Lucius Shepard makes me laugh!
Al Jackson
so right on the money!
His introduction to Fellow Ship of Ring made me fall out of my chair,
his capsule assessment ofmodern fantasy sword and sorcery fiction is a
hoot. (Yes he liked the film.)
His take on the current state of the SF film, which is also an
introduction is better said than I have seen anywhere. (And yes he
kind /of sort of liked Spider Man.)
Check out his site.
Extracted from:
http://www.electricstory.com/reviews/lsreviews.asp
"In the midst of viewing Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man I became
concerned that I’d misplaced a Safeway coupon guaranteeing fifty
cents off on a Healthy Choice dinner, but after a thorough search I
found it crumpled in my shirt pocket and glanced up in time to catch
another shot of Spidey (Tobey Maguire) swinging off through digital
Manhattan. This might indicate that I was uninvolved with the film,
and I admit such is the case; but then unless you are—for
whatever reason—still given to thumb-sucking Spider-Man is not a
movie that requires concentrated attention, since the large majority
of its audience are familiar with the story and familiar also with its
brand of visual pyrotechnics, its generic style of narration, and,
indeed, with its every particular. One does not attend such a movie
with any greater expectations than that one will see what one
anticipates seeing. The entertainment industry, publishing included,
has retooled itself so as to provide us with an infinite feast of
comfort food, and Hollywood, its most conservative arm, has decided
that by churning out remakes, rehashes, and franchise properties, they
expose themselves to less financial risk than were they to offer their
audience even a feeble intellectual challenge. Dozens of comic books
are currently in development. Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Fantastic
Four, Superman, Batman, Daredevil (starring Ben Affleck—can
anyone explain why this guy has a career?), Iron Man, and others more
obscure, projects that range from the intriguing—Ang Lee’s
The Hulk, featuring the fine Australian actor Eric Bana—to the
off-putting—Hellblazer, with Nicolas Cage slated to portray the
cool, cynical anti-hero John Constantine, a casting choice
that’s rather like trying to pass off a pound of pork sausage as
filet of sole.
Thanks to this policy of intellectual debasement, genre film fails to
reflect the rich potentials embodied by the science fiction field.
Despite occasional Great Leaps Forward like Kubrick’s 2001, the
status quo is God. So it is that franchises like Star Wars and The
Matrix (both, in essence, comic books) will continue, as will the
strip-mining of Philip K. Dick’s legacy, the extraction of his
basic ideas and the tossing aside of the unique sensibility that made
his work valuable. The latest of these pictures, Spielberg’s
Minority Report with Tom Cruise, appears to transform a clever albeit
minor Dick story into a higher tech version of Logan’s Run.
Inimical space travelers will proliferate—Predator types and
big-eyed Roswellian grays a la James Cameron’s upcoming Brother
Termite—and so will creepy space relics and disasters
precipitated by extraterrestrial sources. We’ll have the odd
low-budget film that strays from these parameters, but basically
that’s what lies in the filmic future, even though the actual
future promises to be so much more complex.
With the development of computer graphic imaging, all that prevents
the studios from tackling stories previously deemed unfilmable, like
Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama, are their greed and stupidity,
qualities that, however docile the audience, will eventually sabotage
their marketing tactics. There are some terrific properties
languishing in development, but it’s probably a blessing that
many of these—an example, Tom Hanks as Gulliver Foyle in The
Stars My Destination—die aborning. It may be that Bester’s
story could not be sufficiently dumbed down to make its filming
feasible. The dumbing down of character and story, you see, has become
a requisite for most green-lighted projects. It’s been brought
to my attention that a major selling point written into a treatment
for a film based on a Disneyworld ride, Pirates of the Caribbean, was
the assurance that the picture would contain no subplots and no depth
of characterization. Thus it is that we are doomed to endure at least
another decade of George Lucas’ dotage, Stephen
Spielberg’s crass, simplistic humanism, Cameron’s
megalomania, Ridley Scott’s opulent vacancy, and the like. But
the day is coming when a kid with a credit card will be able to walk
around carrying a movie studio on his back, and when that day arrives,
it’s probable that some of the great science fiction stories
will be filmed imaginatively and lovingly by young men and women
outside the system. Perhaps then we will see a movie version of, among
various possibilities, Neuromancer. I suspect the idea of filming
Gibson’s book is low priority for whoever owns the rights. After
all, they might say, the high concept trappings of the book have been
done to death in dozens of films, most of them trashy. That whole
Cyberpunk thing . . . it’s so last millennium! They don’t
get that what makes Gibson’s book compelling is the
storytelling, the dark energy that illuminates his setting. But given
the advent of new technology, I’m certain someone will get it,
and they will make the movie and it will be markedly more successful
than any of the imitations that have already been mounted before the
cameras.
Think about the stories the studios are capable of telling nowadays.
At the top of my list would be Le Guin’s The Left Hand of
Darkness. Then Disch’s Camp Concentration; Stephenson’s
Snow Crash; Effinger’s When Gravity Fails; Aldiss’
Helliconia Spring; Zelazny’s Lords of Light; Bear’s Blood
Music; Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer; Simmons’ Hyperion.
Anyone reading this could in a few minutes generate an entirely
different list that would be every bit as worthwhile. Of course when
you think about whom the studios might cast in these
movies—Afflecks and Cruises ad nauseum—perhaps it’s
better to wait for that kid carrying the studio on his or her back.
In the meantime, we have George Clooney remaking Solaris, Mel Gibson
staring aghast at a crop circle, and the endless Sequel-O-Rama."
-- Lucius Shepard
Chuck Stewart
news:fa9de496.02063...@posting.google.com:
> I love Shepard's film essay site. I sometimes laugh out loud, he seems
> so right on the money!
And a little out of date, apparently.
"Rendevous with Rama" is in production...
--
Chuck Stewart
"Anime-style catgirls: Threat? Menace? Or just studying algebra?"
Al Jackson
> aa...@flash.net (Al Jackson) wrote in
> news:fa9de496.02063...@posting.google.com:
>
> > I love Shepard's film essay site. I sometimes laugh out loud, he seems
> > so right on the money!
>
> And a little out of date, apparently.
> "Rendevous with Rama" is in production...
Wow! Well... I had known it was in the works
... for a long time.
Faithful to the Clarke novel?
If so , amazing!
I find that hard to believe!
Chuck Stewart
> Wow! Well... I had known it was in the works
> ... for a long time.
The development history is on Corona.
> Faithful to the Clarke novel?
Clarke is involved and, when last I heard, was happy with it so
far.
> If so , amazing!
> I find that hard to believe!
http://www.rendezvouswithrama.com/
2004 release date.
Morgan Freeman starring.
All-CGI... no human actors.
I'd like to hear Freeman voice acting as Norton :)
As to quality... could be cool.
But since they have no film cameras and no actors, there'll be no
"filming started today" or "filming wrapped today" notices.
You might say the film is all post-production :)