INHERENT VICE (No Major Spoilers)

Started by cronopio 2, December 02, 2010, 09:51:28 AM

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modage

But this is WB's show so we haven't gotten the stealth PTA-cut teasers or anything along the way.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

modage

Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

jenkins

this is a terrible part of literary adaptations, it is. i wish i hadn't seen this because, you may not believe it, but pynchon hadn't seen the movie when he wrote the book

i'd throw down a fiver that pta had nothing to do with its creation and i hope he doesn't support it. it's prettier but it's like

modage

Are you kidding me?

It is fucking beautiful and he 100% had everything to do with its creation/approval. It could not be further away from the hideous cash-in that you posted.

I'd be surprised if it isn't the final movie poster.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

jenkins

not kidding. you saved the book for after the movie, didn't you. the book has always been far from your mind. the art is pretty, you got it

Axolotl

Jenkins posted an extreme example but it's a valid point when a movie starts encroaching on the source material for marketing purposes. Modage, it may not matter to you because your appreciation/respect for the book and the author is secondary to the film, and yeah as a poster this is 100x better than the one they went with so they should've released it as that and left the book alone but that's asking too much of publishers these days and it's not really that bad compared to-






polkablues

Book covers are just a form of marketing anyway, and movie tie-in covers are a marketing gimmick that has proven to sell more copies of the book. They don't do any harm to the book itself, and if they offend you, you can always buy an older edition. But as long as the publishing industry is still an industry, they're going to do it, because IT SELLS MORE BOOKS. Nobody suffers from more books being sold. So if they're going to do it, they might as well make gorgeous covers like the Inherent Vice one.

That Dante's Inferno cover is one of the funniest things I've ever seen, though.
My house, my rules, my coffee

jenkins

what i'm saying is they harm the book because they burn into the reader's brain an image already created which wasn't the author's intention

it's normal, agreed. just thought we had some classy people working on this. but polka is right, they're going for what sells, and modage is right, it's so pretty

polkablues

Quote from: jenkins<3 on October 30, 2014, 03:05:51 PM
what i'm saying is they harm the book because they burn into the reader's brain an image already created which wasn't the author's intention

My point is that book covers do this by their inherent nature. I'm sure there are that rare handful of covers that are personally overseen by the author, but in most cases it's the publisher making a marketing decision: what image can we present that will sell the most copies of this book. The only difference with this one is that it has faces of people you recognize.
My house, my rules, my coffee

jenkins

Quote from: polkablues on October 30, 2014, 03:44:25 PM
but in most cases it's the publisher making a marketing decision: what image can we present that will sell the most copies of this book. The only difference with this one is that it has faces of people you recognize.

like a romance novel, which chooses models who appeal to the base fantasies of the reader. pta fans can gobble this up because they're reminded of their crushes

but yeah, it's the principle of the situation i'm weighing. and i think it weighs rotten. conversely, i do think they did their best and, fact is, we know for sure, for absolute sure, that some pta fans would've never read pynchon if not for this movie. which matter is at the end of the day far more important than what i think about the new book cover

modage

But this is an illustrated collage, not a tacky photograph and has no more bearing on burning itself into the reader's brain than the image of a Ghostbusters car with surfboards does now. If someone sees the movie, or the trailer, those also infringe on a pure reading of the book. The same way that, even if you haven't seen The Shining, even if the book cover has nothing to do with the film, if you were to pick up the book, the pop-culture stained imagery from that movie are already burned into your brain.

As far as infractions of artistic purity go, it's relatively minor in the scheme of things. The original cover is just some artists interpretation of the book to begin with that the author signs off on and they probably sign off on the movie version as well. If they don't, they at the very least signed off on the principle of their work being adapted for film.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

jenkins

don't you realize you right now fabricated the idea of that as a ghostbusters car? that was your imagination man. a little neural link you made. those are fun. why didn't you do the same with surfboards? don't be timid

you're simply able to invent less for yourself when the book cover creates a direct path to so many links the filmmaker himself invented. and that's a bummer. however you say it, i think that's a bummer. but it's what's happening and i gotta take my breathing exercises

modage

Right and other than the image of Joaquin as Doc, the psychedelic book cover allows you to draw plenty of your own connections. I think we can deem it SPOILER-FREE.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

jenkins

i do think i'd have a tricky time saying the book cover elicits more from the reader than the movie itself, which draws us into a debate over the existence of literary adaptations in their entirety, and i got no beef with adaptations. because i think literature and cinema are two separate art forms that should exist on their own terms. and i think this is muddled marketing, so maybe i'm in my "sensitive" region

Axolotl

Quote from: modage on October 30, 2014, 04:17:08 PM
The original cover is just some artists interpretation of the book to begin with that the author signs off on and they probably sign off on the movie version as well. If they don't, they at the very least signed off on the principle of their work being adapted for film.
When you reach a certain level of influence as an author and you can affect how your book is marketed, the book cover is definitely used make a deliberate artistic point, for Pynchon that would be Vineland onwards, whose cover is a 1930s photo of a seattle logging camp and is significant thematically to book, as are all his other later covers including Inherent Vice whose cover predates the book and was something Pynchon stumbled on to. The name of the surf shop as well as the scratching out and replacement of "endless" with "eternal" become significant when associated with the book.

Of course I acknowledge the cynical/realistic arguments about commercial viability, but that doesn't mean I can't complain about it or believe that either Pynchon or PTA had a say in the matter.