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My husband, Jonathon, is sitting in the chair at my other desk, just behind me. He’s spotting me. I actually wanted him to type this blog while I simply dictated, but he made the screen come up, showed me how to get to a new post, then went to the other chair, and said, “I’ll be right here.” But he wouldn’t do it for me. He’d help me, support me, but he won’t let me hide behind my fears. Every once in a while I need that. But knowing he’s in the room, ready to take my technicalogically challenged hand, helps. It helps a great deal.
Also I now know the interface has been changed. Nothing throws me like my tech being changed without me knowing it.
Enough about phobias and other things, on with the blog.
Let me start by saying we all loved the mummy movies with Brendan Fraser. They were fun, told a good story, characters you cared about, a nice mix of fun and chills. The Egyptology wasn’t the best (one of my friends has a degree in anthropology, and cannot watch the first movie at all, and has never seen the second.) Their use of Anubis as the bad guy in the second movie was an odd choice if you look at Egyptian religion, but I still enjoyed both movies. They are also movies that all of us can watch and enjoy, including Trinity, who is nine, and was younger when she first saw them. Wonderful movies, and they have about as much to do with real folklore and myth as the early mummy movies did in old Hollywood. But it still works, and I love the old monster movies.
Having said all that, Jonathon and I saw Van Helsing.
We’d heard mixed reviews. Two of our friends loved it. Two of our friends hated it. We got a night to go see a grown-up movie, without the kiddo. With such mixed reviews, and both of us being such fans of both action movies and monsters movies Van Helsing seemed a good choice. We thought, we’ll go and see for ourselves.
First, if one friend had not prepared me for what the movie was going to be like, I would have been really unhappy. If you just embrace the fact that Van Helsing is like an early centuary James Bond, then you’re happier. It’s not such a shock.
But . . . How many of you have acutally read the novel DRACULA by Bram Stoker? Those who have probably know where I’m going with this. I was okay that they changed the name of the character. In the book it’s Abraham Van Helsing. Gabriel Van Helsing is still close enough, and someone probably thought Gabriel was a sexier name. Okay, fine. But why take a character that is somewhere between fifty, close to sixty, small in stature, German, with the accompaning accent; ex-holy man, metaphysician, a learned scholar, a thinking man; if what you’re wanting is a six foot, or more, cowboy, who never seems to think, only react, and shoots and kills his way across Europe? I don’t use the cowboy comment loosely, have you seen the coat and hat, it’s so cowboy, if they had better tailors. Don’t get me started on the Ana, the female lead, and the leather corset that left her breasts and thus her heart so it would be exposed to any sharp talon, or the high-heeled boots. You know a lot of people complained about Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a lot of things, but you never saw Buffy running around in crap like that unless she was caught out doing something else, and the monsters just showed up, the corset and heels seemed to be Ana’s day gear.
On the plus side, the Frankenstien’s monster was incredibly well done, well acted, the best part of the movie for us. Also the movie did give Dracula and his brides something to do besides bite necks. It was one of the first times I’ve seen a good motive given to Drac and his lovers. Cool. Unfortunately, without giving too much away, let’s just say that the biology sucked. My biology degree often spoils movies for me, but I just couldn’t even figure what the deal was with this some of this part of the plot. Good idea, the execution of it, left me puzzled.
But my personal biggest complaint was that as my books get more and more attention from Hollywood, I’ve started watching movies differently. This movie, Van Helsing, would have been as if they bought Anita, then cast a nearly six foot blond, blue-eyed, skinny model as Anita. But at least Anita does kick-butt and take names later. We do have enough violence to keep Hollywood happy in the books. Van Helsing was so different from the orignial character, that it would be more like they took Anita and made her a quiet retiring bookworm, who thought her way through, and never touched a gun. That is how different the book, Dracula’s Van Helsing and this cowboy were. I’d have been happier if they’d have changed more than the first name. Just don’t pretend that this is Abrham Van Helsing. Let this character be Gabriel Something Else.
Movie’s like Van Helsing help make me happy that I havn’t signed a movie or t.v. deal. I do not want to leave the theatre to my book on screen, shaking my head, and saying, “Well, it was pretty.” It’s gotta be more than just visually pretty. Do not even get me started on how the vamps and werewolves walk and crawl up the walls. Everyone does it in the moves. I know it’s stunning visually, but it’s not logical. It’s not good biology. Yeah, spiders, flies, bats, rats, mice, can climb walls, and sometimes across cielings, but not by magic. Their biomechanics allows it. They have claws or little spiny hairs on four limbs, or more. Geckos have sticky pads. You gotta have a way to stick to that wall. My vamps levitate and sometimes fly, but I see it as a type of energy use, that acts as lift to push against gravity. You don’t just stroll along the wall and cieling. It is bad biology.
So many movies of late, just can’t seem to resist a good visual, to hell whether it makes any sense. What happened to logic? What happened to research? What happened to thinking, why, or how, a thing works, not just can I do it. LORD OF THE RINGS were thinking man’s movies. Of course, it was based on books where someone thought, but they could have been ruined so easily, and they weren’t. I would love for someone to bring that kind of time and attention to my books. I would love to sit in a movie theatre in the dark and see my vision that closely followed on the screen. But I fear, greatly, that it will be like Van Helsing, pretty, visually appealing, and with the best of intentions, it will get away from the person who promised so much, who had every intention of doing the ‘right’ kind of movie, and I will come out of the dark, shaking my head, and saying, “Well, it was pretty.” I don’t think I could bear it.
There are only two ways to let Hollywood take your book and work it up to a movie or television show. First, you take the money and put the entire project out of your mind. It does not effect you. Second, you find someone that will put in writing in a contract what you want and need to feel secure. I’ve actually had one person willing to do that, but was told no studio would bank-roll it, because they wouldn’t trust me, a writer, not to flake, and pull the plug if I had that much power. I am almost pathologically incapable of the first way, so number two, it is. But even if I could find someone to agree to it, and we could jump all the hurdles, it would mean that I would have to be much more involved in the movie process than any writer ever is, which no one will like, or allow, and I don’t know if I could ride herd on a movie project and write my books. I might have to concentrate on the movie and put the books on hold while the movie got nursed into existence. My schedule doesn’t really allow that kind of time off. I also don’t know enough about the different jobs and skills that go into a movie. It’s so much more complicated than most people relize. (Yes, I have started researching movies and how they are made, and how parts of them work. It’s like writing a book by committee, but with other people doing the writing. Very odd.) I guess there is a third way. Someone in the movie business could convince me that they share my vision, will give me the written contract to prove that they can be trusted. It would have to be someone who had enough clout to protect the project all the way through the process. What I’ve learned is that no matter how sincere the movie people are, most of them do not have the clout to protect the baby. They mean well, and they will fight for it, for “our vision”, but if they aren’t a thousand pound gorilla, then someone else who is a thousand pound gorilla, will come along and force their vision on ours. Movies are ruled by the strong, or the lucky, or the rich. Strong is not the same as rich, though a lot of people in a lot of businesses mistake the two. I can’t imagine how anyone would convince me to trust them. My background taught me at a tender age, to trust no one, and that the person smiling at your face, usually has something painful behind their back. More than a decade in the publishing industry sort of finished off my basic cynisim. Dealing with even the edge of Hollywood has sort of solidified it. Oh, well.
I let Jonathon read this over, and I’ve missed his biggest complaint about the movie Van Helsing. It did not tell a complete story. We got to the end of the movie and thought, so, or so what? We needed more background on this new character that they called Van Helsing. We needed something explained. We both came out of the movie, puzzled. It was one of those movies that should have worked, but didn’t. Should have been satisfying, but wasn’t. Having said that, as we are coming out saying how horrible it was, we overheard other people saying how great it was. It was lovely to see all the omage’s to so many old movies, but that wasn’t enough to sustain us through the film. I’ve heard from another friend who loved it, so make up your own mind, as for us, sadly, we came away feeling like someone missed the point, or we did.