The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen

[poliphilo]

It's maybe not something you confess to in these parts but I'd never read a comic book before. At least not since I was nine. The comic book I tried to read then was a Western adventure. I loved westerns but this one floored me. It was partly because I didn't know how to read a book where the illustrations weren't illustrations but carried the text and partly because the story was more warped and adult than anything they showed on TV-  and ended on an image of a Boot Hill grave marker that was so creepy I couldn't bear to look at it.

45 years later I'm trying again.  I'm reading Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and thinking it's fab. It helps that, like Moore, I'm just crazy for all those late 19th century adventurer types. Allen Quartemain was my hero when I was about twelve and it's great to meet him again. I like it how his opium habit serves as a passpoirt from his morally-uncomplicated world to ours.

The story is fluff, but that's not the point, is it? The point is atmosphere. The point is dreamscape. Moore and O'Neill's mythic, steam-punk London is a place you could lose yourself in. And the dream goes deep. It's a collaborative work. The dreamers who have helped in the dreaming include Haggard, Doyle, Verne, Wells, Stoker, Dickens, Poe, Hogarth, Dore, Cruikshank, Phiz, Beardsley, Hokusai, Utamaro, Lang, Hitchcock  and- no doubt- all sorts of people I've never even heard of.

I've been wondering why it is that great comic books make lousy movies- and I think I've just hit on it. It's about speed. In a movie you have to go at the director's speed- which these days is insanely fast- while if you're reading a comic book you're going at your own speed and can pore over the pictures and pick up the cool details in the corners and let the ghosts in the text talk to the ghosts in your brain. To do justice to Moore and O'Neill's vision you'd want a director prepared to go at Bresson's pace or Ozu's and- well- that's just not going to happen, is it?

Comments

[dakegra.livejournal.com]

I think you've hit the nail quite squarely on the head there. Pacing is everything, and whilst you can freeze-frame a DVD to get the detail of a particular scene, it breaks the flow of the story.

I've not read LXG, but have seen the movie. It was ok, but I bet my bottom dollar that the original is far superior.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen the movie. All I really know about it is that Sean Connery thought the director was an ass and that they fought a lot. The book is really rather fabulous.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Don't for the love of all that is holy go see the movie if you've read the comic books and liked them.

Really.

It's an okay movie, but it's not in the same league as the comics, and makes changes that make no sense just for the sake of it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning. I'll steer well clear.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Unrelated to LXG, but related to comics, one of the things that Scott McCloud talks about in Understanding Comics is the gap between frames.

As he says; if we see a man raise an axe in frame 1, and we see it buried in someone's head in frame 2, we fill in the gap between the frames. Good comics play on that, using it to make the reader become invested in the story in a way that few film-makers or novelists do.

It's not better or worse, but it it something that's common in comic narrative and relatively rare in other ouvres.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

So the reader of the comic becomes as it were a co-creator- imagining the action he/she hasn't been shown?

Yes, that's a very good point.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Exactly - at the very least, a good comics artist can draw the reader in deeply by offering this co-creation.

Doesn't happen in all comics - but then not every film-maker is a Hitchcock.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

Connery apparently objected to Quartermain being a drug addict, and things just went downhill from there. Too bad it's his last film--I always wanted to see him in King Lear, but he wasted his last years in the movies.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Is that it? Then Connery is a chump.

I've always thought Connery's film career was underwhelming. For someone who's been around so long and appeared in so much he's made very few first rate movies.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

The same could be said of many old school film stars, such as Clark Gable, the one Connery probably resembles most. But I went and looked on imdb to refresh my memory, and Connery appeared in a handful of pretty good films: From Russia With Love, Goldfinger, Marnie, The Hill, The Offence, Zardoz, The Wind and the Lion, The Man Who Would Be King, Robin and Marian (one of my favorites), Time Bandits, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Russia House. The problem is that his choices within the last two decades have been truly poor. (They still are--I think he made a mistake by refusing to appear in the upcoming Indiana Jones film.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I agree about Robin and Marian; that's my favourite Connery film. And you've left out the Untouchables.

But there are good films and there are films that are better than good- films that define the zeitgeist- and- apart from the early Bonds- I don't think Connery has ever appeared in one of those.

[senordildo.livejournal.com]

I think riding the zeitgeist once is good enough--like Gable, Connery did it once. It's hard to think of many movie stars who did so repeatedly, especially since when we look back at a star's best films, we often do so out of their original context. Jimmy Stewart did so a few times, but even in his case, films like Vertigo or The Naked Spur weren't regarded as zeitgeist-shaping movies at the time of their release. In retrospect that we look at them as genre classics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Vertigo may not have made much of a splash when it was first released, but it's now regularly voted one of the greatest movies of all time. Stewart had at least three distinct personae- the all-American everyman, the western hero, and the screwed-up sonofabitch he played for Hitchcock. For me he's the actor of the century.

I don't think there's anything in Connery's back-catalogue (alas) that's going to be reassessed the way Vertigo has been.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

The movie SUCKS. And that isn't a term I use all that often. Sean Connery was even bad in that movie and it's difficult for him to be bad in anything.

I"ll have to see if I can look up the comic book...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Maybe- since he apparently hated the movie and its director- he was being bad on purpose.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

YES! YES!! That's exactly what it is. I hate comic book movies. I watch like an idiot every time thinking, "this time will be different." It never is. And this is why.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Are there exceptions to the rule? I can't think of any.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Sin City and 300 are both good adaptations of their original material; that is to say if you liked the comics, you're not automatically going to hate the films.

Sin City manages it by changing the way that the scenes were filmed so that the framing and action take their cues from comics.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Sin City was an interesting experiment but I felt it side-stepped the challenge. It's a kind of hybrid, neither comic book nor cinema but something in-between

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

What about the cartoon stuff like Galaxy Express 999 and Ghost in the Shell?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen those. I'm a huge fan of Studio Ghibli, but the non-Ghibli anime I've seen (and to be honest I think I've only seen one) left me feeling that character and story had been overwhelmed by the grandiosity of the visuals.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

My dad got me watching the Galaxy Express 999 series when I was a wee child and for father's day I bought him the collection. He was so moved I recalled (really, I was, like, 4) that he vowed to wait for me to watch. So I'm heading out over the Pacific to see him and watch! I'll tell you what I think then! ;)

As for Ghost in the Shell--I love it. But I'm to close to that one to properly assess. I highly recommend it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I've been aware of these movies for a while and sort of circling round them. Some day I'll pounce.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

Yay! Tell me all about when you do!

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

I can't believe I didn't mention 300. Have you seen that? Also a comic by Frank Miller.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I haven't. I've read about it though.

Miller's films seem to come as close as it's possible to get to transferring comic books to the screen frame by frame. This is interesting, but cinema has its own grammar and I think what Miller is doing is a dead end.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

Really? I disagree completely. I think it is really expanding the horizons of film and shifting the focus from story to imagery in a way even the most image-centered directors have been unable to do!

Time will tell.

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

OMG I just wrote that, ha ha ha! Cheers!

[besideserato.livejournal.com]

Sin City did not suck. But then it was co-directed by its creator, comic book writer and artist Frank Miller.

[bodhibird.livejournal.com]

If you like Moore's LoEG, I recommend you give his Promethea or Watchmen a try. The former is an amazing romp through the Western Magical Tradition with a kick-ass heroine, and the latter is a gut-wrenching exploration of what society might be like if superheroes actually existed.

I did not know Moore's work and hadn't read a comic book since they did a Dr. Who series decades ago until queenofhalves gave me the gift of the first Promethea collection. And yes, the LXG movie is dreadful.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

An enthusiastic second vote for Watchmen. Haven't read Promethea.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the recommendation. After this first taste I'm going to read everything of Moore's I can get my hands on.

[internet-sampo.livejournal.com]

I felt the same way about comics also. Then my wife started getting graphic novels from the library (see yesterday comment). I like the comix League better than the movie. Especially the references to fortean happenings.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I believe Moore has completely disowned all the movie versions of his books-

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Which brings us to 'V for Vendetta'.

Again - one of Moore's better comics and, this time, a movie that doesn't suck. It changes the storyline to an extent, but far less than they might. And some of the changes that Moore rants about actually work.

And the most powerful scene they take almost frame by frame from the comics.

I'd suggest reading the comic first, but the film isn't bad at all.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I need to get hold of V for Vendetta.

I enjoyed the movie version of From Hell- (I'd forgotten that until now)- but I expect I'm going to like the original more.