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lobelia321Last night I saw Roman Polanski's film The Ghost (apparently called The Ghost Writer in the US and perhaps other dominions?), based on the novel by Robert Harris wot i read 3 years ago and liked. And I liked this film a lot!!
I am a novel-purist, as some of you will remember from t'days of Lotr and HP but this is actually a really successful and intelligant novel adaptation. RP doesn't bugger about with the script but he also doesn't bore you to death by doing a kind of play-reading (instead of a full-on performance) of the novel. He transposes the dialogue and situations to a visually very resonant environment, full of textures and fantastic weather atmosphere.
Just as in his Macbeth, the weather is always rainy, stormy and windy. The predominant colours are grey and stone and sand. Because RP can't travel to the States, the Martha's Vineyard parts of the novel were filmed in Germany (yay!), in Usedom on the Baltic coast and on Sylt, in a fantastic modernist house with wall-to-floor windows showing the rainy/stormy/windy colours of the grey/stone/sand beachscape outside.
Pierce Brosnan is superb. Ewan McGregor is fantastic: very restrained, almost as if he weren't acting at all, and looking rather scruffingly delectable (I'm not always a Ewan fan; he can be a bore/a luvvy/twee but this film was making me come over all FOTA, for thems of you as wot remember Cordelia's wonderful Ewan/Orlando Bloom saga). And a woman I couldn't place but had in fact seen here and there who is called Olivia Williams was phenomenally good, also.
The direction was tight and like a Rubik's cube, and the whole thing just so well-crafted. Also, the soundtrack is unbelievably good and made the whole film into something sublime. It's by someone called Alexandre Desplat and I found it brilliant, makes your heart beat but not too fast, makes everything ominous but not horror-movie'ishly so.
Also, I have a more than lay interest in political thrillers (about ghost writers) at the moment as my friend and I have revived the 2008 political action orig thriller we were co-writing (do you remember?) or, rather, he wrote it and I (hah!) ghost-wrote it.
I am a novel-purist, as some of you will remember from t'days of Lotr and HP but this is actually a really successful and intelligant novel adaptation. RP doesn't bugger about with the script but he also doesn't bore you to death by doing a kind of play-reading (instead of a full-on performance) of the novel. He transposes the dialogue and situations to a visually very resonant environment, full of textures and fantastic weather atmosphere.
Just as in his Macbeth, the weather is always rainy, stormy and windy. The predominant colours are grey and stone and sand. Because RP can't travel to the States, the Martha's Vineyard parts of the novel were filmed in Germany (yay!), in Usedom on the Baltic coast and on Sylt, in a fantastic modernist house with wall-to-floor windows showing the rainy/stormy/windy colours of the grey/stone/sand beachscape outside.
Pierce Brosnan is superb. Ewan McGregor is fantastic: very restrained, almost as if he weren't acting at all, and looking rather scruffingly delectable (I'm not always a Ewan fan; he can be a bore/a luvvy/twee but this film was making me come over all FOTA, for thems of you as wot remember Cordelia's wonderful Ewan/Orlando Bloom saga). And a woman I couldn't place but had in fact seen here and there who is called Olivia Williams was phenomenally good, also.
The direction was tight and like a Rubik's cube, and the whole thing just so well-crafted. Also, the soundtrack is unbelievably good and made the whole film into something sublime. It's by someone called Alexandre Desplat and I found it brilliant, makes your heart beat but not too fast, makes everything ominous but not horror-movie'ishly so.
Also, I have a more than lay interest in political thrillers (about ghost writers) at the moment as my friend and I have revived the 2008 political action orig thriller we were co-writing (do you remember?) or, rather, he wrote it and I (hah!) ghost-wrote it.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-25 04:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-25 05:01 pm (UTC)Where oh where is my naked-Ewan-waving-his-penis-in-Velvet-Goldmine icon??
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-29 05:41 am (UTC)I remember being that age back then, and I knowingly consented to a fair amount of stuff, some I am glad about and some I regret. But no one old enough to be a parent fed me drugs and then refused to let me call my mom or leave.
I know he can be a fine director, and private lives are not the same as art, and that other people got and get away with worse. But I can't argue with my friends who are pure in their anger. Weird feeling.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-04-29 08:11 pm (UTC)Apart from that, this throws up interesting other issues. E.g. in art history, Paul Gauguin plays a similar role. He 'married' a thirteen-year-old girl (I think it was 13) in Tahiti, in the guise of 'that's what they do there, it's a different culture' and was, from all accounts, fairly much what in the good old 1970s they used to call a male chauvinist pig. Yet I love his paintings.