DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Good film that, and his accent/delivery was superbe
Ridley Scott's next film is Brave New World
- Thread starter Lisarocket
- Start date
Good film that, and his accent/delivery was superbe
gnoriac
lowly seer
Yep, absolutely, yet of the Two Great Dystopias, 1984 has always attracted far more attention, perhaps as being a convenient dig at the Soviet Union in cold war days.
Looking forward to this, I'd rate Ridley Scott's record as very mixed, but having made Blade Runner and Kubrick being dead, I reckon he's about the best one for the job.
Arse it was. Had my lady in stitches, bru.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
Well I enjoyed it. Was it that awful then?
I guess if you know the accents it sounds bizarre. He did a fair job, TBH, but after being surrounded by jaapies for years even I thought it sounded a bit off. Actually a very hard accent to get right.
edit: why do films about Africa need a white interlocutor? Like the Last King of Scotland. They manufactured a story with a white fella so that the audiences would swallow it. Nice white guy, bad black man.
Yes, unfortunately the feature film made of 1984 with John Hurt and Richard Burton was rubbish. Let's hope a better job is done with Brave New World.
Haven't seen it for a while but remeber it as being rather chilling. What was so terrible about it?
Yes, I watched it quite recently and quite liked it.
Lisarocket
In bed with me dinner
I remember my Dad letting me stay up late to watch this when i was a kid
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3536993421073315692&q=brave+new+world+%2B+1980&ei=rz9JSLGNF5bAigKG8sW9DA&hl=eN
Edit: I watched the first 10 mins or so of this today for old time's sake and ended up watching the whole thing
I really enjoyed it
The casting of Bernard was good in it...imo
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3536993421073315692&q=brave+new+world+%2B+1980&ei=rz9JSLGNF5bAigKG8sW9DA&hl=eN
Edit: I watched the first 10 mins or so of this today for old time's sake and ended up watching the whole thing
I really enjoyed it
The casting of Bernard was good in it...imo
rogue_lettuce
Well-Known Member
There's already a Brave New World film out there, with Leonard Nimoy in. Should be interesting to see which is better (my money's on the old one)
I could go on and on about that but it would be a thread derail. Briefly:
It misses some important things which are in the book, eg the bit where Winston Smith tells O'Brien that if the Brotherhood demanded it, he would throw acid in a child's face. This is later played back to him while he's being interrogated.
Poor sense of Oceania being at permanent war, apart from a few trucks with extras in tin hats. No real sense of how Oceanic society is becoming completely inscrutable, as different to the modern day as that of the Incas or Aztecs (no accident that Orwell chose terraced pyramids as the ministries' various headquarters.) Check out the last five minutes of Istvan Szabo's film Mephisto if you want to see something similar done well.
Burton isn't well directed either IMO. He was better in an earlier confessor role as the shrink in Equus
Thinking about it it was rather about the personal at the expense of the political. The book had the breadth of vision to examine both.
Barking_Mad
Non sibi sed omnibus
Huxley's Brave New World Revisited makes an interesting accompaniment to the original.
SpookyFrank
Don't swallow the cap
Quite. There's plenty of scope in the book for a director to create some over-the-top special effects laden future world as a setting, but the most important thing to get across is the ideas and the characters, things which are all too often buried under mountains of CGI and forgotten about these days; especially by Scott and his ilk.
And wasn't the whole point of Bernard's character that he's shorter and less beautiful than his fellow alphas and thus gets excluded? In which case casting Dicaprio is a bit like casting Rhys Ifans to star in a remake of Raging Bull...
Cor... ta.
It's probably 20 years since I read BNW for the second time... and it seemed really thin.
Orwell may have been a journalist. But I concluded Huxley was a mere pamphleteer. It's no coincidence that people tend to get, like, really into him, when they're about 15 - and especially when they're as posh as he was.
Which makes my proposal that Zardoz is - because of its tackiness - a decent version of BNW (or rather of the considerable intersection between BNW and The Time Machine) the more plausible
chainsaw cat
Tea. Biccies. Happy now?
Yeah, baby!
chainsaw cat
Tea. Biccies. Happy now?
Cor... ta.
It's probably 20 years since I read BNW for the second time... and it seemed really thin.
Orwell may have been a journalist. But I concluded Huxley was a mere pamphleteer. It's no coincidence that people tend to get, like, really into him, when they're about 15 - and especially when they're as posh as he was.
Which makes my proposal that Zardoz is - because of its tackiness - a decent version of BNW (or rather of the considerable intersection between BNW and The Time Machine) the more plausible
Don't be so ridiculous. The both of them were reporting from the edge of what was new.
You and I have the luxury of criticising them against our own backdrop - in my case, the 80s onwards.
Can anyone argue against a position where both of them were disturbingly close to the mark?
I'd welcome even a crapulous fillum of BNW, if it pointed in the same direction as the novel
Having said that, there's no way a director of any calibre could put the page on the screen and get away with even a 15 certificate.
Both books, flawed though they are, need to be revisited IMHO about every 2 or 3 years as you grow older.
I was not arguing with their analysis.
I was being bitchy about Huxley's writing.
And having watched an hour and 43 minutes of the BBC adaptation my opinion is confirmed. Also, my realisation that Huxley was lazy because of coming from the family of Huxlies.
It reinforces my working definition of class - additional to, but possibly more significant in this century than, the relation to the means of production:
- Working class: "no-one will ever listen to what I say, so why bother OR may as well be Angry Incoherent Prole";
- Middle-class: "if I try really hard, people may listen";
- Aristo: "if I say it, they will listen".
Prediction: Scott will go heavy on the Shakespeare.
chainsaw cat
Tea. Biccies. Happy now?
Huxley was anything but lazy.
Read the doors. That took an effort man.
If not for his googly eyes he would have been dead in the trenches anyway, he spent his life trying to make up for that.
Work ethic through guilt.
We think we have a war to spur us on politically?
Ha!
Read the doors. That took an effort man.
If not for his googly eyes he would have been dead in the trenches anyway, he spent his life trying to make up for that.
Work ethic through guilt.
We think we have a war to spur us on politically?
Ha!
Oh, I have.
Again: he wasn't lazy in his analysis.
He was lazy in his craft, as a writer.
They're completely separate. Not to speak of story-telling creativity, which I'm thinking (after a bottle of wine) is a third, distinct, feature of a book.
chainsaw cat
Tea. Biccies. Happy now?
I was talking about his research.
And his balls (as a writer) in engaging with the trench veterans, in person, and still claiming to have something to say in the 1920s about the state of the world.
Come to think of it, he was perhaps trusting us, the readers, to digest his analysis and letting the craft of the writer go hang. He did think he was dying after all.
Then again, Grey Eminence. No trust of the reader there. Beaten over the head with it more like.
Hmmm. May have to re read.
And his balls (as a writer) in engaging with the trench veterans, in person, and still claiming to have something to say in the 1920s about the state of the world.
Come to think of it, he was perhaps trusting us, the readers, to digest his analysis and letting the craft of the writer go hang. He did think he was dying after all.
Then again, Grey Eminence. No trust of the reader there. Beaten over the head with it more like.
Hmmm. May have to re read.
And I wasn't, then, OK? I still say that whatever the quality of the content, the expression was clunky and polemical.
Meanwhile, I'm still watching the BBC adaptation - and loving the fact that teachers and journalists are betas, while DJs are gammas
I remember my Dad letting me stay up late to watch this when i was a kid
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3536993421073315692&q=brave+new+world+%2B+1980&ei=rz9JSLGNF5bAigKG8sW9DA&hl=eN
Edit: I watched the first 10 mins or so of this today for old time's sake and ended up watching the whole thing
Me too
Epsilons (hoodies) and Deltas (baseball caps).
Prescient filmmaking
Watch it.
Gromit
International Man of Misery
Read Jim Morrison and his band?
Or the book the took their name from? The Doors of Perception.
