los films
on the plane over I watched three ‘flicks’. The Ghost1, Youth in Revolt, and Sherlock Holmes. In that order I’d give them five, five and seven out of ten.
I read the book that the Ghost Something is based on last week, it was good with a really strong build up to the final few chapters and then a really terrible ending. Really terrible. And cheesey. Just awful, in fact. A friend of mine said that the guy who wrote it, Robert Harris, writes his books so that they can be turned into screenplays very easily, I challenged that saying that the although the structure was there, a clear three acts, there was something missing. You know when you read a book whether it will make a film, I took a class on novel-to-screen adaptations last semester2 and there was this underlying feeling that when you read a good novel you can just tell, it has the Hollywood ‘x-factor’ if you will. You can feel it in films like 2010, one of my favorite adaptations, feel it in some of Stephen King’s work3, in more recent times, when I read Marley and Me you could tell that a cheap film version was going to be great, same with the story ‘Gun for the Devil’ that I adapted but in Ghost, it’s just not there.
A couple of minutes into the movie you can see what I mean, it’s the dialog that kills this film. It is wooden with a capital W an two capital D’s. Wait. The delivery of almost every single line is flat, especially Brosnan’s which at times is just laughable. His accent shifts so much too. It’s not just the lines that don’t work, the physical movement of the characters doesn’t work either. When the news first breaks from the ICC Kim Cattrall’s character moves the iMac screen about, resting it exactly where it was. It is laughable.
Pretty quickly I started trying to find someone to blame, Harris wrote the screenplay almost word for word with his novel, which is a fatal mistake because of the differences in the way you write the spoken word in a book and in a film, was it his fault? Who cast Ewan McGregor4, who at nearly forty still looks 23, far too young to be the voice of the book which they were bizarrely still going for. Cattrall as well, she sounds American the whole way through the second act. Dreadful. Maybe we should blame Polanski, that nut-job. Perhaps, I found myself thinking, he would turn up on set and give direction but it wouldn’t make sense, or it came out wrong, for example when he was trying to get his actors to show any trace of human emotion he would scream at them; “Make sure that you don’t show any emotion what-so-ever! Don’t smile! Deliver that line two seconds too early so it cuts off the important dialog in this scene! Again!”. I also wondered if McGregor introduced Polanski to his little girls. My guess is he didn’t5.
I didn’t really like Youth in Revolt. I felt that it didn’t achieve what it set out to be. Billed as ‘Indie’ by Virgin Atlantic the Dimension Films Cera vehicle tried to be laugh-out-loud and failed at every opportunity. I like Michael Cera, I liked him in Arrested Development and I’ll follow him through everything but this was a swing and a miss as far as I’m concerned. It was a bit of fun, fine but nothing did it for me. And that mustache! What? The action was too slow, there was not enough kissing and I didn’t get the plot, I don’t think the screenwriter got it either.
Lastly, Sherlock Holmes I liked. There was House in there, the chemistry between Holmes and Watson was awesome, the story, whilst a little crazy was really adventurous and kept you engaged and the action was just ‘top class’.
The only thing that was missing was the Holmes style; bring everyone into a room and go through the entire mystery, both catching the audience up and catching the bad guy in the process. There was a little scene when he explained the whole thing to Watson and that American girl I never got the name of but it was so short and there were only three of them there I don’t think it should have counted. Plus we knew from the opening scene who the bad guy was! In that respect it wasn’t a mystery, it was action.
The play between Jr. and Law was just brilliant, you wanted them on screen together constantly, that worked really well when Holmes left his gun lying around because we felt some of Watson’s desire to go after him. The sub-plots worked, the action was beautifully excessive and well designed and the piece was slickly directed by Guy Richie? Who’d have thought?
I’d watch it again in a second.
- Ben
- Writer - the credits called it ‘The Ghost’ but then the bit at the end said ‘The Ghost Writer [↩]
- it was called ‘Adaptations’ [↩]
- not all of it, mind [↩]
- an actor I really like, who could be a time ranger one day [↩]
- Is that too close to the bone? [↩]
