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cneiss
Reviews
Lady in the Water (2006)
Textbook
I walked out of the theater thinking this was not on par with M. Night Shyamalan's other works. I was feeling disappointed by the thin story and transparent characters and I started talking about it with my wife. By the time we left the parking lot, I realized that we had not seen a movie so much as gone to a class on how to tell a story. All that was missing was an instructor standing on stage echoing what the film was already saying. The real kicker is the name of the narf: Story. It's really a strange, simplistic name until you take it in the context of the movie. M. Night Shyamalan remains one of the best story tellers of our time. As a film maker, I put him on my personal pedestal next to Peter Weir.
Earthsea (2004)
Worse than I thought possible
I had read Ursula K. LeGuin's response to some statements made by the director and I expected it to be bad. What I saw was horrendous. This is, to my mind, one of the best fantasy series ever written. This adaptation of it only resembles it in the location it was set and the names of the characters.
I have seen a couple of posts to which I must respond:
1) Comparing this to other works such as Dune and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant miss the mark. While both of those series were great, A Wizard of Earthsea precedes them. Moreover, the best of the series was the last two books, unlike most other most similar series (was it Frank Herbert that said "every good trilogy is five books, at least"?
2) Changing the race of the characters misses an integral part of the statement made by the author. I know she hates it when people read meanings into her works, but given that the book was written in the middle of racial unrest in the '60s a statement was made, intended or otherwise. The "good guys" were the dark skinned peoples and the "bad guys" were the tall, blond white peoples (yes, I know it's no where near that simple, but the basic idea stands).