Tuesday 6 January 2009
Tuesday
In a discussion with Alex, the subject of the new Star Trek film was brought up. Alex's thoughts were that Star Trek worked well as a television series but never really as a movie, to which I immediately agreed. Coincidentally, I had been thinking only a few days earlier about the idea of changing a TV series into a movie. The series I had in mind was Friends. Could it be done? It seems unlikely. The concept of the show just can't be adapted to fit the narrative of a film, and as Alex pointed out, it has too many characters. A film, traditionally, needs one main focus. If you type 'Friends movie' into Google, you'll find that there are rumours about such a thing. Let's hope it never happens. The Friends model fits almost every other TV series. You can't adapt 30 minute episodes into 2 hours of plot. The Simpsons Movie was a classic case of this. Whilst it was funny, it was essentially an over-long episode, and contained nothing new at all. If you make a film of the TV series it has to go so far beyond that it ceases to be anything like the original (much like my thoughts for adapting novels to film). The X-Files films showed us another example of such failure, and rumours of Lost or 24 movies once again seem doomed to mishandling. In fact, have there been any successes?
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3 comments:
Of course there can be good ensemble films, The Big Chill for example. Why are these different than the too many character monstrosities?
I wonder if it's because we're waiting for the characters we know to "do their turn". So we must see Spock being logical, we must see Chandler saying "could it be any funnier" so you can drop the line into the trailer, etc. And that's probably a backwards way to write a movie.
Yet Sex In The City was still produced
And it's sequel
No accounting for taste... and money
However I did actually find the new Star Trek film to be a success.
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