Travesty Most Fowl
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I loved the Artemis Fowl books. I just saw the trailer for the movie and I feel like crying.
Artemis is a teenaged boy, a genius and ruthless criminal mastermind, assisted by his hulking bodyguard, Butler. The scriptwriters dragged out all the tropes to make him a naive kid guided by the Wise Old Black Man to Save the Planet from Ancient Evil and Rescue his Father . . . they turned him into a Disney Princess.
Look guys, you bought the movie rights to a wildly popular series of books because you wanted a ready-made fan base. But that fan base knows the character and knows the story. They don’t want you to ‘improve’ it, they want you to put the movie in their minds up there on the screen, like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.
Yeah, yeah, Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench and awesome special effects, great stuff. But couldn’t they have done it with a new story, one that nobody knows so the fans wouldn’t mind if it was butchered?
Joe Doakes
Hey, you’re lucky they didn’t turn him into an ass-kicking girl.
December 6th, 2021 at 6:00 am
The wikipedia article on the Artemis <film is devastating. It looks like Disney knew they had a stinker on their hands when they finished the film in 2019. The DEI paradigm is death for the arts.
Last month Amazon launched the Wheel of Time, an epic sword and sorcery series. I could only make it through the first ten minutes. It was something like the LOTR films, but with female heroes who tell us, over and over, that they are heroes because they are female, the only power that can save the world is a female power, and they need to watch out for the men who are jealous of their female power and will try to stop them. Because that is what men do!
December 6th, 2021 at 6:45 am
The Critical Drinker is the anti-PC film reviewer: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSJPFQdZwrOutnmSFYtbstA
December 6th, 2021 at 9:17 am
You tube doesn’t allow VPN or Tor connections…just as well
December 6th, 2021 at 1:01 pm
MP, that’s how the books are. Women are the leaders in a village (the village wisdom). The Aes Sedai are women who can channel the one true power (sort of like the force). Men can’t channel cuz backstory, now it makes men mad and then they destroy the world.
December 6th, 2021 at 2:36 pm
BPCT, I have no problem accessing youtube with expressvpn in anonymous mode.
December 6th, 2021 at 2:38 pm
Kinlaw, maybe I am too sensitive to these things, but I remember reading at least part of a Wheel of Time novel years and years ago, and the misandry didn’t seem quite as bad as what I saw on Amazon.
December 6th, 2021 at 3:44 pm
MP, I have read through book 4, but have not seen any of the show, but I have no doubt that they really pumped up the man hate.
December 6th, 2021 at 9:04 pm
I read the first six books of Wheel of Time before Jordan’s plodding plotting wore me down. I’ve watched the WoT episodes so far, and it seems to me that the misandry is less in the show than in the books, though the show has posited that one of the women could be the “Dragon Reborn”, but I think that was more plot contrivance than social contrivance. In fact, the shows have increased the role and prominence of the male Warders who guard the Aes Sedai and all but eliminated the women constantly talking about what idiots the men are. Meanwhile, some of the Aes Sedai are coming off as real cast-iron witches. Overall I think the changes in plot in the TV version are good, even if some characters and plotlines have been eliminated; I think each episode is getting better. The TV version has done a good job in creating more in-depth characterizations of two of the main male characters, Matt and Perrin. Rand, the actual main male character – and, spoiler alert – the Dragon Reborn has been given short shrift so far.
I also think it’s interesting how we have both WoT and Dune hitting at the same time. In both stories you have a group of super-women, or “witches” (Aes Sedai and Bene Gesserit) struggling against the coming of a male Messiah-type character.
December 7th, 2021 at 7:40 pm
I am giving Wheel of Time a second chance. The misandry seems diminished after the first quarter hour.
But it still irritates me because of the genre. There is a market for fantasies set in a pseudo-Medieval world that never existed. SF has fewer constraints on it than does the genre of “heroic fantasy.”
I fall back on Tolkien, because while some fantasy writers have been compared to Tolkien, none has been said to surpass Tolkien.
And Tolkien’s characters did not depend on magic saving them. They depended on their virtues, mostly courage.
When I think of the Wheel of Time I wonder what holds its axis fixed.