Speaking of Anse I don't like how he got such a happy ending. The worst thing that may have happened to him was that he broke a sweat. The rest of his family was left either physically or emotionally destroyed. Poor Vardaman didn't get his toy train, Jewel loses his prized horse, Cash loses a leg, Darl is heading toward a psychiatric ward and Dewey Dell is still pregnant. Anse gets a new wife and a new set of teeth and that just seems unfair to me after all that everyone went through.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
James Franco please...
Short story, if I didn't just read the book for the class I wouldn't have had the slightest clue what was going on in this movie. According to IMDB, Matt Rager and James Franco were in charge of "screenplay". What really disturbed me was how the characters would constantly break the forth wall and stare at the audience. These moments just were too intense for a book that seemed to be a little more joking than what his adaptation was going for. Still being a downer, I really didn't like the screen being cut in half because it just looked...bleh. Though from what we saw the movie really did follow the book plot-wise which is pretty good. Every time I think of this film I just pictured Anse smiling with his new teeth and that is something I could live without.
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I would definitely agree that the split screen was a bit confusing, but I personally liked the character's staring at the audience. It was definitely really weird, but I feel like it helped us see the character's in a more personal way, much like we do by reading their narration.
ReplyDeleteAs for Anse unfairly coming out as the only person who didn't lose anything (other than his wife) I would definitely agree that it's wrong. I feel like it's also important to point out that Anse didn't even do anything when they ran into issues along the journeys. His choice to not do anything, however, could also have been a plus since he tends to mess up anything he does.
I really didn't enjoy the scene we saw with Cash at all. I always took that scene to be representative of his refusal to talk openly at the start of the book, like he was forced to say something and that's all he could say. Franco depicted it as more of a short Cash monologue in a very serious way and it really threw me off.
ReplyDeleteYou weren't bowled over by the sight of Anse's brandy-new pearly whites? Didn't he look a "foot taller"?
ReplyDeleteI take a different view on the direct-address narration: this seems like just a more literal manifestation of the voiceover, itself a thoroughly artificial convention (as scenes in real life don't have a narrator's voice hovering in the background). Movies are full of conventions that depart from reality, whether it's cuts from camera to camera, to music swelling underneath a dramatic scene.
And narration in a book is artificial, too, right? Sometimes an author will provide an explanatory frame for narration ("I write this from my jail cell. This is a confession"), where the writing is part of the story. But in _AILD_, we just get these different characters "talking" to . . . whoever? Is this stuff "written"? (Probably not--unsure how literate this crew is.) Are they thinking it? Saying it aloud? Reading their words on the page, without any clear frame for them, isn't all that different than watching a character face the camera and narrate.