God of Thunder and Rock'n'Roll (archmage) wrote,
God of Thunder and Rock'n'Roll
archmage

I'm a huge fan of Edward Gorey's work, have been most of my life, ever since the first time I was exposed to The Gashleycrumb Tinies. So, I should be ecstatic at the thought of Gorey's The Doubtful Guest being made into a movie.

But I'm not, really.

First off, it's live-action. I don't know about you, but just about every comic-strip-to-live-action movie I've seen has been mediocre at best. You take Gorey's art out of Gorey's work, and half of what made it great is gone. Plus, a lot of Gorey's mastery was his poetic style and his way with words. Besides that, like most of his work, this is a short piece. It's bad enough when short stories and novelettes are stretched into full films, this is WAY shorter, so you'll have to add a LOT. In the modern family/kids-film market, that tends to mean sight gags and slapstick...which is quite the opposite of Gorey's macabre sense of humour. So, you're going to take away his art and make it live, then take away his words and make a full-length movie out of it. It's no longer Gorey's work.

Another thing that already bothers me...
"It's hard to come up with a creature that you've never seen before in any medium..." Jim Henson Co. co-CEO Lisa Henson said.
Excuse me? That's a bald-faced lie; he's quite clearly there, doing his thing, throughout Gorey's piece. It's not as if this is a prose-only piece. And, if you haven't seen it, I don't even have to go get the book off my shelf and scan it to show you: a simple Google Image Search turns up more pictures than you could shake a stick at. I really hope this isn't a careful set-up for "making look however the Hell we want" instead of being true to Gorey's work.

Needless to say, I'm apprehensive.
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