A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, December 2, 2007

Anyone Have a Can Opener?

I watched most of Tin Man on the SciFi channel tonight, and haven't made up my mind about it yet. The Oz books were what I had as a kid instead of Harry Potter, so I have an abiding affection for them. And I think what Tin Man captures is the strange, dark weirdness of Oz, which in the books was not at all the pretty plastic Technicolor place that MGM made of it. To my mind, the best film version of Oz was Walter Murch's 1985 flop Return to Oz, which was much too dark for the critics, who panned it, or the kiddies, who stayed away from it. It's a brilliant movie, as you might have expected from someone as enormously talented as Murch, a legendary sound man and film editor. It's his only outing as a director, which is sad.

Tin Man is a bit like Return to Oz crossed with Blade Runner, with touches of the Lord of the Rings and (in Neal McDonough's character) Indiana Jones movies. I missed about half an hour of exposition -- mostly about McDonough and the whatever-it-is that's the equivalent of the Cowardly Lion. Still, I have to wonder why so much effort has been put into creating a fantasy story so closely paralleling The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Why not just film one of the previously unfilmed Oz books? When James Joyce retold the story of the Odyssey in turn-of-the-century Dublin, it made perfect mock-heroic sense. But Tin Man takes a story set in one fantasy world and translates it into another fantasy world. Why?
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