The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

[eez28]

ok, so i'll try this again, this time with some commentary.

Some info about the movie here. Going to be starring Viggo Mortensen, Guy Pearce, Danny Huston. Sounds promising to me, love all three of those guys and also really enjoyed The Proposition. I wonder if they can get Cave to do the music.

I've been wanting to read this book for some time, guess I need to borrow it from my dad soon.

[kaujot]

I think, like No Country for Old Men, it needs as little music as possible.

[flyonthewall2983]

This sounds great. I loved The Proposition. Danny Huston played both the tenderness and psychotic sides of his character with real balls.

[eez28]

I think, like No Country for Old Men, it needs as little music as possible.

Good call

[kaujot]

It will be interesting to see how/if they film the scene in the house with its basement full of half-eaten people.

[miless]

seeming as the book makes a big deal of the fact that music doesn't really exist anymore (the closest thing being a handmade flute fashioned for the small boy who just makes some noise with it before abondoning it), I hope that no music is employed.
I also hope they stick with the original material (very little action and no explanation as to the "apocalyptic" events). I could easily see how someone would find it "necessary" to add some idiotic action sequences to make it "commercially viable".

I'm actually really lamenting that this is being adapted, as it is one of my favorite books I've ever read (right alongside Notes From Underground).

oh, and McSweeney's posted this: BRETT RATNER'S NOTES FOR HIS FILM VERSION OF THE ROAD BY CORMAC McCARTHY

[you gotta be kidding me]

I could easily see how someone would find it "necessary" to add some idiotic action sequences to make it "commercially viable".

The book has plenty of idiotic action sequences on its own already.

Also, the protagonist is apparently a master physician, chemist, mechanic and triathelete (daily swims in arctic temperature water in a sunless world where you would never dry out?) as well as a perfect shot (with a flare gun, no less -- have you ever tried to fire a flare gun accurately? ha!) and of course no one in the novel had glasses or contacts that got broken or lost, because that would be inconvenient.

So the book is perfect Hollywood material.

[Steven H]

I could easily see how someone would find it "necessary" to add some idiotic action sequences to make it "commercially viable".

The book has plenty of idiotic action sequences on its own already.

Hey, but at least he admits to being smart AND lucky. I can see shooting someone with a flare gun not being that hard. Depends on how far away they are. hmm. Also, I don't recall the main character being a "master physician, chemist, mechanic and triathelete." It would take a handful of college courses and maybe being a boy scout for a few years to know what he knows. Not everyone wears glasses. I'll give you the other points though, especially since drying out should have been a much larger factor.

[you gotta be kidding me]

Hey, but at least he admits to being smart AND lucky. I can see shooting someone with a flare gun not being that hard. Depends on how far away they are. hmm. Also, I don't recall the main character being a "master physician, chemist, mechanic and triathelete." It would take a handful of college courses and maybe being a boy scout for a few years to know what he knows. Not everyone wears glasses. I'll give you the other points though, especially since drying out should have been a much larger factor.

If I remember correctly, he hit a guy inside a second-storey window (!) from across the street (!!) with a flare gun (!!!) while avoiding arrows shot by that man (!!!!).

I just hope the director uses a Fred Durst lookalike - backwards baseball cap, douchebag soul-patch and all - for the head-in-a-cake-jar scene.

[Steven H]

If I remember correctly, he hit a guy inside a second-storey window (!) from across the street (!!) with a flare gun (!!!) while avoiding arrows shot by that man (!!!!).

I think the book implies that the flare explodes and damages him, but I don't know if it hits him directly (it just says he shoots it and then the guy screams). And two arrows are shot, the first one is a surprise and misses, the second hits him in the leg.

Agreed on the Durst lookalike. Hillcoat is a perfect choice to direct this. If it could retain the atmosphere of The Proposition, it'd be a match made in heaven.

[miless]

The book has plenty of idiotic action sequences on its own already.

So the book is perfect Hollywood material.

did we read the same book?

most of the "action" sequences were spent running away and hiding (instead of the typical "running towards with guns blazing"). only small glimpses of the others' lives were described (a particular mystery was left surrounding the extent of the cannibalism) and the book lingered on moments where nothing much particularly happens (the discovered storables). If they do a straight adaptation, the film is going to be pretty boring to a lot of people.

[Steven H]

I haven't seen I Am Legend, and have no interest, but it sounds like The Road, only they made people vampires to give them an excuse to be nightmares.

[Nothing]

Have to say I found The Proposition to be truly ghastly and find the prospect of this adaptation even more so. Great writer though he is, it would seem that Cormac has fairly limited taste in cinema (as anyone perusing his recent published conversation with the Coens can discover).

[John Cope]

Have to say I found The Proposition to be truly ghastly

Why?

and find the prospect of this adaptation even more so.

All right. I'll bite. Who would you have preferred?

[you gotta be kidding me]

Malick is who I thought of while reading the book -- particularly the ending, specifically the last, poetic, heartbreakinigly beautiful paragraph, which is totally something malick would film and make meaningful.

Actually, the book's ravaged landscapes through which the protagonists travel reminded me of Ichikawa's Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. Is he still making films?

[Rsdio]

I had Malick in mind all through the book too, it'd be an interesting change of tone for him seeing nature in ashes and ruins rather than in its full glory. I think Hillcoat is a great choice though - perhaps more for the bleakness of Ghosts of the Civil Dead than The Proposition, as much as I rated the latter.

[miless]

Malick is who I thought of while reading the book -- particularly the ending, specifically the last, poetic, heartbreakinigly beautiful paragraph, which is totally something malick would film and make meaningful.

Actually, the book's ravaged landscapes through which the protagonists travel reminded me of Ichikawa's Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain. Is he still making films?

Malick would be quite the choice (while reading it I was thinking someone similar to Béla Tarr, someone who'd focus on the mundanity of travelling and surviving... but obviously in color... so I guess Gus).

Ichikawa does seem to still be directing (according to imdb he has two credits to his name for 2006)

[you gotta be kidding me]

Sokurov?

[miless]

Sokurov?

true, but I have always found Sokurov's films to be quite tedious (when compared with the hypnotizing works of Tarkovsky, Tarr, Van Sant, Dreyer, etc...), although I have seen relatively few Sokurov titles.

[John Cope]

I adore Sokurov but I can't imagine him doing this. I just don't think he would want to make it and I don't think many would want to see it. Hillcoat is a fine choice. Malick's sensibility is too ethereal despite the poetic nature of the text. And why does he have to be the go to guy for every poetic piece that makes use of landscapes? My dream choice would be Cimino. Dream on.

Still, we ought to be grateful. Given the Oprah endorsement this could have just as easily been handed to Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.

[miless]

Still, we ought to be grateful. Given the Oprah endorsement this could have just as easily been handed to Ron Howard and Tom Hanks.

Old Ronnie's too busy remaking Caché to bother with this one.

[Nothing]

The Proposition is a gimmicky rehash of western cliches in an Australian setting - a fanboy ode to Peckinpah without the heart, the political sensibility or the intelligence. John Hurt gives perhaps the worst performance of the decade, like nails on a chalkboard. Huston is a great actor but he's completely miscast as a psychopathic outlaw. Meanwhile, Watson's token role is expanded beyond all reason (presumably the UKFC insisted on a major female lead, failing to understand the genre they were working in). Cave's music is almost as inappropriate as his writing. Beyond all of this, the direction is horrible. There are some nicely lit shots courtesy of Delhomme, but they don't fit together in any way and are, instead, subjected to migrain-inducing MTV editing. As Bresson keenly reminded us, it's the relationship between the shots that counts. Perhaps the most embarassingly overrated film of the past decade. Any number of people, including Ron Howard, could do a better job. I'm not sure it's a book that needs adapting, anyway.

[miless]

I agree with the above sentiment (although I do think that there were some beautiful shots in The Proposition, mostly centering around that terrible flogging and the constant carpet of flies covering everybody) and think that someone with a vision and the technical skills to back that vision up are needed (and I think that CGI, as always, should be avoided at every cost, the power of the images could much more easily come from great location scouting... and with the number of forest fires every year, there's got to be plenty of burnt down forests to shoot in).

[Steven H]

The Proposition is a gimmicky rehash of western cliches in an Australian setting - a fanboy ode to Peckinpah without the heart, the political sensibility or the intelligence.

"Gimmicky"? It seemed pretty barebones to me, and I also don't recall anything remoately like "MTV editing". People walking across the outback, doomed, quietly asking themselves why they are there and what exactly makes them human in all this misery and desolation is what I took from it. The Proposition strikes me as very straightforward. Also, if you have a problem with cliches, The Road is full of them (what novel in recent memory isn't? House of Leaves?) so I guess Hillcoat would be appropriate after all.

[Nothing]

The basic concept is a gimmick and thus the film never rings true either as an evocation of a period of Australian history or as a hard-bitten revisionist western. I guess you'd need to watch it again if you weren't attuned to the editing rhythms the first time around, although I wouldn't wish that on anyone.