here, as promised, is a blog post where you can [via the comment function] add your reflections on jordan's INTERVIEW. as we have said in class, i'm particularly interested in your responses to the following:
1. how does the movie size up as movie? i.e. how well does it 'stand on its own two feet'?
2. how well does it rate as a filmization of the anne rice novel?
[of course your comments need by no means be limited to these questions alone.]
3 comments:
As a movie fan, I have to admit that I enjoyed Coppola's movie the most. I think the cinematography is clever and engaging and it does a pretty good job of focusing on the novel's most interesting plot points (plus, he pulls a nifty sleight-of-hand with the biographical data of the real Vlad in order to fill in some holes in the novel's plot - i.e. the Count's motivation for going to England). That being said, I think that "Interview" does the best job out of anything we've seen in terms of bringing out the true horror of the vampire story. See, I just don't think vampires are scary and any attempt to make the threat of vampires real is doomed to disappoint. After all, real life is much scarier. However, "Interview" prompts the audience to think about the choice that Louis and the interviewer make - whether or not to become vampires. In Stoker, the choice is easy because being a vampire means being damned. In "Interview" we see that Louis remains religious (to a degree) and that being a vampire simply means becoming a different type of being...and its tempting to want to be a rung higher on the food chain. To me, that's what is really frightening - that the audience member winds up contemplating the pros and cons of vampire-hood.
I felt that Interview the film was an interesting movie if left by itself. As a movie, I enjoyed watching it and found it to be the best vampire movie we've watched during maymester.
I also thought that it was a good rendering of the novel. This was probably achieved b/c Anne Rice wrote the screenplay ( and she refused to bastardize her own work). I was a bit disappointed that some of the more interesting details were left from the movie though (vamps in eastern europe, his family in New Orleans, etc.) I think this was done to alleviate from the time issue (too much book to cover in a two hour movie).
I found the film version of "Interview" to be a pretty good and true adaptation to the novel. The film, while having to cut out some scenes for obvious time reasons, didn't stray too far from the novel. Yeah, some scenes were taken out, but I'm usually not too nitpicky about things taken out of its original source material simply because for film there has to be time constraints. So long as the film version doesn't stray too far from its source or attempt to reinvent some of the themes in a bad way, I'm usually happy with film adaptations. This was the major problem with the second film "Queen of the Damned" which absolutely sucked as a movie and almost made me vomit in disgust when I finished watching it the first time. The biggest mistake it made was trying to combine the second and third novels into one film, and then not revealing a good amount of scenes that were very important to the novels' plot. It's almost not enough Anne Rice didn't bother writing the screenplay to the film as she did with "Interview". Even if you ignore the film's original material, it still doesn't work as a movie.
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