Letters to the Editor
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Marquez 10, Filmmaker 0
The only good film adaptation of a Marquez story was "The Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Evil Grandmother". Irene Papas played the grandmother. It wasn't made my americans of course. Every time somebody takes up the challenge to set one of Marquez's fabulous tales to film, I cringe. I can only pray that it isn't an American director and crew that try it. Please, I pray, if they have to put it on film, let it be Latin American or European producers/directors, even an Asian one would do better than an American would.
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Yes, Ballsee, but . . .
even Franceso Rosi couldn't make "Chronicle of a Death Foretold" into a good movie. That prose, glorious as the best of it is, may not translate -- even though stories like Cholera and Chronicle are such good stories they seem naturals.
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Surprised?
Like anyone who reads Marquez, I was stunned by the prose, even as translated. He is possibly the greatest living writer, an expert at conjuring an earler time and far away place and making it seem very real.
However, I was deeply disturbed by Cholera, more so than by his other works. His everyday matter of factness when writing about his "hero"s pedophilia, promiscuity and incest were most troubling to someone with my early 21st Century sensibilities. Presenting this character as a moral exemplar of some sort of rare and all consuming love made me squirm and I felt that even as an example of the realtivity of moral values it went a bit far. It has always seemed to me to represent what is in fact wrong with the latinate cultures. The "hero" objectifies women, whether it's the exagerated "resepct" for the love object or the degredation and disregard shown for the neice. Neither is seen as human.
I haven't seen the movie, and now of course I won't see it. In fairness it seems to me that there may not have been any way to capture the thought provoking aspects of the novel in a form that would be remotely acceptable to contemporaries. Marquez, put simply, may be unfilmable at presemt.
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So much failure so little time
First off, whether or not it's great literature is largely subjective. I've found the author to be unreadable which has never stopped college profs from asserting it's the greatest thing to get jammed down my throat, ever.
Secondly, great books make crappy movies. They ALWAYS make crappy movies. Why? Because they're books. Not movies. Movies are movies, they are 2-2.5 hrs of entertaining sounds and pictures. Not books.
Third, movies as art, are as different from books as art as paintings and dance are different from one another. Just because actors speak words does not make it the same thing as literature.
Bad books die (except in college) while bad movies are immortal.