Movies
Welcome to Movies, a community for discussing movies, film news, box office, and more! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about movies and movie related things. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!
Related Communities:
[email protected] - Discussing books and book-related things.
[email protected] - A place to discuss comic books of all types.
[email protected] - LW's home for all things MCU.
While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
-
Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
-
Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
-
Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
-
Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.
Regarding spoilers; Please put "(Spoilers)" in the title of your post if you anticipate spoilers, as we do not currently have a spoiler tag available. If your post contains an image that could be considered a spoiler, please mark the thread as NSFW so the image gets blurred. As far as how long to wait until the post is no longer a spoiler, please just use your best judgement. Everyone has a different idea on this, so we don't want to make any hard limits.
Please use spoiler tags whenever commenting a spoiler in a non-spoiler thread. Most of the Lemmy clients don't support this but we want to get into the habit as clients will be supporting in the future.
Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.
view the rest of the comments
Idk, at a point it becomes its own weird marketing gimmick. Like, you can make a movie with period accurate 17th century English dialog, because, despite antiquated turns of phrase and whatnot, it is by and large the same language we speak today. Middle English (which is the more appropriate terminology for the vernacular in post-Norman Conquest Britain, not Old English), by contrast, requires significantly more effort to decipher, and I think it is unrealistic to expect any audience put up with a whole movie written in that way, and this is to say nothing of how period accurate pronounciation would further obscure the meaning of words which would otherwise be recognizable in writing.
To illustrate my point: 1600s English
1300s English
Can you piece together what Chaucer is saying there based on context clues and a decent vocabulary? Sure, it's not impossible, but, again, I believe a modern production written in that way becomes more about the filmmakers choice to use that language to tell the story than it is about the story itself. It's worth pointing out too that the language used in The Canterbury Tales is 100-200 years more modern than the time period of this film. Period accurate dialog would sound even further removed from modern English.
Now, with that being said, Eggers clearly has a talent for writing evocative period styled dialog so I'm happy to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I am a little wary of the marketing machine already spinning up here.
I'm confused by your argument. It's a marketing gimmick...that won't work because modern audiences don't tolerate period authentic dialogue? That doesn't sound like a marketing gimmick.
What I mean is that period accurate dialog, or at least a respectable pastiche of such, has become a part of Eggers' brand. It's expected of his work, and is a bullet point used to drum up interest in his projects, as indicated by the fact that they included it as a feature of note in its announcement to the public (and potential investors, depending on how early in development the project is).
My argument is that, in this particular case, I feel like writing "period accurate" dialog will make an inferior film to one which approximated it without slavish devotion to authenticity at all costs.
My rationale for that position is that it's not very immersive to require annotations which explain key things in modern parlance. I understand folks that saw the Witch and came away from that thinking that the antiquated dialog helped immerse them in that film. I felt the same way. Ditto for the Lighthouse. I would not have felt that way if more than half the dialog sounded Shakespeare ran through a couple rounds of Google Translate, and then spoken through a mouthful of oatmeal. On top of which, every now and again the movie stopped to read Wikipedia at me about colonial life in Puritan New England. I like to do that on my own, after the movie, for embarrassing lengths of time, thank you very much.
As for the contradiction on using period accurate dialog to drum up interest despite its potential to actually shut the audience out, well, clearly Hollywood does not share my qualms, so I don't think it's a contradiction at all. Not all marketing is good marketing. Sometimes, people will try to sell you something using features that you actively dislike, and, when you indicate your rejection, their response is to double down on what was prepared because you are clearly wrong about what you want.
All of that being said, I want emphasize that Eggers has earned the benefit of the doubt, and its ridiculous to write off a project based on the few scraps of information they had ready to share at the time of its announcement. I'll be very curious to see how he approaches the problem, I'm just saying I very much consider "the film will be written in Middle English" to be a problem to be solved, not an automatic gateway to immersion.
I guess if you are arguing that it's targeted marketing to a specific audience, then I can see your point. But that's not the impression I got when you mentioned "any audience" in your previous reply. Regardless, I believe this is an artistic choice he makes and insists upon as opposed to a gimmick pushed by studios to hype up his films. His most recent film did not include this supposed gimmick, so I'm not sure how that applies to your "doubling down" theory.
The core of my argument is that I think, on its face, the idea of using period accurate Middle English in your werewolf movie is a bad idea that will likely result in an inscrutable film, and if Eggers insists upon it, he is letting his "brand" interfere with his creative judgment. I did not mean to imply I ever thought it was the studio's idea that he emulate period language. It's clearly a passion of his, and he's deployed it to good effect in other movies, but I don't believe it's going to be right in this particular case, the same way it wasn't right for The Northmen or Nosferatu.
I am not against the use of period language as a rule. I have stated why I believe its use in this film will have a different effect than it had in the Witch, and provided illustrative examples. You may disagree with me on that front, and that's okay, but I feel like I laid out my argument decently on this subject, and thats the root of this whole thing.
Marketers doubling down on selling points which their audience have rejected was an oblique reference to American politics that I couldn't stop myself from including. It was low hanging fruit, and I almost regret it. However, I will defend myself by saying your argument was, essentially, "it's a contradiction for something to be both bad and one of the primary selling points", and that's readily disproven.
ETA: and, again, I can't emphasize enough that I'm willing to wait and see what he does with it. It's a bad idea, in my estimation, in the sense that there are a million ways it can not work, and very few ways in which it does. However, Eggers is, as mentioned, a talented guy who clearly thinks he's got a way to pull it off. I'll be happy to eat an extra helping of humble pie if he succeeds and does not have to compromise on this point.