*
Beautiful photos of beautiful libraries around the world.* When I went to watch
El laberinto del fauno (
Pan's Labyrinth), I came out from the theater feeling deeply disturbed. I was sad because of the outcome of the story and also deeply satisfied because of the movie itself as a whole. The mix was unbearable. Really. The movie was --is-- magnificent and bittersweet and I chose to read it as if the fantastic bit was real or I would've broken down. And I couldn't do that; we were in public, I had a reputation to mantain, and I had to drive --I'm pretty much certain
telrunya didn't know the way back. >.>;;
Anyway, I hadn't felt that sense of completion with a movie --specially a fantasy movie-- until I went to watch
Stardust yesterday. This time I came out from the theater quite happy and with the same sense of completion I felt with
El laberinto... And happy, totally happy. A wide, stupid grin on my face included.
The adaptation from book to big screen is one of the best ones I've seen, fantasy-wise; it's up there with
The Last Unicorn, slightly above
The Princess Bride.
They changed bits, of course, but they took the backbone of the story and kept the magic. The esence is there, all of it. Despite the missing characters and the missing scenes, you don't feel like you've been cheated down an explanation, like in, let's say, the Harry Potter movies. Like the infamous missing Marauder Map explanation in PoA, for example. (Nevertheless, I still think this is the one that works best as a movie so far. Go figure.)
I've been told that the HP movies are done just for the fans that had already read the books, but I strongly disagree with that argument. Maybe mainly because when I go to the theater, I want to go watch a sequence of scenes stitched together to tell a story, not some scenes extracted directly from the primary source just put in chronological order, specially if that have problems flowing together to tell a story. (See a pattern there?)
In an adaptation --in a perfect world (mine, anyway)--, there'll always be the need to take things out or add them, but it's important that they make sense. That at the end, the final product make sense and stands by itself. With the probable exceptions to nods at the original source, as in-jokes. But if they disrupt the flow of the narration, the editor has every right to say "bye, bye".
Stardust The Movie seems to come from my perfect world. For example, they take the right time at the beginning to explain what's necessary for us to understand about the hero, where he comes from and what task he takes. And then let's move on to the action. All the information we need it's displayed on the screen either visually or as dialog that does not feel like infodump at all.
In short, if you like fantasy, you must watch this.
If you don't, just remember the book's author is the one
who said, "I suspect that world peace and harmony would come about in weeks if people just got to put pandas on their laps every few months. Honest."
He's also the cat person who
got a dog after rescuing it from a life of neglect.
I could go on and on, but I'm hungry and the food is (finally) ready. So let's wrap it up: Mr Gaiman is awesome. Period. <3 */total fangirl*