May 05, 2005
An e-mail to Yen about Michael Winterbottom's Code 46, which we both just saw for the first time over the past few days:
Yeah, I was pretty sure you'd love it. For the first hour or so, I was thinking this might be Winterbottom's best film yet. It's not, in the end, but it's definitely up there. I think the one big flaw of the film is when Tim Robbins says "and then I fell in love with you." There's never any evidence that he's really in love with her, and it would have been more powerful if the word had been uttered for the first time by Samantha Morton, near the end. And wasn't the love scene at the end amazing? Actually, when you think about it, it's actually a rape scene - albeit the most romantic rape in cinema history.
Did you watch the deleted scenes? It's really interesting - you can tell they just used the production audio for them, completely uncleaned/unmixed. It completely changes your perception of what you're seeing - the scenes, which look as good as the rest of the film, nonetheless seem very amateurish. All because of the audio. Maybe we need to budget more money to sound mixing on all of our upcoming projects. Hmmm, I think I might write about this on my blog!
And so I did.
I'm very much looking forward to Winterbottom's upcoming adaptation of Lawrence Sterne's Tristam Shandy, which, rather than strictly adapting an unadaptable novel (widely regarded as the first self-referential postmodern piece of literature), seems to be taking the spirit of the source material and running with it (and gaining a new title, A Cock And Bull Story, in the process). The screenplay was written by Winterbottom's frequent collaborator, Frank Cottrell Boyce, who I recently decided I should pay much more attention to after reading this charming interview. I'm always quite interested in writers adapting material in untraditional ways, as Boyce did with The Claim (based on Hardy's The Mayor Of Casterbridge) as well.
I've a post on a very specific (if speculative) example of a non-literal literary adaptation in the pipeline. For now, taking a cue from Matt who took a cue from GreenCine, let me too recommend Nicholas Rombe's new blog Digital Poetics. Of particular interest to me: his very first post, concerning editing outside of traditional juxtaposition. That, and his mistakist cinema post.
Posted by David Lowery at May 5, 2005 06:24 PM
Comments
That's a great interview with Boyce. What a witty fellow. A definite dinner party candidate! I should try compiling a list of people I wanna invite in the future and ask them if I ever run into them.
Posted by: Yen at May 5, 2005 10:00 PM
I loved the mistakist cinema post.
Posted by: Matt at May 6, 2005 10:16 AM