A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Honestly the worst looking part of this movie is how they dressed Oprah Winfrey up, I don't recall any vivid physical descriptions of the witches (maybe one of them was heavy), but they just look utterly contrived for the sake of attempting to attain a feeling of exoticism.

The dialogue is of course unsurprisingly dialed up to 11 on the meaningless, thoughtless, face palm.

https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/literature/general/A_Wrinkle_in_Time.pdf

Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon?) described as basically a cartoonishly stereotypical crazy homeless person on pg 10:

After a few moments that seemed like forever to Meg, Mrs. Murry came back in, holding the door open for—was it the tramp? It seemed small for Meg's idea of a tramp. The age or sex was impossible to tell, for it was completely bundled up in clothes. Several scarves of assorted colors were tied about the head, and a man's felt hat perched atop. A shocking pink stole was knotted about a rough overcoat, and black rubber boots covered the feet.

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Mrs. Which (Oprah?) described on pg 42/43 as almost the most generic witch possible, except somewhat shimmery as if it only partially exists:

The shimmer seemed to be laughing, too. It became vaguely darker and more solid; and then there appeared a figure in a black robe and a black peaked hat, beady eyes, a beaked nose, and long gray hair; one bony claw clutched a broomstick.

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Whatever happened to movie makers that were satisfied with telling an interesting story and didn't feel the need to spend a million dollars on CGI per second of the movie?

They fucked Bridge to Terabithia and now this. Both books I read my 5th grade year. I guess Wait Til Helen comes is next.....

Jesus. Googled it to see if there was movie plans and apparently it’s been done:

Book gives me interest

Mindy gives me raging hard pass

Took a date to this. Quite possibly the worst movie I've ever seen in theaters.

It's not even worth me putting it into words, simply imagine they screwed up the movie in the worst way you can conceive of.

Its bad.

1,000,000,000,000 / 10

He forgot the decimal point before the 1 ;P

This movie is an abomination and should be used for advanced interrogation at Guantanamo

The list of heroes fighting for the light in the books (Of course, the books symbolism was about Western modernity and Christianity, and thus the "heroes" were a mix of enlightenment/Renaissance philosophers, inventors, artists and theologians.)

Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, French theologian Albert Schweitzer, Ludwig van Beethoven, Rembrandt van Rijn, and St. Francis. Charles Wallace mentions William Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Louis Pasteur, and others (Ghandi was in it). For her part, Meg brings up Euclid and Nicolaus Copernicus.


The list in the film.


Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Jane Austen, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Maya Angelou.


No white Christian males from any point in history. Jane Austen replaced people like Da-Vinci, Beethoven and fucking Shakespeare....At least Curie was on the level of Pasteur. I wonder if this director might be upset to learn Gandhi hated black people? Hmm.

Unbelievable. Like I get not wanting the Christian themes in the film if you want a McFilm you can promote across the globe. I do. What I don't get is this is why erase the enlightenment scholars and artists just because they are a certain sex and gender? But IOOTI so I'm sure this is fine.

fanaskin said:

take a christian allegory strip if of all meaning and put oprah in a space outfit. They might as well have made this direct to video, like on VHS.

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That's exactly what it felt like.

Ava DuVernay To Direct DC's "New Gods" - Dark Horizons

Hah, so here's another movie from DC I will pass on cuz of this director.

this movie bombed so hard its apparently been pulled from theaters across european countries 2 weeks before release

I had the book as a kid but for some reason could never really get into it.

About 5 minutes in, I said, "Yeah, I'm not going to get into the movie, either."

We made it 40 minutes before giving up. Literally nothing made sense. It's was just a hodge podge of weird shit happening with no explanation, and where one chain of events is completely irrelevant to the next.

Then I read the reviews on IMDB. Holy shit, this movie got skewered.

Re-reading this thread made me wonder.

Has there ever been a time Hollywood stuck close to the book and the movie bombed as a result? I am coming up with nothing. It seems like at some point a director might try it just to do something different.

Aldarion said:

Re-reading this thread made me wonder.

Has there ever been a time Hollywood stuck close to the book and the movie bombed as a result? I am coming up with nothing. It seems like at some point a director might try it just to do something different.

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i am in no way defending this movie or any other... but it's a LITTLE more complicated than simply choosing to stick to the subject material. most successful movies based off books are based off of short stories because it's much easier to ADD to the story in a meaningful way than to trim. and unless you trim a book, even a 200 page book is going to end up 6 hours long.

so the problem then is that when you trim down a book to fit in 2 hours, you have to cut out a bunch of stuff that the original author thought was important enough to write about. you take that stuff out, because you have to, but lose a lot of the soul of what made the book special. then there might be aspects of the main plot that don't make sense anymore, so you have to re-write it in a way that explains why these characters would behave differently without having had the 40 page sidequest where they learned the true meaning of friendship or whatever nonsense the book is about.

christopher nolan makes a lot of his movies based off of short stories, so when he adds something, he gets to add his personal flair to it, instead of ripping huge chunks out of someone else's soul

Aldarion said:

Re-reading this thread made me wonder.

Has there ever been a time Hollywood stuck close to the book and the movie bombed as a result? I am coming up with nothing. It seems like at some point a director might try it just to do something different.

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dunno how close some of these were to the source but they all bombed

Cloud Atlas
OG Dune
Ender's Game
John Carter
The Fountain

In general it isn't advised to spend $100m+ on the production budget for a Sci-fi when it doesn't have mainstream appeal. Or in John Carter's case $250m production + $100m on marketing for a story originating from the 1910s.