Adaptation - vo.rs

The Based on a True Crime Boom and Its Ethics

Thu, 28 Nov 2024 13:00:00 +0000

Somewhere around the launch of Ryan Murphy’s Dahmer series in 2022, the true-crime dramatisation stopped being a genre and became a utility, like true-crime podcasts and true-crime cold-case Reddit threads before it. The Dahmer show topped charts worldwide, and while it did, the sister of one of Dahmer’s victims — Rita Isbell, who had delivered a famous victim-impact statement at the 1992 trial — went on the record to say no one had asked her, and that watching her own courtroom breakdown recreated for streaming felt like being robbed. That is the true-crime boom in one image: enormous profit on one side of the screen, a family that was never consulted on the other. The films and series that survive scrutiny are the ones that took that imbalance seriously before a frame was shot. Most do not.

Annihilation: The Studio's Nerve Failed, the Film Didn't

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 10:00:00 +0000

Paramount had a problem with Alex Garland’s second feature, and the problem was that somebody had watched it closely. Late in 2017 the film tested badly. Audiences came out confused and rattled, and David Ellison — whose Skydance money was inside the picture — pushed for changes: soften Natalie Portman’s biologist, warm up Jennifer Jason Leigh’s psychologist, and rework an ending that sends a paying crowd home without the reassurance they came for. Producer Scott Rudin held Garland’s contractual final cut and declined to open it. Left with a film it no longer knew how to sell, the studio arranged an exit. Paramount kept theatrical rights in the United States, Canada and China, and handed the rest of the planet to Netflix, where Annihilation surfaced a few weeks after its American opening as something you scrolled past on a quiet Tuesday.

Anime's Live-Action Curse

Sat, 13 Jul 2024 13:00:00 +0000

There is a graveyard at the edge of the film industry, and it is full of live-action anime adaptations. Dragonball Evolution (2009) lies there, a name spoken in whispers, so reviled that a screenwriter later apologised to fans in public. Nearby rest the 2017 Ghost in the Shell, the 2017 Netflix Death Note, and the swiftly cancelled Cowboy Bebop series of 2021. The curse is real, it is remarkably consistent, and it is worth understanding, because the reasons a great anime turns to ash in live action reveal something precise about what each medium can and cannot do.

Why Every Horror Remake Softens the Ending

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 13:00:00 +0000

There is a pattern you start to see once you have watched enough double bills of an original horror film and its later remake, and it lives almost entirely in the last ten minutes. The set-up survives. The kills survive, often upgraded. The monster gets a bigger budget and a cleaner silhouette. Then the ending arrives, and something has been quietly adjusted. A death is walked back. A survivor who should not survive walks out of the woods. An ambiguity that made the first film linger for decades is resolved into a tidy final scare. The remake has flinched, and it flinches in a specific place, because the last reel is where a horror film either keeps its nerve or spends it.