Unverified Spoiler
I saw this by accident - I wish I hadn’t - but it was posited that it’s not Dr. Strange here, but actually Kang pretending to be Dr. Strange, hence the fucking with the multiverse stuff.
Question: Is High Fidelity a prequel to Hot Tub Time Machine?
I’ve never seen HTTM but High Fidelity stands on its own.
As an actor I think Being John Malkovich was his apex, he has been on a decline ever since. HTTM was a pretty lame attempt at comedy.
I reeeeeally want this to be good, but I have concerns…
FYI Shang Chi is excellent. Saw it yesterday afternoon and it delivered on all fronts. Their wuxia kung fu scenes were fantastic and didn’t feel like Hollywood trying to copy a Chinese style of movie. Tony Leung was awesome as well and there were a few surprises. It might be a top 5 Marvel movie for me.
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Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of “Dune” is getting rave, and I mean rave, reviews. Not the “I’m paid to say nice things so you’ll go and see it” reviews, but over-the-top, gushing, “I’m not fucking kidding this film is genuinely fucking awesome” reviews.
Good to hear. I was pretty fucking excited to see he was handling this.
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I hope so, because the Sting version was a desecration of the novel.
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The movie is supposed to be very faithful to the novel. And this is only part one, because it needs more than one movie to do it right.
There’s also this:
“It’s hard to overstate how little actually happens in this “Dune,” which flows like an overture that’s stretched for the duration of an entire opera.”
“Duncan Idaho…spends most of “Dune” trapped in Paul’s insufferable dreams of the future, which are scattered throughout the story like ransom notes from a more exciting cut of the film.”
I’m probably going to see it anyway, being a Dune nut myself, but I’m prepared to be disappointed like I was with LOTR. The visuals no doubt will be great, but the story is too dense to tell visually, even a 5 season mini series likely couldn’t do it justice.
I will say the 1984 Dune is awful even though as an 18 year old at the time my friend and I loved it and saw it 8 or 10 times in the theater, with the last several times being afternoon matinees where we were the only ones there. I tried to watch it again recently and turned it off pretty quickly. Looks great though, really great.
Meaning that you were prepared to be disappointed, or you were actually disappointed?
Both. The visuals (like in Dune) were great, but I didn’t care for the story. I know there’s no way to tell that whole tale in 3 movies, but I thought it was poorly done, the story was too chopped up and elements added, like the bit when Aragorn loses his horse or whatever in the Two Towers and has some weird self doubt type moments. And the elves and their fucking whispering, or Galadriel’s weird cartoonish transformation at the Mirror. It debased the book to me.
I’m giddier than a fucking school boy. Been looking forward to this for awhile, and if it’s anything like Bladerunn 2049, Villeneuve’s Dune ought to be pretty spectacular.
ETA: Sid’s understandable grain of salt noted below.
I get that, as a fan of the novels, the movie is never going to match your experience. Movie’s rarely do justice to their source material, with a few exceptions; “Silence of the Lambs” springs to mind as one. Short stories work better, which is why there have been a number of great movies from Stephen King short stores, while “Dances with Wolves” was a book of maybe 100 pages.
Novels with broad scope and sweeping narratives are the hardest to adapt to movies, because you need ways to be able to keep the audience informed as to where they are in the story. A writer can do this in narrative prose, while movies have to do it with visuals, captions, exposition (ugh) or voiceovers (UGH!). Backstories are another area where movies struggle to match the elegance of the written word, because building the characters and environments can slow the pacing to a crawl.
Just think at how long “Avengers: Endgame” spent explaining where we were now after only a 5-year time jump, and how clumsy that all was. Why was there trash everywhere after 5 years of 50% fewer people, yet they’d got their shit together to make the memorial park with everyone’s names? Why was there no baseball anymore (unless the world had been lucky enough that 100% of Mets fans got snapped away)? And there’s so many more examples in the 10 minutes - a lifetime in a movie - they spent trying to bring the audience forward.
I never expect a movie to be able to express the full plot of a novel. Any book that’s full-length or longer is going to take too long to represent faithfully in a movie (“Dances with Wolves” can be read faster than it can be watched and is almost scene-for-scene identical). Also, movies have to have good pacing with action beats and character beats occurring at appropriate times to keep the audience engaged, whereas a novel writer has no such confines. That’s one of the reasons why movies add things that weren’t there - like Aragorn’s fall - is because they need a “moment” at that point in the run time (and sometimes it’s because director’s are arrogant and just think they know better).
We’ll never know what David Lynch could’ve done with “Dune” had he not had the studio enforcing artificial constraints on him. A director’s cut - sadly impossible as the studio destroyed all the additional footage he shot - may well have cured any number to the things wrong with that movie. Even if Lynch had been able to put out his full vision, it still would not have matched the experience of someone steeped in the lore of Herbert’s universe. Also, Sting. 
That they keep trying with “Dune” is a compliment to the work. I keep hearing of efforts to bring “Hyperion” to the screen, but they never go anywhere probably due to similar problems in adapting it as they have/had with “Dune” and LOTR, while not being anywhere near as broadly popular.
PS: If you want a masterclass at a writer keeping you informed of where you are across space and time, read Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, or his “Ilium/Olympus” series. He will jump you across galaxies and thousands of years and then drip-feed information into the ongoing narrative to fill in those giant gaps. Try and do that in a movie, and people will walk out.
I don’t know if it was you or someone else here that recommended Hyperion, but I devoured those books.
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I certainly was one who recommended them. If you liked those, you’ll definitely enjoy Ilium/Olympus.
I’d certainly like to see a try at a Hyperion movie or series. Couldn’t be any more ham-handed as religious allegory than Prometheus.
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I still have not read books 3 & 4. IIRC, it sounded like they were pretty polarizing. Books 1 & 2 together are the best work of science fiction I have ever read.
I was very down on book 3 but book 4 really redeemed it. They are, however, not up to the standard of 1&2.
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