Films, adaptation or otherwise, don't get much worse than Martin Ritt's ill-advised prestige pass at the Sound and the Fury, with Yul Brenner quasi-romancing Joanne Woodward's "teenager" while auditioning a half-dozen different accents, none too convincingly southern. A different, desirable depression is produced by Sydney Pollack's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, which besides being one of the grimmest studio films of all time is also one hell of a keen adaptation of Horace McCoy's thin tome-- the additions the film makes improve the general idea and truly encompass what Andre Bazin always called for in filmed adaptations-- fidelity to the spirit of the text, not the letter.

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matrixschmatrix
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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#7 Post by matrixschmatrix » Thu Jan 06, 2011 6:01 pm

(Out of curiosity- and obviously feel free to delete this post if that's appropriate- can we discuss other people's posts here, or is this just for contest entries?)

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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#8 Post by cdnchris » Thu Jan 06, 2011 7:12 pm

You can respond to comments made here in this thread to keep submission posts on their own. After the contest is over I may merge the two threads.

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Close The Door, Raymond
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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#9 Post by Close The Door, Raymond » Fri Jan 07, 2011 9:39 pm

Favorite: The Innocents, Jack Clayton's exquisite 1961 adaptation of Henry James' novella The Turn of the Screw perfectly captures the psychological terror and sensual anxiety that emanates from James' text. Deborah Kerr's performance as a Victorian-era governess is at once subtle yet powerful.

Least Favorite: When Kerr starred in Elia Kazan's self-indulgent dreck The Arrangement, the only haunting mystery there was why the the movie was made in the first place. Based on Kazan's own semi-autobiographical novel, Kerr, Kirk Douglas and Faye Dunaway are just as bad as the bizarre scenes: a stag film with Santa Claus; weirdly comical nude cavorting on a beach; Douglas talking to multiple versions of his character (while nude, playing the piano, strangling himself) and a fight sequence that uses colorful title cards (Crash! Pow!) like the Batman TV series.

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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#10 Post by Wu.Qinghua » Sat Jan 08, 2011 3:20 pm

That's a funny question. I tend to dislike cinematic adaption of well-known books etc, but while working this afternoon I realized that there actually are lots of great literature to cinema adaptions.

Usually I'd nominate Karel Reisz' marvelous take on Alan Silitoe's 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning', but thinking it over today, I'd say Frank Beyer's adaptation of Erik Neutsch' 'Spur der Steine' (The Traces of Stones, GDR 1966) might even be better. I do love those social realist movies about everyday lives of workingmen, and 'Spur der Steine' does not only feature great performances and fine cinematography, which 'SN&SM' also does, but, what is more, offers a far more progressive representation of working women, too. And you can also read it as a reworking of Sturges' 'Magnificient Seven' ...

The worst or at least most disappointing literary adaptation I can remember at the moment was also produced in the GDR. It's Vera Loebner's 'Das Buschgespenst' (GDR 1986), an adaptation of one of Karl May's most interesting novels and the first 'eastern' cinematic adaptation of one of his novels. The book features an fascinating story about smuggling etc. and portrays the living conditions and everyday life of poor artisans, weavers etc. in the mountainous border region of Saxonia around 1900, but Loebner transforms it in a series of lifeless tableaus and even eliminates the male bad guys which results in a beautiful woman representing nearly all evil.

Btw, I have missed Sabu's take on Kobayashi's 'Kanikosen' last year, but I'd really love to see So Yamamura's adaption of the novel (Kanikosen/The Cannary Ship, Japan 1953) to be released on a proper DVD with decent subtitles. How about that?

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Re: BD/DVD Giveaway: HOWL

#11 Post by cdnchris » Mon Jan 17, 2011 2:11 am

Congrats to matrixschmatrix for winning the HOWL Blu-Ray/DVD combo, and thanks everyone for entering this contest with your favorite and least favorite lit-to-film adaptations! Hope we jogged some interesting discussion in the mean time!

matrixschmatrix, please DM us with your mailing address and we'll get your prize to you in a jiffy!

Best,
Oscilloscope Laboratories

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