The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2012)

[stwrt]

I didn't like it that Davies wasn't keen on the Rattigan script and decided to tweak it to make it suit his dramatic purposes. If you're going to film a Rattigan script,, leave it alone.

[knives]

Why?

[stwrt]

Why?

I take it you feel Davies has improved on the Ratters script ?

[knives]

It doesn't matter to me. I'm unfamiliar with the source material, but the source material doesn't matter if, and it does, the film works as its own entity.

[stwrt]

It doesn't matter to me. I'm unfamiliar with the source material, but the source material doesn't matter if, and it does, the film works as its own entity.

Rattigan is worth becoming familar with, he's one of the Twentieth Century's greatest playwrights. (To be honest, there wasn't a lot of competition.)

[knives]

That's besides the point though. Rattigan and some movie that uses Rattigan as a jumping off point are two separate if related entities and therefore are allowed to be different. This is like complaining about the lack of subservient love that Starship Troopers or any other of the hundreds of adapted material didn't show to their source. If somebody wants to stick true to the source they're adapting that is fine, but clearly Davies was not interested in doing that.

[George Kaplan]

Rattigan is worth becoming familar with, he's one of the Twentieth Century's greatest playwrights. (To be honest, there wasn't a lot of competition.)

Ahem...that is, after, one at least accounts for - Strindberg, Lorca, Shaw, O'Neill, Molnar, Brecht, Synge, Pirandello, O'Casey, Anouilh, Kaufman (and Hart, etc.), Coward, Maugham, Genet, Giraudoux, Williams, Inge, Ionesco, Beckett, Albee, Duerenmatt, Miller, Orton, Shepard, Stoppard, and Mamet.

[warren oates]

George Kaplan is right on with all of the playwrights who might lay claim to besting Rattigan.

Agree with knives completely. Adaptation is essentially art of being interestingly (un)faithful to the source material. In terms of Davies' respect or lack of it for the play, I haven't read it, but I can wager that no stage production could ever capture the tone and texture of the light or decor in those interiors the way Davies' does. His precise feeling for the subtlest emotional nuances of period detail is unmatched. So there are more ways than one to be faithful to material. Not that film adaptations ever even have to aim for that.

I actually just finished reading the novel Starship Troopers last night, having previously seen the film many years ago. The book is thoroughly gung-ho, and wildly inventive, the foundation of every military sci-fi story written since and the inspiration for a new generation of films and videogames (about those armored infantry fighting suits) that can only now begin to be made (because of the VFX tech). The film is a deadpan send-up of jingoism and fascism that uses the novel as little more than a title and an excuse. In a way, Verhoeven film's is all the more impressive for doing the least likely thing with the novel, and getting away with it, all in the guise a huge Hollywood action spectacle made for the youth audience.

[stwrt]

That's besides the point though. Rattigan and some movie that uses Rattigan as a jumping off point are two separate if related entities and therefore are allowed to be different. This is like complaining about the lack of subservient love that Starship Troopers or any other of the hundreds of adapted material didn't show to their source. If somebody wants to stick true to the source they're adapting that is fine, but clearly Davies was not interested in doing that.

You may be right. I haven't seen or read The Starship Trooper and wouldn't know how close to the book the love affair is in the movie.

[J Adams]

I\'d like to see Davies reboot Starship Troopers.

[warren oates]

I\'d like to see Davies reboot Starship Troopers.

I think Davies' would need more of a sense of humor than he has to even swede Starship Troopers, and the Verhoeven version is pretty queer as it is. Plus there's no wallpaper anywhere in that world. Still, I wish that Michel Gondry could convince his peers to do something like this -- famous directors doing sweded remakes of the unlikiest films. What an anthology that would be.

[whaleallright]

Don't we already have Quentin Tarantino for that?

[warren oates]

Tarantino doesn't steal from anything he's not already in love with. And even when his borrowing is brazen, he generally turns it into something new. Which is, you know, what art is. Have a look at Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/02/0081387 , as he says it more eloquently and with more footnotes. I'm talking about stupid remakes and badly mismatched sweding assignments. Like Be Kind Rewind via The Five Obstructions. No one would be permitted to work on a film s/he loves. Everyone would be encouraged to choose that with which they are most optimally ill-matched.

[boywonder]

I liked Anna Karenina too, though I'm not sure where you're going with Davies there. What do you mean by that last sentence there, that Anna Karenina is representing the filmmaking of the 1880s?

1930/40s as intended with the Duvivier comparison. Sorry for not making that clear. As to Davies I was struck by its similarities to The Deep Blue Sea and The House of Mirth in terms of emotional expression, cinematography, and use of colour.

Seems as if there is not much love for Terrance Davies "The Deep Blue Sea". Out in April, and still no home of its own here. Perhaps viewing it on a double bill with "Brief Encounter" might help. It is rather the flip side ... the woman who leaves and the woman who returns home.

It wasn't so much the story that had merit, but rather Davies' extreme obsession with nostalgic detail that sucked me right in. If I was forced to guess the set designer I would swear that Wong Kar Wai's man had taken up roost in London, and at times his photographer Christopher Doyle, too! The screen is so rich and dense with period detail, and not the sachrine style of the Merchant/Ivory home beautiful flavor. My eyes were mesmerized. How and why did this slip through the cracks.

But do pass on the DVD director commentary. Davies must be getting a bit dotty. He can only tell you what you are already watching, and praise to no end every person that had anything to do with the film.