william_miller

I feel the need to point this out:

A woman and her daughter had walked into our theater in the mid-afternoon; they looked about at the posters and banners and whatnot. The woman saw the Chronicles of Narnia banner that hung above our utensil island.

"Do you want to see that?" she asked her daughter.

The daughter, somewhere in that last shift of puberty, about to finally crest into full adulthood, said "yeah, it looks good!"

Then the mother noticed a King Kong poster up on a wall.

"What about King Kong?"

"No... it's just so long!" the daughter replied.

Now, Narnia is 2:45 minutes, with about ten minutes of the movie being credits, So there's 2:35 of actual picture.

Kong is 3:07. Seventeen-twenty minutes of credits. That brings the running time to 2:50~2:47.

TWELVE MINUTES OF ACTUAL DIFFERENCE. But nobody ever remarks about Narnia being quite a long film -- probably because it's right around the 2:20 length that most people accept as a "full" movie.

What I find funny about that is that Kong simply feels faster than Narnia. It feels like a lot of wrong choices were made in Narnia, in terms of how to pace the piece, where to concentrate the early parts of the book and where to let full developments roll out. Kong, on the other hand, has everything shoved under the hood -- so many characters, only so much time. The only slowness came with Jamie Bell and Evan Parke -- probably because we don't get a real introduction to these characters, and never establish a legitimate depth the way, say, Lumpy the Cook gets.

I feel like gushing about the brilliance of Lumpy: he knows much more than he lets on, but he's still somewhat of an idiot. Thanks to both Lumpy and Kong, I think Andy Serkis has become one of my favorite actors, period.

And that's where Narnia fails. The White Queen is evil... why? Why do we give a shit Edmund has been captured? He's shown really as a kid who's held down. Whoo fucking hoo.

I think I just had an epiphany on why the movie failed so very much for me: it leaned on the book. It leaned really fucking hard. I've discovered that generally the bigger the fan of the book, the more a person was okay to look over the shortcomings of the movie and consider it really well done. I can't blame Andrew Adamson for leaning on the book; it's his first live-action feature, and when it's an adaptation of a beloved book, you might as well try to wrap it around the book as much as possible. But you can never fit everything, and in fact, you will always lose a whole lot. So you're fucked unless you step back from it.

That's kind of what Peter did; if he had tried to actually wrap Kong around the original '33 version, then it would have been horrible. 90 minutes, and we'd be lost, confused on how someone could have made something like that.

But he didn't. He, Fran, and Phillipa set out and decided to make Kong the way they wanted it to be seen. Extend what he always wanted to see more of. Fuck whatever's already down, what's already in the books -- a vision is a vision, and compromise is only negotiable for the health of the story and the characters. Peter Jackson took a step back from the 1933 Kong, and said "well, I'd like to do this and that,", and he went and did it. On Lord of The Rings, he did the same thing. He looked at the books, and said "well, I suppose we could move Frodo and Sam's story from the Two Towers to Return of The King, because then we kind of lose them for movie three if we stay close to the book". And, dramatically, cinematically, it worked much, much better. There was a roundness to Frodo and Sam and Gollum's final leg of the quest, a plumpness of drama and development and just pure good storytelling. And it would've been shoved into Two Towers if they stuck close.

Another good example of how to work with a movie that could have certain length, Disney? Watch Harry Potter And The Goblet of Fire. Understand that a good 50% of the book is not neccessary to the continuing story of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and the rest of the Hogwart's faculty and studentry. What's most important are Harry, Ron, Hermione, Sirius Black, Dumbledore, Snape, and Voldemort. These are the six characters who must have as full a role in a film as possible. And above all, it has to center around Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Voldemort. Just as LoTR had Frodo, Sam, Gollum, and Aragorn as emotional centers. Just as Kong has Ann, Carl, Jack, and Kong. Instead, Narnia gave us all the kids, two beavers, a lion, and a queen with no actual motivation to turn people into the stone other than she just can.

But, anyway -- Goblet of Fire removes the classwork, removes everything but the Tri-Wizard tournament, The Yule Ball, and the Return. That's it. If anything in the book didn't strictly involve that, it was kicked aside.

And you know what?

It's another film that's as long/longer than Narnia, but feels shorter.

C'mon, Disney; you got it right once in Hitchhiker's, why did you mess up Narnia? I remember when I read this at like 7 years old and having much more epic images of things like Aslan's death.

(darthspielberg believes that Narnia may have "Harry Potter" syndrome; the first two or so will be the lesser of the movies, mostly because they have to introduce so much. But seeing as the first few Narnia books work a lot better than the first few Harry Potter books, I think I have to put the comparisons more towards the middle Potter books and Lord of The Rings; they are pretty fabulous opening books, if a little random at times.)

Wow. What a way to rant off the New Year.

In happier news, I bought Don't Tell A Soul and ...The Goblet of Fire soundtracks off iTunes earlier today. I love the Waltzes -- and I already loved The Replacements.

But I didn't expect "Do The Hippogriff" to be so... good.