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Tolkien on film
Jul. 20th, 2014 10:20 pmNot his works, this time: Tolkien the person. News article on two competing bio-pics* of Tolkien's life in the works.
As we say among my people, oy. The problem with movies based on facts, as with movies based on novels, is that they inevitably overshadow those facts, and then people concerned with getting the facts right have to spend the rest of their lives patiently explaining that It Wasn't Really Quite Like That. Even if the movie is faithful, it will oversimplify things. And the better the movie is as a movie, the more it will overshadow those facts. (After all, our film image of how the sound barrier was broken is the pretty good and [in some aspects] fairly accurate 1983 The Right Stuff, not the pretty bad and horribly inaccurate 1952 Breaking the Sound Barrier - though see Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, on which the film of that name was based, for how disruptive the other movie's untruths were at the time on attempts to explain to laymen, especially those responsible for funding aerospace, what was actually going on.)
( Read more... )
As we say among my people, oy. The problem with movies based on facts, as with movies based on novels, is that they inevitably overshadow those facts, and then people concerned with getting the facts right have to spend the rest of their lives patiently explaining that It Wasn't Really Quite Like That. Even if the movie is faithful, it will oversimplify things. And the better the movie is as a movie, the more it will overshadow those facts. (After all, our film image of how the sound barrier was broken is the pretty good and [in some aspects] fairly accurate 1983 The Right Stuff, not the pretty bad and horribly inaccurate 1952 Breaking the Sound Barrier - though see Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff, on which the film of that name was based, for how disruptive the other movie's untruths were at the time on attempts to explain to laymen, especially those responsible for funding aerospace, what was actually going on.)
( Read more... )
