Nice turn out yesterday for the Threes, but turning out firstest was regular player LizC, followed in second by our pal giljorak, and in third one of my favorite reader screen names, Mundane Dolphin. Congrats, all!
They all knew, as did most of the rest of you, what film featured Steve Coogan (appearing this week in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, on DVD and available from redbox), Owen Wilson, and the Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. Granted, I tried to be a little (no pun intended) sneaky by pairing Coogan and Wilson, who play the bickering cowboy and Roman centurian in the Night at the Museum movies–so if you’re still not sure of the answer, just climb aboard the magic Inviso-Text below!
Yes it was the 2004 version of Around the World in 80 Days, based of course on Jules Verne’s 1873 novel. See, ’cause it’s literary adaptation week here at redblog. See what I did there? (Though most folks probably better know the 1956 Oscar-winning film version starring David Niven as Philias Fogg.)
The 2004 version starred Coogan in what I always describe as the “agent-grab” movie on his resume–that’s when an actor starts to get attention for cool, impressive performances in smaller indie films and suddenly his or her agent hustles the actor off to Hollywood to star in some big-budget studio blockbuster. Usually with mixed results. (Coogan was hot in the early ’00s thanks to one of my favorite music-scene films, 24-Hour Party People, and of course his Alan Partridge TV shows in the UK. Seek them out, find them! My god, the funny…)
In Around the World Coogan played Fogg with Jackie Chan on hand as his sidekick. Owen and Luke Wilson had a cameo appearance as the Wright Brothers, and Schwarzenegger made what would be his last filmed appearance before running for California Governor in 2003. (Since then his CGI head was used in Terminator: Salvation last year, and he has a cameo next month in The Expendables.)
But I’ll be honest, Around the World was my second “literary adaptation” choice for this quiz. I wanted to use Coogan’s very smart, absurdest 2005 film Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, made with his 24-Hour Party People writer-director Michael Winterbottom, but it was just too obscure a choice for the Threes. Tristram Shandy is a mockumentary about “actor Steve Coogan” (complete with all his tabloid baggage) and “director Michael Winterbottom” trying make a film adaptation of a book that truly does turn out to be “unfilmable”: the 1759 novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne.
The novel Tristram Shandy is a monster of a satiric “memoir”–I got through half of it a few years back and loved it in a “wth?” way, but it remains over there on the “to be finished” stack of books. The narrator Tristram sets out to tell his life story, but over the course of nine volumes and well over 700 pages his chronic, obsessive digressions into every single other topic under the Sun means the “memoir” never gets much past baby Tristram’s birth. The film Tristram Shandy is terrific wry British wit–not only do the attempts to film the novel continue to spin hilariously out of control (“the actress Gillian Anderson” also gets dragged into the proceedings), but the film becomes a meta-commentary on film making and the creative process (or nightmare), and in doing so actually does sort of “adapt” the central subversive conceits of the novel.
So in honor of From the Page to Screen week here at redblog, everyone’s homework assignment is to go read Tristram Shandy, watch the Coogan film, and then come back to discuss… let’s say by tomorrow?
Related Posts
 |
 |
|