come anticipate guillermo del toro's "at the mountains of madness" with me

I took it more to be like, perceptual illusions that fucked with the human mind's concepts of space and time.

x-post to max

― procedurally generated pidyn (Masonic Boom), Thursday, July 29, 2010 5:23 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

aw no man i always conceived of those descriptions as like... stuff completely incomprehensible by the human mind. not 'illusions' but i dunno. crazy n-dimensional stuff of which humans can only grasp a portion of. i like reading him next to irritating hard sci-fi authors who are super concerned w/ making their stuff scientifically accurate to a certain extent, b/c hpl goes in the completely opposite direction--if its not literally impossible w/in the realm of scientific thought than he doesnt care

my reading/interpretation follows max's - always thought this was key to the Elder Gods/Cthulhu mythos stuff, that these are things that are beyond the grasp of our pitifully limited consciousnesses, and thus when we come into contact with them, our minds are broken, are souls crushed, etc.

our souls

OK, I see what you mean. Kind of like the bit in Cosmos where Carl Sagan talks about the Tesseract and shows that weird hypercube with the 45% angles and says "now imagine if all the angles were 90%" - that it's hard to perceptually grasp, but you can imagine it. I do think there are ways of getting around that, if it's cleverly done.

I suppose what I mean by "perceptual illusion" is that the brain can't quite render it properly, so it's the kind of thing that shifts every time you look at it, in ways that it shouldn't shift if it were a natural angle.

(But then again, I always think of the towers of the Barbican of being vaguely Lovecraftian because their angles aren't 90% at the corners, so they seem to be further away and closer than they appear as you walk up towards them, because the brain keeps trying to straighten them.)

(But then again, I always think of the towers of the Barbican of being vaguely Lovecraftian because their angles aren't 90% at the corners, so they seem to be further away and closer than they appear as you walk up towards them, because the brain keeps trying to straighten them.)

Had this after a Christmas drink round there once.

No, it's not the drink, the Barbican tower really is like that. I went to a party in a flat in it, and it's just not quite square.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/85/258902697_c315f904e9.jpg

^^^^^^^puny human brane cannot comprehend

Christ, thank God for that. I was busy worrying about the nameless horror that was going to confront me at every corner, but it was just an architectural quirk. (Actually wasn't the house in The Haunting built like that? That film allus gave me the willies as well).

xpost No!!!!! (Leaves final insane thoughts on stylogram and sends to cousin)

ya i agree with max/shakey

i think you could think of some fun ways to suggest that shit though, i mean what HP lovecraft is also talking about is stuff that shouldn't literally be even write-aboutable so

can't remember the plot to this story, but i know the typical lovecraft arc - is this is going to be 90 minutes of atmosphere and then 5 minutes of face-ripping CGI?

A huge part of the story in this one is basically just the protagonists exploring and figuring out the history of the Elder Things by deciphering murals

good

xpost -- Thus my reference to that above y'see. :-D

they're probably gonna have to sex it up a bit to make the movie more palatable for most people. hopefully del toro will at least keep the mutant penguins!

by "sex it up" i of course mean "give the monsters boobs"

Or they could just adapt this

Meantime, this actually looks of possible interest.

http://www.ibtimes.com/data/articleimgs/42030-people-guillermo-del-toro.jpg

"the tits on the mutant penguins will be truly extraordinary"

xpost -- have fun with the sneak preview.

"This scenario is a complex one. Mood and confusion play large parts in the evolving story—confusion over loyalties, allegiances, identities, and even the morality of duty. In the end the investigators find great responsibilities in their hands, and discover that the burden is not one they can ever put down."

find out what happens when explorers stop being polite...and start getting real

that's in ref. to Ned's link a few posts back

Lengthy interview with del Toro, contains this:

DNY: As director, you could have gone to work for Warner Bros, doing a Wizard of Oz movie, and, I’ve heard, the studio wanted you to resurrect Superman...

Del Toro: There were other projects [he laughs].

DNY: That’s diplomatic. Why did you instead choose At the Mountains of Madness, a much harder picture to get greenlit?

Del Toro : I came out of The Hobbit, and it was the biggest heartbreak I’ve experienced as a filmmaker, because I will never know what that movie would have been. I was very mindful that I didn’t want to have a rebound movie, as happens sometimes when somebody comes off a long romance. There were very big, lucrative, beautiful projects on the table, and I was developing one of them with Jim Cameron. In my stubborn fashion, I slipped Jim the script, again, when we were meeting on that other project. He said, you still want to do that? To his credit, he said, well, let’s pursue that instead. This is the movie I most want to do. I haven’t done horror in a long time. Devil’s Backbone tries to make the ghost a victim, and not a scary character. Blade 2 is more action than horror. I really love the genre and last time I did a horror film was Mimic, and that was not a horror for the right reasons. That’s a muscle I want to flex. Frankenstein has the mitigating factor that for a length of the narrative, you favor the monster. For horror to work, you have to be afraid. You have to keep the monster in a black and white light. I mostly love monsters too much to see them in that light, but Lovecraft allows me to.

DNY: Because the villain is an otherworldly species?

Del Toro: Because the proportion is so big. When the monster has a dimension that allows you to humanize it, that’s the route I usually want to go. The cosmic proportions of the Lovecraft horror are so immense, it forces you to find humanity in other aspects of the tale. You can keep the monster inhuman, remote and scary, which is a great benefit.

DNY: Universal needed to be convinced to make this film, which is a bold play. I’ve heard there was a meeting with you, Jim, Ron Meyer and his Universal execs that swung the deal. How did you walk away with a yes?

Del Toro: Adam Fogelson and Donna Langley have always been friends of the project. The screenplay that is on the internet is an old screenplay, and the one I gave to Jim and Universal is different. When I came back from The Hobbit, I gave my Jimmy Stewart Mr. Smith Goes to Washington speech at Universal. I pitch with heart on sleeve, and Donna and Adam were moved, liked the new take and said, let’s develop it hard. But I wanted to be shooting by June next year. I didn’t want to let another year go by without shooting, it made no sense. So Jim, Jon Landau, Rae Sanchini, came with me for that big meeting. Jim and I were able to do a double tag team, talking about the world and the experience that Mountains would be. We found new ways for them to see it, and they agreed to investigate it further. We are not green lit, we are still budgeting and designing, and we are partners on this. I believe in my heart we are going to be making this movie in June of next year. We are budgeting the creatures and met with Spectral Motion and ILM, where Dennis Muren told me the sweetest words ever when he said, no one has ever seen monsters like this. That was truly one of the highlights of my fat life, a demigod like Muren saying that.

Nothing much new but:

In a conversation with 24 Frames Monday, Del Toro said he's actively engaged with the project and moving ahead with the tale of the mysteries and monsters on an Antarctic expedition. In fact, just last week Del Toro met with studio Universal for the so-called summit meeting in which he walked executives through his concepts and models for the movie. The script is also ready, he said.

So how soon could shooting begin? This summer, he hopes, and possibly as early as June, according to the filmmaker.

And lest you think producer James Cameron is simply putting his name on it while he's off working on "Avatar 2", think again: The "Terminator" director was present for the summit meeting and has been offering Del Toro some notes.

"In his subtle style he said to me, 'I have a few notes, but I have one fatal flaw [that I see in the script],'" Del Toro recalled. "He pointed out one thing that was big. I've been thinking about this for 35 years, and he pointed out something I'd never seen."

"There's not enough of that mystical rainforest giggling children shit."

man i wish i liked gdt more as a storyteller... he's smart and has great taste and has his heart in the right place but with a couple exceptions his movies are usually kinda bad

great del toro profile from new yorker, has some info on this:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/02/07/110207fa_fact_zalewski

shub niggurath's clit

Can someone debunk the Tom Cruise lead rumors so I can relax and know this movie will be excellent?

Even though he would guarantee the movie actually being made which would be nice. But I just don't want him on screen.

tekeli-li tekeli-li

Well, no need to fret over Tom Cruise,I guess . . .

After three months of deliberation, Universal Pictures, the studio that gave del Toro money for pre-production creature designs, has remained unwilling to give the director a greenlight, citing concerns over the film’s budget and likely R rating. On Monday, del Toro withdrew from the negotiations, and that night at ten-thirty he sent me a short, mournful e-mail:

Madness has gone dark. The ‘R’ did us in.

Del Toro had told me that he would not compromise on the film’s rating, even though a film rated PG-13 would have a much easier time attracting a mass audience. “Madness,” as he imagined it, would not be particularly gory, but he insisted that he needed the artistic freedom “to make it really, really uncomfortable and nasty.” Del Toro had hoped that a greenlight for “Madness” would mark a new golden age for horror films:

Del Toro envisaged “Madness” as a “hard R” epic, shot in 3-D, with a blockbuster budget. Creating dozens of morphing creatures would be expensive, and much of the film needed to be shot somewhere that approximated Antarctica; one of the most disquieting aspects of Lovecraft’s novella is that the explorers are being pursued by monsters in a vast frozen void, and del Toro wanted to make the first horror movie on the scale of a David Lean production. But a “tent-pole horror film,” as del Toro put it, hadn’t been made in years. High-budget productions such as “Alien” and “The Shining” had been followed by decades of cheaper thrills. “The natural flaw of horror as a genre is that, ninety-nine per cent of the time, it’s a clandestine genre,” he said. “It lives and breathes—‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ the first ‘Saw,’ ‘The Blair Witch Project’—in dark little corners that come out and haunt you. Rarely is there a beautiful orchid that blooms.” He mentioned Hitchcock’s “The Birds”: “It was a major filmmaker using cutting-edge optical technology and special effects. It was a big-budget movie. It had Edith Head designing costumes, it had all the luxuries. And it was appealing because it had all the polished aspects of a studio film.”

According to Deadline.com, Universal executives felt that “Madness” would need to make at least five hundred million dollars in worldwide grosses in order to turn a profit, considering global marketing costs. It is possible that del Toro will now present the project to another studio.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/03/guillermo-del-toro-madness-has-gone-dark.html#ixzz1G3d845aI

Aw, fuck.

Sometimes it's just better than way.

nice article by Drew McWeeny about the state of the biz as it relates to 'mountains...' being scrapped

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/is-it-fair-to-blame-universal-for-the-state-of-the-industry-today

Universal badly wanted to be in the Guillermo Del Toro business. It was a priority to them, and when they made "Hellboy 2: The Golden Army," that was in large part a show of faith on the part of the studio. They wanted to make "Frankenstein" with Guillermo. They wanted to give him a home for his particular voice and vision. And when it came down to it, after a few years marked by expensive filmmmaker-driven flops and sure-thing properties that failed and cult fanboy favorites that no one turned out for, they looked at that R-rated $150 million horror film and said, "We can't." Not that they didn't want to, or that they don't believe in Guillermo, or that they want to make crap instead. They looked at the money they've made, the money they've lost, the choices that have led them to this place, and they said, "We can't."

:(

It was a no brainer that this would never be made the second they announced that del Toro wanted to make it. Besides, Carpenter already did the mutating gory monster in Antarctica thing as well as anyone ever will. For a visionary, del Toro is having some trouble getting the vision-thing working for him. "Madness" was never feasible, "Frankenstein" would be a disaster, "The Hobbit" was a poor fit. And yet, "Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth," his best movies, were both original scripts. Stick to your strengths, big guy! You've got great, original ideas. Make a movie out of your great, original ideas!

it's silly, you could totally make Mountains PG-13. The book isn't that violent, aside from mutilation-discoveries that could totally be managed at Star Wars-level gore.

50-ft penguins are the elephant in the room

50-ft penguins are the 50-ft penguins in the room

the cancellation of this project is so tragic and i hope he gets to make this movie one day. there are very few directors i'm as interested in seeing what they come up with as del toro.

it's silly, you could totally make Mountains PG-13. The book isn't that violent, aside from mutilation-discoveries that could totally be managed at Star Wars-level gore.

OTM

dude had a hard R vision

Not dead yet, getting better, etc.

Somewhat of an uh.

GDT entering competition for unluckiest filmmaker in the game

though i'm looking at the imdb for pacific rim and the cast is p awesome

so basically space jockeys = old ones, aliens = shoggoths

(seriously fuck off to anyone who thinks that's a "spoiler")

You heartless cynic etc

Nah it's just kinda obvious that's the route they're gonna take with Prometheus. Lovecraft invented so many sci-fi/horror tropes that are still being used that it's pretty easy to spot the influence.

Xenoarcheology

lame

Enjoyed the first episode of The Strain! (Don't know if it's being discussed elsewhere) Very well put-together nonsense.

I would have watched that on an airplane

Wouldn't mind seeing more of the concept art, that one image was pretty good.