Margaret's comments (member since Mar 05, 2009)

Margaret's comments from the Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group group.

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Jackie wrote: "Right off the bat, it's different from the book's synopsis, the FF is 21 years in the book, only 6 months for the series. I didn't know it was a book, so it's now on my To Read shelf..."

I knew a woman once who used to say that she hoped the afterlife was going back to those key moments when she had had to make a decision to go in one direction or another with her life, and making the other choice - the one she didn't make the first time. I always thought it was an interesting idea.

Jackie wrote: "Jim, yes, it is, I started a new discussion in TV Weve Just Watched: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2146...

Here's a copy of the first posting:
Based on The Witches of Eastwick nov..."

Hi Jackie -
I liked it too, although I imagine John Updike is whirling around in his grave and I did think it was a little too blatantly DESPERATE HOUSEWIVESy right at the beginning, with the voiceover and so on. I could almost hear the pitch meeting: "It's Desperate Housewives - only in New England! And with witches!" But I thought it looked great, glossy in just the way you want in a Guilty Pleasure Show, had a nice self-aware sense of humor about itself, and what seems to be a very charming and strong cast. Paul Gross, who's playing Darryl, is a big deal in Canada - sort of the Canadian Kevin Kline - but really only got noticed here in the import series SLINGS AND ARROWS (see link below), where he plays the beleaguered artistic director of a Canadian theatre festival.
And BTW, that series is a great and sometimes heartbreakingly accurate picture of what it's like to work in theatre - crazy, funny, uplifting, exasperating, exhausting, exhilarating - as well as just wonderful television.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_17?u...

Arnie wrote: " It's that so much in this country has to be seen as a competitiopn.
I agreed with George C. Scott the year he refused the Oscar for "Patton" because he thought the whole award show mindset was d..."

Actors were so marginalized for so long - just a heartbeat away from being considered vagrants, and for many years "actress" was virtually a synonym for "whore" - that I guess I can understand in the big historical picture why at some level it's so important to them to be honored and recognized for what they do, even if it's only by their own! But you're right, Arnie, so much of the time comparisons between one performance and another are pointless, apples to oranges. Comic performances almost never win, and they're much harder to bring off and take a lot more skill than the big sturm-and-drang dramatic ones. I actually have a category of my own now when I see movies, which I call the "Give-Me-My-Oscar-RIGHT-NOW!" Performance - see Renee Zellweger in COLD MOUNTAIN or Daniel Day Lewis in THERE WILL BE BLOOD - and sadly the Academy is almost inevitably seduced by them.

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Margaret wrote: "Hi Jackie! Sorry not to have gotten back to you sooner, I wanted to wait until I had time to answer your question properly..."

Margaret, thanks for the interesting posts.
Just one..."

Thanks Joy! I debated whether to go with the whole title or the short version - I gambled and I lost!

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Margaret wrote: "Indeed. As a casting person I was really struck all through by how conscientious and well-judged all of the casting on the LOTR ..."

Margaret, I agree, the casting was great. For..."

OK, I have to confess that I haven't read the LOTR books, so I don't know what Tolkien had to in mind about elves. Jackie? Can you shed some light on this? My own feeling about the choice they made for the movies was that for visual and artistic reasons they wanted people who physically echoed the tall slender trees that the elves live among.

Jackie wrote: "Margaret,
Oh, I have to pick your brain, LOL. What a rare opportunity to ask this question to someone in casting! Indulge me, if you will.
When casting for a book-turned-film, do the casting di..."

Hi Jackie! Sorry not to have gotten back to you sooner, I wanted to wait until I had time to answer your question properly.

The first thing to know is that for the most part Casting Director is a facilitating and collaborating position, and not a decision-making one. While she (and I'll go with a feminine pronoun, since the majority of film casting directors are women) may be responsible for the casting of extras and smaller speaking roles, principal casting choices are always ultimately made by the director, sometimes with input from the studio and/or producer - although a clever CD can sometimes influence a choice by how she positions an actor in the audition process, or by championing them a bit if she has that kind of relationship with the director.

A thorough CD would probably read the original novel for her own information, but by the time she comes into the process it's already a couple of steps removed from the source material, and she necessarily has to work with the vision of the screenwriter as expressed in his script, and the vision of the director, which if she's lucky are the same and bear some resemblance to the novelist's original. If not - and we know that four people reading the same book can easily have four different ideas about the characters - then part of her role is to reconcile everyone's ideas in a way they can all live with, and perhaps introduce some new ones. Either way, her job is to pull together everybody's casting ideas, add her own , and make it possible for all the potential candidates to get seen. She may do a preliminary screen without the director, if they're long time collaborators, to eliminate actors who are definitely wrong so as not to waste the director's time; but many good directors (Ron Howard is one) like to see everybody themselves.

How closely a film's casting resembles the characters in the book can depend a lot on the book's fame and popularity. LOTR, the Harry Potter films, Gone With the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird are all examples of books whose notoriety and fan-base created a kind of positive pressure that resulted in extremely detailed and relatively faithful casting. But this isn't always true - the Narnia movies are a casting train wreck.

Other factors can come into play that may make weird things happen. The book may have been bought by or for a particular actor, who may or may not be what the author envisioned; the studio may have an actor they're trying to push, or one they know can bring in big box-office receipts on the first weekend (although there are fewer and fewer actors who can actually do that, it's the franchises now that have the most opening-weekend impact); someone important may have a girlfriend or boyfriend whose career they want to advance (yes, that still happens!); or there may be a longtime relationship between the director and a particular actor, and then you get Tom Hanks in the Robert Langdon movies.

There are a lot of variables in the process, and many many ways it can all go completely off the rails in that way that makes us as an audience go, what on earth were they thinking! If you're interested in knowing more about the nuts and bolts, with some good dish on the side, there's quite a fun book by Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins, who together run one of the top three casting offices in Hollywood, called A Star is Found.

Jackie wrote: "One of my favorite voices of all time is Patrick Stewart, another Shakespearean actor. I will watch him in anything, from Star Trek:TNG to The Lion in Winter. Outstanding actor and wonderful spea..."

...and they were actually young actors together with the RSC back in the '70s, along with Ben Kingsley and David Suchet, and Alan Howard, a British theatre actor virtually unknown in this country with one of the great stage voices ever, honey and brass, who actually provides the voice of the One Ring in LOTR.
It's my biggest gripe about the way young actors are trained in this country, there's almost no focus on developing a voice that has color and range, dimension and resonance. I always feel that if you're going to stand on a stage and talk for three hours, you'd bloody well better have an interesting voice! To be honest, it's my one disappointment in Viggo Mortenson's performance as Aragorn - his speaking voice is to me relatively colorless and reedy, and it's placed very high (from the throat rather than from the chest and diaphragm, like our RSC guys), so that when he really needs to go for passion and volume it only gets higher and tighter and thinner. You can get plenty of range out of a tenor instrument (Olivier had one) but you have to really train it. Maybe it just bothers me more because he's surrounded by such terrific speakers - not just McKellen, but John Rhys Davies, and the great Bernie Hill who plays Theoden, and Hugo Weaving - and the contrast is more evident.

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Ian McKellan was so magnificent.."

Indeed. As a casting person I was really struck all through by how conscientious and well-judged all of the casting on the LOTR films was, right down through the extras, and I empathize with the poor ladies who did the open call for the Elves - by the end of a day looking at hundreds of tall willowy beautiful blonde people they both felt like gnomes! One of my favorite Ian McKellan moments is in the first film at the end of the Mines of Moria sequence, when he turns on the Balroc and roars "You shall not pass!" That's when you need you a Royal Shakespeare Company actor - a line you almost cast for when you're in the process - they have such huge vocal resources to call on when you need the big effect.

Jackie wrote: "Copy of my response in Movie thread:
The battle for Helm's Deep was an huge part of the book too but it was much more than a just a battle. What leads up to it, how important for Rohan it is, T..."

And a copy of my reply to Jackie...! I swear I'll get this right the first time eventually!

Jackie wrote: "Margaret,
Did you find the Easter Egg where Andy accepts the MTV Award( or some award) and Gollum comes out and rips it out of his hands, going on a tirade how it is him who should have gotten it?..."

You know, I've not done much Easter Egg hunting on DVDs, but I'll definitely try to locate that one!

I agree about the filming of the battle for Helm's Deep, I thought it was wonderfully done. Battle sequences can get so muddled and confusing if they're not shot and edited well, and this one for me was terrifying and thrilling and moving from beginning to end. (The arrival of the Elves always makes me cry.)

I have to confess to a preference for Boromir over Faromir, I suppose because he's so much in the mold of the classic tragically flawed hero and that complexity makes him more interesting to me. Plus, the tradition of the imperfect hero who redeems his failings in the end always touches me. And let's face it, Sean Bean had never in his entire career been that good before and probably never will be again, it seems to have been one of those magical connections between an actor and a character that no one, least of all the actor, can predict.

Jackie wrote: "Margaret,
Did you find the Easter Egg where Andy accepts the MTV Award( or some award) and Gollum comes out and rips it out of his hands, going on a tirade how it is him who should have gotten it?..."

You know, I've not done much Easter Egg hunting on DVDs, but I'll definitely try to locate that one!

I agree about the filming of the battle for Helm's Deep, I thought it was wonderfully done. Battle sequences can get so muddled and confusing if they're not shot and edited well, and this one for me was terrifying and thrilling and moving from beginning to end. (The arrival of the Elves always makes me cry.)

I have to confess to a preference for Boromir over Faromir, I suppose because he's so much in the mold of the classic tragically flawed hero and that complexity makes him more interesting to me. Plus, the tradition of the imperfect hero who redeems his failings in the end always touches me. And let's face it, Sean Bean had never in his entire career been that good before and probably never will be again, it seems to have been one of those magical connections between an actor and a character that no one, least of all the actor, can predict.

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Yesterday I watched the film based on the second part of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy, _The Two Towers_ (2002) by J.R.R. Tolkien.

It held my attention, but there wa..."

Sorry, Joy - posted this earlier on the "good movies lately" thread and then realized it really belonged over here!

Hi Joy - It's a funny thing, TWO TOWERS was my least favorite of the LOTR films when I saw it in the theatre, but after watching it several more times on DVD it's come to be my favorite, maybe because it has so many elements of the traditional heroic epic. Gollum is a combination of CGI and very sophisticated motion-capture of a freaky brilliant performance by the British character actor Andy Serkis, who actually played all those scenes with the other actors and whose talent gives Gollum his emotional detail and nuance. (That's him doing the voice, by the way - no computer boost, all actor-craft!) There's some fascinating footage on his work and the creation of Gollum in the TWO TOWERS extras on the "ultimate version" DVD. I thought he should have gotten a special Oscar for it, he took the whole idea of CGI characters to a completely new level. (You'll see him in his human form as Smeagol at the beginning of RETURN OF THE KING.)

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Earl wrote: "This is a PERFECT example of the usefulness of Roger Ebert's reveiws! He gives the movie high marks, but reading thru it, filtering it with my Roger-Ebert-detector, I surmise that I'm ..."

Hi Joy - It's a funny thing, TWO TOWERS was my least favorite of the LOTR films when I saw it in the theatre, but after watching it several more times on DVD it's come to be my favorite, maybe because it has so many elements of the traditional heroic epic. Gollum is a combination of CGI and very sophisticated motion-capture of a freaky brilliant performance by the British character actor Andy Serkis, who actually played all those scenes with the other actors and whose talent gives Gollum his emotional detail and nuance. (That's him doing the voice, by the way - no computer boost, all actor-craft!) There's some fascinating footage on his work and the creation of Gollum in the TWO TOWERS extras on the "ultimate version" DVD. I thought he should have gotten a special Oscar for it, he took the whole idea of CGI characters to a completely new level.

Arnie wrote: " I didn't read Compulsion, but saw the movie---Brad Dillman and Dean Stockwell turned in excellent performances as the twisted pair, and of course Orson Welles was magnificent as Darrow.
The mo..."

From what I've read the stage play, produced in 1957 also with Stockwell and Roddy McDowall in the Dillman role, made the homosexual aspect of the Leopold/Loeb relationship a little more palpable - not in the script itself, but in the subtext the actors were able to put subtly into their performances. McDowall was apparently brilliant, and Stockwell was really upset that the film's producers passed over him for the handsomer but less versatile Dillman. Did you know there's actually now a Leopold & Loeb musical? It's a chamber piece called Thrill Me, and although it's hard to imagine a story less suited to musical theatre, it's pretty powerful, almost a little pop opera.
Have you seen Rope, Hitchcock's riff on the story with Jimmy Stewart as the Darrow figure?

Arnie wrote: " Hi Margaret,

My wife and I have an arrangement like that---three nights a week i go out with the boys, and then three nights aweek she goes out with theboys! just kiddin'--I hope)

Anyway,..."

You're so right about Mme Streep. I'm a theatre casting director out here in Seattle, so I can say with a fair amount of confidence that there are very few actors about whom one can say they've never given a bad performance, but I think she's one of them. Even when the material is sub-par, she gives it her all and somehow makes it seem worthier than it is. And some of the stuff she does is just -- well, actors are magical to me anyway, but every now and then they do something that really blows my mind, like OMG that scene in "The Hours" where she's breaking egg after egg and then completely breaks down. Unbelievable. I also love that she's now the age that she is and is embracing everything that's beautiful and sexy and wise about that with such radiance and humor. An example to us all, ladies! (She would be at my imaginary dinner too.) I've heard the same things you have about her Julia Child and can't wait to see her/them!

Arnie wrote: " Am currently reading a book about the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920's, For the Thrill of It", by Richard Baatz (2007)---fascinating so far."

Hi Arnie - welcome to the group! Thanks for reminding me about this book, I remember reading the reviews when it came out and thinking I should put it on my list, and then it went off the radar somehow. I read Meyer Levin's Compulsion when I was in my teens - weirdly, it was one of the very few books my grandparents actually owned, who knows how or why, and I found it on their shelf one summer in Florida - with what I suppose is probably the standard combination of horror and fascination. The account of Darrow's impassioned defense was a game changer for me and the beginning of a lifelong interest in his career and closing arguments. I've always thought that if I were giving one of those imaginary dinners where you could have any ten people from any place or time, Darrow would absolutely be at my table.

Seven of my girlfriends and I are going together to see "Julie & Julia" on Monday afternoon and then afterwards cooking a big Julia-inspired dinner to share. It's our first "themed" Girls' Night and we're really excited about it. Even if all the recipes go wrong, there'll be plenty of wine, cheese, fruit and good companions, so it'll be fun no matter what!

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Nina wrote: "... Everyone seems ga ga over Julia and Julie around me. ..."

Below is the IMDb webpage for "Julie and Julia":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135503/

I can't wait to see the movie."

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "My next Netflix movie is based on the book _The French Lieutenant's Woman_ (1969)
by John Fowles, which I read years ago.

The Netflix description:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~..."

I'll be interested to hear what you think about this film. I loved the book, and thought the movie was beautiful to look at and in many ways very compelling - although I agree with the Netflix comment that the present-day part of the story, invented for the film, is weaker and for me not an effective cinematic substitute for the modern-day voice of the novel, which as I remember is largely authorial and mainly an exploration of what it means to write and to be a writer. Books about books/writing are always tough to translate to film, I think. But Streep and Irons are terrific, and the cinematography is superb - the first close-up of Streep is unforgettable.

Here's a quote from my Little Black Quote Book from the novel, Fowles talking about novelists:
"You may one day come under...a gaze. And you may - in the less reserved context of our own century- be aware of it. The intent watcher will not wait till you are asleep. It will no doubt suggest something unpleasant, some kind of devious sexual approach, a desire to know you in a way you do not want to be known by a stranger. In my experience there is only one profession that gives that particular look, with its bizarre blend of the inquisitive and the magistral; of the ironic and the soliciting.
How could I use you?
Now what could I do with you?"

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "As for other "literate" writers being easy to read, I'm not so sure about that..."

I hear you, Joy - I actually can't read Louise Erdrich at all, and I haven't really liked much of Toni Morrison either, she always feels to me like she's a little too much in love with her own voice. I guess when I say "easy to read" I'm really making a distinction that may or may not be valid between the actual use of language/clarity of expression and those elements that get us interested and keep us engaged by the story and its characters, i.e. structure, plot and character development. Contemporary writers often seem to emphasize style at the expense of storytelling, and I too have a very tough time with that kind of writing in a novel - although I have to say that an author who really relishes language and uses it in an exciting way can keep me in it longer than one who doesn't, even if the book overall isn't necessarily doing it for me. I used to doggedly finish every book I started even if I was *hating* it, but at some point I decided life is both too long and too short to spend any of it reading something I don't like! My general rule of thumb now is that if the author doesn't get the hook in in the first 50 pages, I'm out of there. My sister once took a writing seminar at Columbia with John Irving, and one of the things he said was, "As a writer I need to assume that anyone picking up one of my books has about a hundred other better things they could be doing with their time. It's my job to write a first page that makes them want to read my book instead." I've never forgotten that, and as I get older I wish more writers kept it in mind!

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Margaret wrote: "Over the weekend I watched a British mini-series that was so delightful I just have to let you all know about it, and it was such a surprise - one of those "if you liked that, you ..."

Hi Joy - If it's a while since you visited the Bennetts, yes, it would probably enhance your enjoyment of LIA to refresh your memory of the story; part of the fun is definitely in seeing the ways that Austen's plot goes off the rails with the advent of a "new" character from the 21st century! I do love the old Olivier/Greer Garson one (Garson was far too old to play Elizabeth, but catches her spirit so beautifully that it doesn't matter), but going into Lost in Austen I'd absolutely go with the terrific Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth version - it's the most detailed and sticks closest to the novel, and it's also just wonderfully done. You can feel everyone's love for the material in every frame. (Besides, there's at least one inside joke in LIA which specifically references that particular version!)

Joy H. (of Glens Falls) wrote: "Margaret wrote: "I've been holding off on The Gravedigger's Daughter until someone I knew had read it, so I'm glad to get your endorsement! ..."

Margaret, I'm on p.318 (of 582 total p..."

Joy, it sounds from the experience you're describing with TGD as if We Were the Mulvaneys is another of JCO's novels you'd find very satisfying. It's also driven primarily by character and narrative, and isn't so much weighted down by the author's enormous brain! I do sometimes think that her reputation can be more intimidating than many of her books really are - she has a magnificent imagination, and she's a tremendous stylist, and I always feel that very confident, literate writers are "easy" to read even when they're tackling pretty esoteric material.