Todays’s advice to would-be swipers: don’t nick both the imagery and the words from someone else’s work, or overgrown adolescents on the internet will poke fun at you.
Category: Film Page 5 of 9
Back in the olden days, when I worked for Sherratt & Hughes (a bookshop chain long since gobbled up by Waterstones), we received a delivery of the latest edition of The Bible.
And when I say “latest edition”, I don’t mean it had a new foreword by the author and previously unseen material, but rather it was a trendy modern repackaging, with silvery lettering and skyscrapers on it like the opening of Dynasty (actually, that’s appropriate when you think about all the begetting in the first book). Strangely enough, I can’t seem to find a picture of it online, but you’ll take my word for it, won’t you? Thanks.
The reason I was thinking about this is because Wuthering Heights has recently been reissued in a form that’s deliberately meant to lure in fans of the Twilight books and films, as you can see:
Obviously, I’m not the intended audience for this re-issue, but I don’t really have any great objection to this packaging (mind you, I do think it’s a bit blatant to use the tagline from Coppola’s film version of Dracula, but I suppose it’s only old farts like me who are expected to remember this, not fans of Robert Pattinson). I’m not entirely convinced that readers of Twilight will necessarily enjoy Bronte’s book that much, but it might work for some people, and I suspect the hope is that they’ll have bought it by then and that’s another sale.
But in a way, lasting works or characters are often re-packaged and re-purposed in line with the prevailing mood of the times; take a look at the way that, say, books by Ian Fleming or Charles Dickens have changed over the years (often in line with some related TV or film adaptation). Even Shakespeare’s plays get a frequent re-packaging, and as alluded to above, some vastly older volumes have had some profoundly groovy and hip covers. And – as is the case with Wuthering Heights – there are usually other, less zeitgeisty, editions available.
I’d guess that a lot of the fans of Twilight are fans of stuff like Harry Potter who have grown up (as opposed, of course, to grown-up fans of Harry Potter) and are now looking for something in a similar vein (…) though perhaps with a bit more repressed passion. That’s my suspicion for the popularity of the Twilight stuff, anyway – I’m not lured in even out of is-it-good-or-bad curiosity, as I’m not particularly interested in vampires per se (for example, as much as I enjoyed Buffy, the presence of the v-word in the title was actually rather misleading, given all the other Monsters Of The Week).
And in fact, given the current mood of a large amount of the audience, I’m not in the least surprised to see that Oscar Wilde’s only novel, in its latest screen incarnation, is being advertised thus:
Crafty. And given his own tendency for not-always-entirely-accurate self-promotion, I rather suspect Mr Wilde would have approved.
I’ll freely admit that I haven’t seen this film, but I do like the way the packaging contains a clue as to the demeanour of the main character.
To crack the code, just take a look at the letters in bold in the tagline, and see the word they create…
I should imagine that, by now, you’ve heard Stephen Fry’s podcast on the subject of piracy, copyright, DRM and the like. If not, it’s worth a listen, as it makes some good points and raises some interesting issues which are worthy of discussion.
I point you towards it, not because I’m going to discuss any of the issues within it, but rather because I was thinking that there’s one area of copyright infringement and piracy which rather tends to be overlooked in these discussions, and probably because it has next to no commercial impact; that is, items which are not commercially available. I’m mainly thinking here of things such as radio and TV shows, but it also applies to albums and films to a slightly smaller degree. I can’t claim to have the most wild and esoteric tastes, but I find that certain things I’d cheerfully pay to own are no longer available, due to never being released on CD or DVD or whatever. Examples would be Victor Lewis-Smith’s Radio 1 shows or the first self-titled album by Animal Logic (for some reason, Animal Logic II is available as a download, though its predecessor isn’t).
So, if I want to own these things, and be able to play them whenever I want, the only real route is to see if I can find them online, and then download them there – which invariably means getting them for free and the original creators getting no money. Which, in the case of items such as the above, I’d actually be happy to pay – and as commercial releases are often of higher quality and contain extras which are missing from copies thrown onto the ‘net, I’d certainly welcome the chance to do that (not to mention the conscience aspect of things).
Now, I’m painfully aware that the vast majority of music and film which you can download from t’web is commercially available – new films and CDs are often there to download within hours of release (if not before) – but I have to say that I feel slightly less bad about downloading material which isn’t available in a commercial form; yes, I know it’s copyright infringement in the most literal sense, but much of the argument about this topic seems to focus on the fact that doing so is taking money away from the appropriate parties, which in the case of non-commercial downloads of non-commercially available material, doesn’t apply. To give an example, before there was a full release of On The Hour, a BBC radio series which was both influential and spectacularly funny, many comedy websites and discussion boards would provide links to places where you could download the series. Now that it’s available to buy through the usual routes in its full form, those sites have removed those links, which seems only right and proper.
So, I think this is a bit of an overlooked area, and as one who’s always keen to replace cassettes and VHS tapes wherever possible (let’s face it, mp3s and DVDs just take up less space), I may simply be trying to justify questionable behaviour on my part as a means of enabling my obsessive-compulsive collecting tendencies to be satisfied. But I like to think there’s something worthy of discussion here.
Incidentally, thinking about the non-availability of items which are owned or produced by the BBC led me to wonder if there isn’t a commercial opportunity for a hybrid of iTunes and the BBC iPlayer whereby one can pay a sliding scale fee to access items which have been broadcast but are no longer on iPlayer; for example, 50p to download an mp3 of a radio show which is over a month old (and which isn’t going to be released commercially), £1 for a TV show or documentary, with the prices increasing depending on DRM issues and whether you can download them to keep or just to stream or whatever, and upwards to the point where downloading the stuff just becomes less attractive than buying the DVD.
I appreciate that the BBC has to balance its public service and commercial thinking, but given that they sell millions of DVDs each year, I would have thought there was some way to ensure that people could get to listen to the Afternoon Play they thought sounded interesting, or see the episode of Mastermind in which someone they knew was a contestant, even if they took place outside the ‘iPlayer timespan’, for a fee which is small enough to be appealing to a punter but useful enough to justify the service.
Just a thought…
Ah, The Onion. Often imitated, even more often embedded.
… but I’ve recently been having a look at Making Of, and finding it both interesting and informative.
Granted, I’ve mainly been looking at the stuff about screenwriters, but there seems to be a lot of other stuff from people who know all sorts of useful stuff about the making of films.
Have a look, why don’t you?
I recently saw most of (not all of) M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs again, and it set me to thinking.
Not about the film itself, really – I saw it in its entirety a few years ago, and was rather let down by the ending, with (spoiler alert) a substance that covers two-thirds of the Earth being something that galaxy-travelling aliens respond to as ’twere acid – but rather the amount of foreshadowing in the story.
To be fair, the semi-rewatch meant that I picked up on references to the aliens not liking being near water which I hadn’t registered in my initial viewing, but it also made me realise just how much of the film is spent setting up elements which will pay off in the final confrontation of the film; the last words spoken by the main character’s wife, the daughter’s tendency to leave half-drunk glasses of water around the family home, and things like that.
I’m not knocking this at all – in fact it made me notice that the ‘violent reaction to water’ on the part of the aliens was less deus ex machina than I’d initially believed – as I think that foreshadowing is terrifically important in a story; as most modern writers have the luxury of being able to finish their work before handing it in (since there are now limited venues in which to publish serials Dickens-style), I think it’s nice if they go back and slot in a reference or two to something that’s coming later on, and which only becomes apparent as such when the revelation is made. One of my favourite examples of this is the original novel of The Shining, where Stephen King sets up the means by which Jack Torrance will die (whilst I like the photo at the end of the film version, the sudden death of Torrance struck me as almost a bit too convenient, whereas in the book it made perfect, logical sense).
As a reader or viewer, I find this both gratifying (as it flatters my intellect that yes, I spotted that reference to it earlier on), and also reassuring – there are a number of TV shows which I’ve stopped watching because I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that the creators were just making things up as they went along, and I wasn’t convinced that the final destination was going to be worth the journey (most notably Lost, who lost me with the end of the first season; I’m reliably informed by people I know that it’s coming together and gathering steam as it approaches its end, after some draggy, not-moving-stuff-forward bits of earlier seasons, but I’ll wait until it’s all done and get their final verdict on whether it’s worth the trouble or not).
I think it was the writer Chekhov who stressed the importance of foreshadowing by saying that if you have a gun put on the mantelpiece in Act 1 of a play, it should be fired by the end of Act 3. I think there’s a lot of truth to this, and as I say, I admire it when writers are able to set up later events in a way that they remain both inevitable and surprising.
But…
Well, the thing is, life doesn’t often seem to be this neat, does it? It’s fairly rare for all the random and unexplained events in our lives to suddenly become infused with meaning later on, whether it’s mere hours or whole years further down the line. Whilst I’d love to claim that the arc of my life is holographic or symphonic, I think that would mean me ignoring the enormous amount of things in my life that just seem to happen.
People often say that ‘everything happens for a reason’, and I think that’s true insofar as it means that current events are caused by previous happenings, but not that everything that happens has some ultimately enlightening or positive outcome; a man may drive his car into a bus queue because he has a heart attack at the wheel or because he’s been drinking, but for the families of people killed or injured in that sort of event, the ‘reason’ it happened has to be ascribed to bad fortune or human folly, not to some kind of over-arching pattern to our lives, and a sense that if we just live long enough everything we’ve ever seen or heard or done will come together in a beautiful climax of meaning and insight which will make every second of loss or seemingly random tragedy seem worthwhile.
So from thinking that Signs was a bit lacking in foreshadowing, I actually shifted to thinking that it had gone too far the other way, making the whole of the central character’s life into a run-up to the events of the film’s final act. Which would be fine, except that all the events had conspired and converged, and then he was still alive at the end, and … what? What now? His whole life had effectively been leading up to that one time and place, and now it had passed, he had to carry on living, which is a less a climax than an anti-climax (which would be the word I’d used to describe the end of the film, really – it builds really well, but doesn’t seem to have a worthy ending).
On the other hand, it could well be that it’s my age that’s a factor here; I’m 38, and whilst I can look back on my life and think that a lot of things which seemed horrific and terrible at the time have actually nudged me along the path to where I am now, and I’m more very happy and aware of my good fortune in life, there are still an awful lot of stray and unresolved plot threads; though perhaps as I grow older they’ll recede in the memory and seem so unimportant that I’ll just forget about them, and find that in my old age I can really only recall the causes and effects of my life that seemed to match with its overall narrative, as if my life had been one single and seamless story.
The reason I mention age is because it does occur to me that, in quite a few of the older people I’ve met in my life, there’s a sense of “I wouldn’t worry too much” which is almost akin to that of a child (and indeed may be why children often seem to get on well with their grandparents), but not an adult. The question of whether a current problem is likely to be something that matters to us in five years’ time is one which tends to put things in perspective, and it may well be that, as one approaches the age at which HM The Queen may be gearing up to send you a telegram, there’s an increased sense of perspective, and that, in its way, makes everything you’ve seen or said or done feel like part of a cohesive story. I guess the only way for me to see if this is the case is to grow old, which means living, which was part of my plan anyway.
Besides, I thought Unbreakable was a far better film.
I’ve often thought that John Higgins is a rather under-exposed comic writer and artist; not necessarily under-rated, as people who know of his work tend to admire it, but it’s not as if the release of a new item from him is likely to be made at the San Diego or Chicago conventions, which is a pity, as he’s a good solid artist (and a particularly skilled painter), and a friendly chap (I say this on the basis of having met John at a convention in about 1986, where my fanboy excitement meant I gabbled and talked nonsense, but he was very indulgent of my drivel).
Anyway, the first 22 pages of Razorjack, which he both wrote and drew, can now be seen for free online here – it’s a PDF file, so you’ll need to have appropriate PDF-reading software – and I think you’ll agree it’s worth a look.
And no, despite Hollywood’s current fondness for adapting comics to film, it was not the source material for that Russell Mulcahy film about a killer Boar.
In a post last week I pointed out a couple of films vying to be Least Necessary Sequel, 2009, but don’t fill in your voting card just yet – check out this contender!
Clearly, this contest ain’t over until … um, the multi-lingual copyright warnings start to appear on your TV screen.