Trailer: https://youtu.be/tV_IhWE4LP0
Based on the book by Ransom Riggs.
Eva Green, Asa Butterfield, Ella Purnell, Allison Janney, Terence Stamp, Rupert Everett, with Judi Dench and Samuel L. Jackson
I’m confused. I’m seeing the words “Tim Burton” without “Johnny Depp”. The soundtrack will be by Danny Elfman, right? RIGHT?!
Don’t know this book at all, but, given the trailer, my immediate reaction is “This is X-Kids, with the part of Xavier played by Eva Green?”
The book is actually really good. It’s on the high-end of YA stuff. It covers a lot of concepts you don’t normally find in the regular YA genre like The Holocaust, war’s effect on a person and how that in turn impacts the family, lost love, etc. On the genre side, you have time manipulation and the peculiar powers.
I got a copy of this for Xmas several years back. I read it and remember really enjoying it at the time, but now I can remember literally nothing about the story, plot, characters, etc. Just a complete blank to me. Huh.
Oh, dear.
[quote]
The book features a large cast of characters, from the eponymous children to the many adults who throw them into peril. The idea of seeing them portrayed on-screen thrilled readers of Riggs’ book hoping to see a diverse group of actors take on the challenge. Yet in reality, the few dozen characters that make up the movie version of Miss Peregrine’s are predominantly white, with Samuel L. Jackson’s Barron being the only notable exception. Sitting down at New York’s McKittrick Hotel to discuss the film, director Tim Burton tells me why that’s the case.
“Nowadays, people are talking about it more,” he says regarding film diversity. But “things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct. Like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black. I used to get more offended by that than just… I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.”[/quote]
For those that haven’t read the book, much of it takes place in a 1940’s pocket time loop on an island off the coast of Wales. I’m not sure how diverse 1940’s Wales was, but my gut instinct is “not very.” That would seem to be the logical reason for the casting, but you could always diversify the cast a bit since it is a YA fantasy. That said, Burton’s answer is pretty awful. “Let’s have an Asian child and a black” is all kinds of odd phrasing for 2016.
Well, the book is pretty white - but there is an interesting reason as to why. The author has interspersed hundreds of vintage photographs throughout the book to give the reader an unusual perspective. I always wondered if he found the photographs and then incorporated it into the book, or if he looked for photos that matched what he was looking for.
In any regards, the inclusion of these vintage photo’s take away much of the “minds eye” that people would typically do with filling in a book. Now, do film makers have an obligation to make a movie more diverse?
I don’t find huge offense to Burton’s quote - you can obviously see he understands what he just said might come away with a wrong perception and offers to offset this a bit by his blaxploitation comment - IMO he’s just saying he was tired then of the PC culture and using that example as his denunciation of having to maintain PC diversity indices in the current movie - which as I pointed out above, is based on a book with photos.
I’ve read it & am looking forward to watching it this weekend.
The book is a unique way of story telling with the vintage photos. It will be interesting to see how it translates to screen.
It was the former, apparently. The author had found a number of weird-looking vintage photographs at flea markets and wrote the book around the images.
That’s interesting as he has a pretty significant acknowledgement section thanking a lot of these collectors. I thought maybe her used them or perhaps he meet them through collecting the photos - like a special interest group for vintage photos
My son & I went out tonight & watched this.
I remembered when I saw the Lord of the Rings, watching the opening scenes, it felt like Peter Jackson had faithfully reproduced not just the words, but the emotion, and the setting so pitch perfectly? That’s how I felt the first 30 minutes of this film. It really nails the book. It wasn’t done word-for-word, but rather, the adaption and the way they tell the opening was really well done. I would be hard pressed to point out anything missing.
Things accelerate after the first 45 minutes and the last 1/2 hour is total divergence from the books with what I would suspect is a neatly wrapped up ending with no need for a 2nd or 3rd film. I say that as I have only finished the first two books and still have the 3rd to read.
While the film clocks in at just over 2 hours, I wish I would have got to know children more. Just like the x-men, you get to know all their powers, if only briefly for a few times. If I had one complaint, it is that Asa Butterfield is a little wooden in his delivery.
This is a pretty scary movie. I agree with the PG-13 rating, and I would imagine this is a hard film to market. On opening weekend, our theater only had about 15 people in it for the 7pm showing - they did all they could by scheduling it for October and near Halloween,
I saw this today with the family. All had a good time, but the 8 year old got a bit scared at times.
Also, Eva Green’s eyes are amazing.
IMHO - they should have gone for an more hardcore version of this film. Every time it started to go somewhere it would pull back with stuff like bumbling bad guys or other such silliness to justify it as a “kid’s movie” - when it was just a little too creepy for in the mainstream kid world.
I’d have to agree with making it way darker. I just finished the 3rd and final book and it’s a dark series. It doesn’t match the book’s tone in the 3rd act (and for the record it completely deviates from the book).
It honestly don’t know how you market this.