Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies | Tagged: nbc, wonder woman

Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh 100 Three Odd Instances Of Adaptation

Three bits that caught my attention this past week:

Makes Ya Wonder…

In a rare burst of good sense, NBC has chosen not to pick up David E. Kelley's WONDER WOMAN for a series after they got mixed reactions from a market screening. In this instance, "trust the market-test" was the right thing to do. I got a chance to read the script a few months ago, and it was one of the worst pilot scripts I've ever read, and I read a lot of rubbish in my job. Basically it was "WONDER WOMAN McBEAL IN THE CITY", cobbling bits from other successful shows together to create a horrible Frankenstein of a script that should have been dumped before millions were spent shooting it.

And the pilot obviously cost a lot of money – it's not cheap to close down Hollywood Boulevard even for just a few nights to shoot a chase scene. It's funny what kind of reasons studio executives cite for turning down a show. In this case, they seem to blame it on the terrible costume, saying the test audiences and the internet reacted negatively to it, which crippled the show's chances to catch on, though that's really only the visual embodiment of what was wrong with the script. What everyone said was wrong with the script is true: nobody wants to see Wonder Woman eating ice cream with her girlfriends and moaning about men. The attempts to offset these scenes with newly-shot scenes of Wonder Woman gratuitously killing some bad guys went down badly and suggest the makers really had no clue what worked and what didn't. Then there's the incoherent speech Wonder Woman makes in front of a Senate Committee that was just embarrassing, the typical kind of liberal speechifying that David E. Kelley puts into all of his lawyer shows, but here he has Wonder Woman giving a completely pointless rant about farming subsidies that has nothing to do with the story whatsoever, and then the main plot was about her hunting the manufacturer (played by Liz Hurley, and horribly, I'm told) of an illegal super-steroid that's killing scholarship athletes. The list of "huh?!" elements that passes for a script here is a mind-boggling, especially from an A-list TV writer and showrunner with a successful track record that goes back more than 20 years, is supposedly on the top of his game and who gets to have sex with Michelle Pfeiffer when he goes home every night.

Now, it's easy to see the script as the work of a wildly successful middle-aged writer woefully out of touch with life outside his cable TV subscription, but I find it more entertaining to imagine the plot of the pilot is really the loose fantasies of a woman putting herself through college by stripping, dreaming idly as she relaxes in the tub at the end of a long day. Her degree is probably in Forensic Science. There seem to be quite a few women majoring in Forensic Science who moonlight as strippers to pay off their tuitions fees these days. I have no idea why this is so.

The Arthouse Con

So Lynne Ramsey's movie version of Lionel Shriver's novel WE HAVE TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is getting a lot of buzz from the Cannes Film Festival, with Tilda Swinton a major contender for the Best Actress award for playing the bewildered and guilt-ridden mother of a teenager who shot his schoolmates in a Columbine-style massacre. I haven't seen the movie, but I've been following its progress for months now.  By all reports, it's faithful to the book, and people I know who have read the script confirm writer-director Lynne Ramsey's explanation that she basically condensed the story to an 80-page screenplay.  So while I'm sure that as a talented director, she introduced cinematic qualities to the movie adaptation, I'm going to talk about the story, which has bothered me since I read the original novel.

I remember when the British papers wouldn't stop talking about the book for its timeliness, since it was published not long after the actual Columbine Massacre, but I always felt the book was a load of hot air and now the movie is more of the same. The story is really a fantasy about "what if my son is EVIL?!" and doesn't go any further than that. The heroine of the story, as played by Tilda Swinton in the movie, is wracked with guilt and self-recrimination as she wonders whether she was responsible for her son going bad. Was it because she didn't love him enough? Or was he simply just Bad from the moment he was born? The latter is, frankly, a lot of reductionist bollocks. The problem I have with the story is that it's sensationalism without any real perspective or insight, though it gives the impression that it's insightful. It's not. All it's really about is a woman's masochistic wallowing in guilt over something she may not have had any control over even as the world blames her for her son.

"WHY IS MY SON EVIL?" is the basic tone of the whole book. "WHY? WHY?" The answer seems to be "WHO KNOWS WHY! THERE IS NO WHY! THERE IS NO ANSWER!" Well, I think decades of clinical psychiatric study would beg to differ, but the story is not about answers but reinforcing a terrible an unhelpful myth that the next generation is unknowable, frightening and possibly evil, every parent's nightmare.

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN is really an exploitation movie for the middle class, with the impression that it's profound when it is not. We go to fiction and stories to look for answers or for some kind of order or perspective to be given to a subject and this novel and story does not do that at all. Is the catharsis here meant for parents to feel thankful that their kids aren't murderous maniacs? Who would want to see this movie? Soccer Moms who are feeling masochistic? In my opinion, any parent whose kids are all right and who wants to wallow in a guilty fantasy about having an evil kid has too much fucking time on their hands. If Roger Corman were to producer an exploitation movie about the same subject matter, it would look less respectable, be a more overt and bloody melodrama about I'm willing to bet it would be a lot more honest than KEVIN.

I don't knock the hard work that everyone involved puts into getting a movie made, but I have to wonder: who is this movie for? Really.

Cobra for Adults!

I was having a conversation a with my mate Jeff Conner, a freelance editor, movie person and general pulp scholar a few months back, and he was telling me about his new gig at IDW where he was putting together a proposal for a new prose anthology for the G.I. JOE franchise, especially new interest in the property after the movie came out. Jeff told me the idea was to push the stories from the child-oriented toyfest comic stories into a more adult, Tom Clancy-style techno spy thriller corner.

I'm not the kind of person who expects or asks for freebies, but this week, Jeff sent me a copy of G.I. JOE: TALES FROM THE COBRA WARS. Jeff has sent me copies of projects and books he worked on through the years so we could have a good natter about them on the phone afterwards. TALES FROM THE COBRA WARS has a perfectly respectable collection of stories written by a respectable roster of hardboiled crime and thriller novelists like Jonathan Mayberry, Duane Swierczynski, Denis Tafoya, and Max Brooks. This struck me as an interesting approach, since the writers had to stick to rights owners Hasbro's insistence that there would be no sex and no swearing, which meant writing hardboiled spy and covert ops stories within a PG-13 structure, still a far cry from the cheesy 80s cartoons and comics. And these were all writers already creating a respectable body of work entirely on their own, some of them also already write for Marvel comics. And given that Max Brooks is responsible for the bestselling WORLD WAR Z, for him to be so involved in G.I. JOE – he's written quite a few of the recent IDW comics – must mean he really likes the franchise.

I'm not reviewing the book here, just looking at it from the perspective of licensing, marketing and publishing. Del Rey currently have a different set of rights to publish G.I. JOE novels based on the movie continuity. I suppose they must sell, despite the movie being crap, but I would say the approach taken by Jeff for IDW is the more interesting one, and I speak as someone who was never a fan of the franchise, but respect the intelligence of the work my mate puts into his projects.

You can find the book at your local bookshop, comic shop or order from Amazon.

Willingly distracted at lookitmoves@gmail.com

Follow the official LOOK! IT MOVES! twitter feed at http://twitter.com/lookitmoves for thoughts and snark on media and pop culture, stuff for future columns and stuff I may never spend a whole column writing about.

Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

Enjoyed this? Please share on social media!

Stay up-to-date and support the site by following Bleeding Cool on Google News today!