Tentacle-porn

Old news.
The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife
Hokusai

And Del Toro is also doing a film of “At the Mountains of Madness”. Tentacled goodness abounds.

No tentacles at the Mountains of Madness, IIRC. Formless horrors, yes. Also aliens shaped like (SPOILER) seven-foot carrots with wings. And giant, hostile, blind albino cave penguins.

It’s a lot scarier in the book, really.

I’m still convinced that if I were to actually draw out the description of the giant starry root vegetable things I’d eventually come up with some real-world invertebrate sea creature. Maybe sans the wings, though, which seem like an afterthought in the text.

“The mind squirbles.” I’m not sure how to respond to that sentence except by, you know, saying ‘hurrah!’

We may have been forever denied Henry James on Mars, but we do at least have The Inheritors by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford:

“You really wish to know where I come from?”

I expressed light-hearted acquiescence.

“Listen,” she said, and uttered some sounds. I felt a kind of unholy
emotion. It had come like a sudden, suddenly hushed, intense gust of
wind through a breathless day. “What–what!” I cried.

“I said I inhabit the Fourth Dimension.”

(It was mostly by Ford; he would bring drafts to Conrad and Conrad would tell him to go rewrite them.)

A terminological quibble: “digital special effects” is a bit garbled.

Generally speaking, “special effects” (SFX) refers to anything shot on set, e.g. stuff getting blown up, prosthetics and animatronics, while anything done digitally in post production is referred to as “visual effects” (VFX). While there are areas of overlap, SFX and VFX people have rather different qualifications and work largely in different realms.

Seth @12,

Lovecraft … ranted about “mad Arabs”

Well, about one mad Arab anyway.

Elbowing in on Holbo’s terriotry are we?

Anyway, I’m just glad Saul/Seth writes in such long paragraphs; it makes not reading his comments much easier.

“saul edengarten”
It’s “Sol” Mr Berube, not “Saul.”
But since you ask:
Hokusai, unlike Lovecraft, is more than a camp icon, Guillermo del Toro made the one recent movie (El Laberinto del fauno/Pan’s Labyrinth) that engages childhood fantasy without asking its adult audience to revert entirely to childhood, and the reason some of the effects in LOTR [sic] sucked is that the people in LA finally gave up and hung up the phone: You can only say “No, it’s wrong, do it again!” so many times before exhaustion sets in.

Any more questions, just let me know. I’m here to help.

But it is through the careful observation of the undercurrents of obligation and community that politics are made. I dance lambada with my hijab-wearing neighbours, I am a man of the people. I got drunk on the Trans-Siberian.

Oh, I see I missed the joke. Heh heh. That’s pretty good.

I think Guillermo Del Toro is easily the best non-Peter Jackson director to work on The Hobbit, and possibly the unqualified best choice, but if this stupid Hobbit movie interferes with the timetable for At the Mountains of Madness then the choice to use Del Toro goes from ‘good’ to ‘ruining everything’.

Honestly, after the terrible additions of completely out-of-the-blue nonsense to the Return of the King Extended Edition (Or, as I like to call it, Skullvalanche) I don’t care if I never see another Jackson-made adaptation of Tolkien ever again.

bevy

noun
1. a large gathering of people of a particular type; “he was surrounded by a bevy of beauties in bathing attire”; “a bevy of young beach boys swarmed around him”
2. a flock of birds (especially when gathered close together on the ground); “we were visited at breakfast by a bevy of excited ducks”

WordNet® 3.0, © 2006 by Princeton University.

Bevy does NOT mean “innumerable”. If you see a bevy of mallards swimming in the farm pond, a bevy of white ducks waddling around the barnyard, or a bevy of Canadian Honkers in flight, it will typically be 5 to 7 of them.

I agree very strongly with your assessment of Hellboy, Henry. A very underrated movie.

Hellboy is good fun and has moments which are both poetic as well as visually stunning. That said, I think del Toro is terribly overrated: Blade 2 was rubbish and neither Devil’s Backbone, nor Pan’s Labyrinth really worked structurally. If you want to like these movies, and there are a lot of fanboys out there who do, there’s a lot to like, but they just aren’t working as a whole. But he’s a really smart and talented guy, so there’s hope.

I think the balrog may have looked lamer if it was “shadows in flame”. Some things work in imagination but not in film, as we will surely see as soon as someone makes a decent cthulhu movie. There were lots of things in LoTR which the makers changed subtly so they wouldn’t look or be lame.

I still don’t understand why Peter Jackson is wasting his time on movies like this (and King Kong etc.) when there is yet to be a decent version of A wizard of Earthsea. If ever a movie cried out for Peter Jackson…

If Bill Nighy doesn’t play Nyarlathotep I’m boycotting.

“Pardon me boy,
Is this the Lair of Great Cthulhu?
In the city of slime,
Where it is night all the time.

Bob Hope never went
Along the road to Great Cthulhu,
And Triple-A has no maps,
And all the Tcho Tcho’s lay traps. …”

The tune is Chattanooga Choo-Choo, and the rest is here, if your sanity allows.

H.P. Lovecraft was a teetotaller; what was he doing in a bar?

It seems that a lot of gods have been diffusing past and through each other into popular culture recently – I of course blame the intertubes. In my office I have pair of plush dolls, the images of Cthulu and Ganesh. Above them are the labels Goofus and Gallant, and to the side the legend “There’s one in every family”.

Hmmm … some combinations are worse than others. “Hercules vs Azathoth” might be campy, but “My Dinner with Nyarlathotep” (with Wallace Shawn, of course), well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.

“I still don’t understand why Peter Jackson is wasting his time on movies like this (and King Kong etc.) when there is yet to be a decent version of A wizard of Earthsea. If ever a movie cried out for Peter Jackson…”

Wasn’t his co-author on the script workin gon a version? Perhaps Sci-Fi channel ungodly fuck-up of novel screwed that deal.

43: Yes, the late Michael Powell was interested in filming Earthsea, and had gotten Philippa Boyens to do a script. Information is on LeGuin’s website somewhere; the project is also mentioned in Powell’s autobiography. (I seem to recall that, like the SciFi Channel atrocity, the film was to cover both the first two books.)

Speaking of Boyens, and speaking of The Hobbit, I am much more interested in knowing whether she is still on board than in who the director will be. She was the Tolkienist on the LotR project, which I believe she kept on track at important junctures.

Boyens dropped off the sci-fi channel script, which is probably why Ged ended up being white. Unfortunately Miyazaki’s version is Goro Miyazaki, not his illustrious (and oh! so wonderful!) father Hayao, so the movie didn’t live up to the hype. I only watched it in Japanese and didn’t understand a word, but Ms. le Guin has seen a translated version and was rather critical (see her webpage for more details). Though the dragon was excellent.

The sad thing is that Miyazaki Hayao asked Ms. le Guin years ago for the rights to WoE, and she said no because she wasn’t familiar with his work and thought “cartoon” meant disney. Ah, sometimes cultural ignorance is a terrible thing. Had he made Wizard of Earthsea in his prime (at the time of Nausicaa or even Spirited Away) we would finally have what the world needs.

But since it’s too late for that, I think Peter Jackson should drop all his other projects, suck in all the spare capital in the whole world, and finally make a perfect movie version of a perfect book.

And while we’re at it, maybe Ang Lee should make “The Left Hand of Darkness”, and that chap who did “Children of Men” could make “The Dispossessed”. Governments should mandate this sort of thing…

(I mean the 1980 one, not the later one, which I haven’t seen.)

“adoptive nation”? Is that about the fact that Tolkien was born in South Africa? His parents were both English and he returned to England as a small boy. He considered himself to be as as English as anyone could be, and would have looked on anybody who described him as an immigrant as a raving lunatic. (I don’t know, but I doubt very much whether being born in what was then a colony affected his status as a British subject in the slightest.)

51: by “adoptive nation” I actually mean the sort of mythic anglo-germany he invented for himself.
52: exactly.