A. It’s likely that if you care about these things you’ve already seen the first full (non-teaser) trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice.
B. Here is that trailer:
C. What do you think?
D. I think it looks pretty great.
E. Well, I mean, the trailer still has the, I don’t know, rhythms and contours and tropes of, like, quirky indie comedy film trailers—verbal slapstick, slapstick slapstick (I love the bit at 00:27 when the cop knocks Sportello down, but the callback at 1:52 seems like it could squash a punchline), an affected scream, up-tempo soundtrack (although “Don’t Know Much About History” isn’t one of the many, many songs mentioned in the book). But hey, target audience, etc. etc. etc.
F. And I’m sure the target audience here loves to get a taste of Owen Wilson looking vulnerable and sensitive and just very Owen Wilsonish. (I, a target, enjoyed the taste).
G. And apparently Michael K. Williams is in this movie making his Michael K. Williams face.
H. And also: Joanna Newsom is supposedly in the film—both as a character and narrator. She narrates the trailer, but if she’s in it, like, physically, I think I missed that.
I. And we get this:
J. And a New Age cult pizza party, staged in a loose approximation of The Last Supper.
K. And Eric Roberts.
L. And Josh Brolin shouting for pancakes in sloppy Japanese.
M. And guns! Yes, guns in the trailer, audience!
N. And some ass shots to boot, including our man Sportello, prostrate, cowering.
O. I like that the trailer—and I’m guessing the film itself (?)—uses the same neon-noir font that the book did; I thought the cover of Inherent Vice was horrendous, but ultimately made sense.
P. But what I find most fascinating here is how neatly Newsom’s narration sums up the novel’s plot in the first 20 seconds of the trailer, highlighting just how irrelevant the plot is in Pynchon’s novel. Inherent Vice: The Novel eschews plotting in favor of verbal style, mood, and imagery—which makes Paul Thomas Anderson an ideal filmmaker to handle the first (and maybe we should hope only) Pynchon adaptation.
Q. I’m usually pretty wary of film adaptations of big-ell Literature, but Inherent Vice is kind of on the bubble there. It’s a shaggy dog tale, just like the Coen brothers’ classic The Big Lebowski, or Tarantino’s best film Jackie Brown. (When I reviewed the book a few years ago, I brought up Elmore Leonard and Lebowski, along with Chinatown).
R. My big concern is that PTA, like his hero Robert Altman, can get a bit too shaggy. When he’s got a clear trajectory to follow (Boogie Nights; Punch Drunk Love), PTA offers up a deep comic complex humanism. But then there’s that fine mess Magnolia.
S. I loved the last film that Joaquin Phoenix and PTA did together though, 2012’s The Master.
T. And what do we think of Joaquin Phoenix as Doc Sportello? Does he look a little bit, I don’t know, too old? I don’t know. He kind of looks a little bit like a stoned Hugh-Jackman-as-Wolverine here.
U. (That’s not necessarily, like, bad).
V. The trailer makes me want to see the film more than I had wanted to see it before, which was its job, so, like, good trailer, I guess.
Not too different from the one that came out last fall…except some English intertitles. Excited for this one. Maybe this actioner moves Wong Kar Wai one step closer to directing the new Star Wars films?
I don’t know how I missed this—the teaser came out a few weeks ago—but a new Miyazaki is always promising. The Wind Rises is out in Japan in two weeks, out in the rest of the world, who knows when…but I’ve never minded watching his films sans subtitles or dubbing. Read more about The Wind Rises here; read my review of Ponyo, the last Studio Ghibli film that Miyazaki directed.
All of this seems so terribly ill-advised. The book is great—not Faulkner’s greatest, but it has a linear trajectory that I do think is filmable—but this trailer seems to portray a pale imitation of someone else’s vision of what a Faulkner film might look like (no, I don’t know what that sentence means exactly, other than this film looks like a bad riff on Faulkner).
I liked David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas.
I reviewed it here in some detail, but here’s a brief overview:
Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas comprises six sections, each interrupted by the next section (with the exception of the sixth section), and then commenced again in reverse order (a simpler way to think of this might be a schema: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1). Sections 1-6 move forward chronologically and, significantly, each section represents a new literary trend. (Again, perhaps a schema with illustrating examples would work better here; for more detail, check out my review: 1: Melville-2: Modernism-3: Airport novel-4: Contemporary novel (Roth?)-5: Dystopian sci-fi (post-Orwell, shades of PKD)-6: Post-apocalyptic (language games, à la Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker)). In short, Cloud Atlas is an exercise in several genre styles, glommed onto a few ideas cribbed from Nietzsche: eternal recurrence, master/slave relationships, will to power, all that jazz. Ultimately—and more interestingly, I think—Cloud Atlas is an exercise in postmodernism-as-genre, a sort of critique perhaps (intentional or not), brought into even greater relief when one examines Mitchell’s novels Black Swan Green (a coming of age story) and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (a straight-up historical romance), which are, again, genre exercises.
This leads me up to the film adaptation of Cloud Atlas, the long trailer for which dropped today.
I would embed the goddamn trailer, but it’s been blocked on YouTube and other similar sites by Warner Brothers, who apparently have absolutely no idea how publicity works.
You can watch the trailer here.
[Update] Here’s the trailer:
Did you watch it? Okay. I’m gonna riff a little:
I know that trailers have to advertise films to a wide range of potential audience members, and that often leads to overwrought musical cues and lines pulled out of context and big flashing words in all caps, but damn, this is cheeseball stuff. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a subtle book (at times), one that works best when the readers are allowed to do most of the work. The trailer suggests spectacle over nuance, bombast over substance. But again—just a trailer.
Not that the Wachowskis—who are directing and writing and producing (along with Tom Tykwer, whose films Run Lola Run and Perfume I recall enjoying)—-are known for restraint.
And, while I’m bringing up the Wachowskis: They are most famous for their visual inventiveness (these are the guys who did The Matrix), but great looking films don’t necessarily mean much. I mean, the last film they did was Speed Racer (okay, Cloud Atlas looks a lot more restrained than that fiasco, but still, these guys have major problems with storytelling).
Now, based on the trailer, the filmmakers seem to have done some significant rewrites. In Mitchell’s novel, each section (or sections 1-5, at least), exists as a narrative of some kind—fictional narratives, in a few cases. Each protagonist comes to find him or herself echoing or tracing or otherwise repeating or prefiguring the protagonist of another narrative—but there’s always the recognition of the textuality (and hence, metatextuality) to this patterning. Put another way, these are all characters in stories that are awfully familiar to us, and Mitchell strives to make the reader aware of this textuality: it’s a thoroughly postmodern move.
The film seems to connect the characters in two ways: 1, it seems to use actors across separate roles (this could work) and 2, it seems to have characters from previous segments interact with each other across segments. I might be misreading the trailer when it comes to point 2 here, but I think that having characters actively puncture the nested narratives of Cloud Atlas is a bad idea. And, even if I am misreading this, the film clearly imposes a unifying style across the narratives—sure the dystopian sci-fi scenes will have different set dressing, etc., than the Pacific journal narrative scenes—but take note of how all the scenes seem to follow a unified visual sensibility. The joy of Mitchell’s novel is the way he plays with, parodies, adores (etc.) the narrative styles he’s reworking. For example, Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery reads like a bad airport mystery (or at least a mediocre one). I was hoping that the filmmakers would attempt to do something similar with the film—actually play with the concept of genre, actually manipulate and amplify the distinct genre conventions at work in Mitchell’s book. Which, maybe they do. Again, I know: it’s just a trailer.
But it’s an awfully slick, shiny trailer.
Okay, perhaps I’m griping too much. All the characters seem to be there, and the casting doesn’t seem terrible. My curiosity is piqued, admittedly, but mostly because I want to know how the filmmakers will handle the nested narratives (also: how long will the movie be?). In any case, I’m sure this will be one of those movies where people sigh and say, “Yeah, the book is way better.”
There’s a part in William Gaddis’s big novel The Recognitions where Basil Valentine talks about how forged paintings are always outed as fakes over time because they ultimately illustrate not the original genius of the artist, but instead show how the current zeitgeist interprets the artist. Film adaptations of books aren’t painted forgeries, but they are highly susceptible to the same critical limitations that Valentine discusses. We can see this plainly in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo & Juliet, a messy, vibrant, flaky film thoroughly shot-through with the aesthetic spirit of the nineties. I like Luhrmann’s R&J, despite its many, many faults. One of its great saving graces is that it seems aware of its own spectacle—it unselfconciously acknowledges itself as a product of its time, as just one of many, many adaptations of Shakespeare’s deathless work.
Lurhmann has taken a stab at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He’s not the first. Others attempted to turn Fitzgerald’s classic novel of the jazz age into a movie in 1926 (the film is lost), 1949 (there’s a reason you never saw it in high school), and 1974 (I’ll come back to the Redford Gatsby in a moment). Most recently, a 2000 anemic TV production featured Mira Sorvino as Daisy and Paul Rudd as a terribly miscast Nick Carraway. Up until now, high school teachers across the country who wanted to foist an adaptation on their students (and maybe free up a day or two of lesson planning) have had to choose between the 2000 A&E production or Jack Clayton’s 1974 Francis Ford Coppola-penned debacle—this is the one I was subjected to in high school. It features Robert Redford as Gatsby, Sam Waterston as Nick, and Mia Farrow as Daisy, and none of them are terrible, but the movie is dull, overly-reverential of its source material, and heavy-handed. It also looks incredibly dated now, its evocations of the 1920’s jazz age petrified in gauzy ’70s soft-focus shots. It just looks and feels very 1970s.
Judging by its trailer, Lurhmann’s Gatsby is making absolutely no play at all for timelessness. Just as his earlier mashup, 2001’s Moulin Rouge!, essentially uses the Belle Époque as a sounding board for transgenerational spectacle, Lurhmann’s Gatsby looks like another thoroughly interpretative gesture, a hyperkinetic, hyperstylized film that makes no bid at realism. This is what 2012 thinks 1922 should look like (or at least this is 2012’s ideal, shimmering, sexy version of 1922.) Here’s the trailer:
Overwrought, frenetic spectacle is exactly what I would expect from Luhrmann. There’s a transposition of meaning here, where Gatsby’s famous party turns into a rave of sorts, where Daisy’s phrasing of “You always look so cool” takes on anachronistic dimensions. But the trailer seems faithful (if hyperbolic) to images described in the book. By way of comparison, let’s look at the first shot in the trailer, the car full of young black people treating said car as a party scene. Here’s the text:
As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.
“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all. . . .”
Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.
The energy of the scene is expressed—and magnified—in Luhrmann’s shot, but it’s impossible to say yet whether or not the invocation to change expressed in this citation will transfer to film.
It’s also obviously too early to make any pronouncements on the casting, although I’ll submit that you could find a worse Jay Gatsby than Leonardo DiCaprio (who I think, for the record, was great as petulant, whiny Romeo in Luhrmann’s breakthrough film). I’m not sure about Tobey Maguire as Nick Carraway, but there’s a certain, I don’t know, emptiness to him that may work well in our unreliable narrator. My big concern is Carey Mulligan, who I think is very sweet and I will admit to having a mild crush on—is she right for Daisy Buchanan, one of the meanest, most selfish creatures in literature? The other Buchanan, husband Tom, is portrayed by Joel Edgerton with a kind of seething rage here in the clip. Dude looks positively evil—cartoonishly so (which is really saying something, because Luhrmann seems to turn everything into a cartoon). Edgerton’s Tom presents as the glowering obstacle to the pure, positive love between Daisy and Gatsby. And here might be the biggest trip up with the film: The trailer seems to be advertising a love story.
Now, of course reading is an act of interpretation, a highly subjective experience dependent on any number of factors (see also: the opening paragraph to this riff). But good reading and good interpretation is generally supported by textual evidence, and the textual evidence in Gatsby reveals not so much a love story, but a bunch of nefarious creeps and awful liars who ruin the lives of the people around them with little thought or introspection. I mean, really, the principal characters are basically vile people (hence the reason your high school English teacher loved to point out Nick Carraway’s signature unreliability as a narrator—he glosses over so much evil). But again, it’s just a trailer, and trailers are made to make people buy tickets to movies, and people will pay to see a love story. We’ll have to wait for the film to assess Lurhmann’s interpretation. For now, it’s enough to suggest that the trailer achieved what it needed to—as of now, The Great Gatsby is still trending on Twitter. This is buzz; this is what a trailer is supposed to create. And if a byproduct of that buzz is to get more people reading or rereading, that can’t be a bad thing.
Trailer for Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice. Is it weird that books have trailers now? Not sure…
Australian director John Hillcoat’s movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy‘s bleak and beautiful novel The Road finally has a proper trailer as well as (another) release date, October 16th, 2009. Here’s the trailer:
I weighed in on the possible merits (and possible demerits) of a film adaptation of The Road way back in October of last year, back when the movie was planned for a Thanksgiving release (what better time than Turkey Day to watch a story with baby cannibalism?)
The trailer makes the movie look kinda “big”–explosions, way more people than I remember being in the novel, and what appears to be a heavily expanded role for the wife, played by Cherlize Theron. Still. I wanna see this. At the same time, the trailer seems to scream “Go read the book, now!” And you should. It’s great.
Biblioklept 