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robotech_masterWell, today my parents came up for a visit, and to be impressed at my nice clean room. I spun a Jack's supreme pizza (pepperoni, sausage, onions, green peppers, with olives & mushrooms added by me) on the pizza machine, they brought salad, applesauce, and fig newtons, we enjoyed the dinner a good deal.
After lunch, we watched the recent British production of The Colour of Magic (which should actually have been called The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic since it adapted both books into a two-part movie).
I was quite impressed by it, I must admit. It did leave a lot of stuff out, some of which I wished I could have seen, but I knew going in that it would have to cut liberally in order to fit two books into three hours.
David Jason was a marvelous Rincewind, managing to play all facets of the character to the hilt. Sean Astin was every bit as good a Twoflower as he was a Samwise Gamgee. (When you think about it, Twoflower is very much the anti-Sam—instead of getting his companion out of trouble with his cleverness, he gets him into trouble with his naiveté.) Granted, the original conception of Twoflower was the stereotypical Japanese tourist, but perhaps they were afraid they might get accused of racism if they cast an Oriental actor. (And hey, maybe Twoflower is actually most closely related to the McSweeneys. :) And Pratchett made his expected cameo.
As usual, Tim Curry was fiendishly clever as a clever fiend, Christopher Lee did a great job as the voice of Death (for all that he only had half a dozen lines or so), and the rest of the cast was also solid. I was hugely impressed by the actor (in an unbilled cameo) they cast as the Patrician. It was such a perfect coup of casting that I'm reluctant to reveal his name even here (though you can easily google it, of course).
That leads me into another interesting thing about the movie: the changes that were made from the book. The most obvious is that the overweight, candied-jellyfish-munching Patrician from the print version of the book is replaced by the terrifying, terrier-toting tyrant of later books. But there are a number of others.
Off the top of my head, the biggest is that the Chief Librarian actually has a fairly large part in the movie in his pre-ape appearance. He's depicted as a rather simian little man already, inclined to saying things like "don't monkey with it" or "the Octavo's gone ape," and though my recollection of the book is hazy, I suspect he was given that role to consolidate the actions of a number of other characters so as to save on casting. It's a little disappointing, as the man appears to be in no way as clever, competent, or (compared to the rest of the wizards) sane as the orangutan version of the Librarian in later (b)ooks, and the fact that you never got to meet the librarian in his human aspect in the books was, for me, one of the most interesting parts of the character.
Another noteworthy change is that they actually stuck in dialogue addressing the fact that Rincewind had lied about Cohen back in Ankh-Morpork, after they meet the real one. In the book, I don't think that was ever addressed; I suppose we're to assume Twoflower had forgotten about the faux Cohen by the time they met the real one. In the TV version, though, the viewers would still remember and be confused by it (my mom even asked, "But didn't he say Cohen was someone else back in the city?" right before it came up in the show), so they had to do something about it.
I was impressed by the number of humorous sight-gags and other humor they stuck in that wouldn't have worked in print, but that still seemed sufficiently Pratchettian not to be out of place.
I can't think of too many negatives that don't work out to, "Aw, they cut my favorite part." I know someone on my friends list was disappointed at the treatment of Herenna, changing her from someone who was decidedly not the stereotypical she-barbarian into a stereotypical she-barbarian, but I look at that as the same sort of thing: not enough time to establish why she was different, so avoid making her different in order not to confuse people. I will say it would have been nice if they could have used a real (trained) orangutan for the Librarian, at least part of the time, rather than Little Guy In Suit, but TV budget, what can you do.
On the whole, a very decent visit.
After lunch, we watched the recent British production of The Colour of Magic (which should actually have been called The Colour of Magic/The Light Fantastic since it adapted both books into a two-part movie).
I was quite impressed by it, I must admit. It did leave a lot of stuff out, some of which I wished I could have seen, but I knew going in that it would have to cut liberally in order to fit two books into three hours.
David Jason was a marvelous Rincewind, managing to play all facets of the character to the hilt. Sean Astin was every bit as good a Twoflower as he was a Samwise Gamgee. (When you think about it, Twoflower is very much the anti-Sam—instead of getting his companion out of trouble with his cleverness, he gets him into trouble with his naiveté.) Granted, the original conception of Twoflower was the stereotypical Japanese tourist, but perhaps they were afraid they might get accused of racism if they cast an Oriental actor. (And hey, maybe Twoflower is actually most closely related to the McSweeneys. :) And Pratchett made his expected cameo.
As usual, Tim Curry was fiendishly clever as a clever fiend, Christopher Lee did a great job as the voice of Death (for all that he only had half a dozen lines or so), and the rest of the cast was also solid. I was hugely impressed by the actor (in an unbilled cameo) they cast as the Patrician. It was such a perfect coup of casting that I'm reluctant to reveal his name even here (though you can easily google it, of course).
That leads me into another interesting thing about the movie: the changes that were made from the book. The most obvious is that the overweight, candied-jellyfish-munching Patrician from the print version of the book is replaced by the terrifying, terrier-toting tyrant of later books. But there are a number of others.
Off the top of my head, the biggest is that the Chief Librarian actually has a fairly large part in the movie in his pre-ape appearance. He's depicted as a rather simian little man already, inclined to saying things like "don't monkey with it" or "the Octavo's gone ape," and though my recollection of the book is hazy, I suspect he was given that role to consolidate the actions of a number of other characters so as to save on casting. It's a little disappointing, as the man appears to be in no way as clever, competent, or (compared to the rest of the wizards) sane as the orangutan version of the Librarian in later (b)ooks, and the fact that you never got to meet the librarian in his human aspect in the books was, for me, one of the most interesting parts of the character.
Another noteworthy change is that they actually stuck in dialogue addressing the fact that Rincewind had lied about Cohen back in Ankh-Morpork, after they meet the real one. In the book, I don't think that was ever addressed; I suppose we're to assume Twoflower had forgotten about the faux Cohen by the time they met the real one. In the TV version, though, the viewers would still remember and be confused by it (my mom even asked, "But didn't he say Cohen was someone else back in the city?" right before it came up in the show), so they had to do something about it.
I was impressed by the number of humorous sight-gags and other humor they stuck in that wouldn't have worked in print, but that still seemed sufficiently Pratchettian not to be out of place.
I can't think of too many negatives that don't work out to, "Aw, they cut my favorite part." I know someone on my friends list was disappointed at the treatment of Herenna, changing her from someone who was decidedly not the stereotypical she-barbarian into a stereotypical she-barbarian, but I look at that as the same sort of thing: not enough time to establish why she was different, so avoid making her different in order not to confuse people. I will say it would have been nice if they could have used a real (trained) orangutan for the Librarian, at least part of the time, rather than Little Guy In Suit, but TV budget, what can you do.
On the whole, a very decent visit.
