Ava DuVernay's A WRINKLE IN TIME, based on the Madeleine L'Engle book

Some of the character design is giving off fudderwacken vibes.

i can't see this. it's far too bright. in my mind this book was dark; everything was at night; it was stormy; everything was shrouded in mystery. what is this garish double rainbow bullshit

I dunno, I think this'll be entertaining in its own way and don't really care about if it's 'the book' or not.

That was certainly a great recipe for the Hobbit movies.

i reread the book a month ago (second reread as a grown-up) and found myself thinking that the actual plot, like the planet with the ppl who all act the same and the evil computer or whatever, is the weakest part of it. but everything else -- the interaction between meg and charles wallace, the three visitors, aunt beast -- is wonderful. i think l'engle, much as i love her books and her characters, was kinda bad at plotting. everything about wind in the door is incredible except the actual point of the story, which involves an incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness fight inside a made-up microorganism.

It looks like a kid's movie for kids, unlike the book, which (while not my fave) does not talk down. It and Phantom Tollbooth.

i can't see this. it's far too bright. in my mind this book was dark; everything was at night; it was stormy; everything was shrouded in mystery. what is this garish double rainbow bullshit

sounds like you need a happy medium

It’s not fun to look at, and the line readings throughout all the trailers are so, so bad.

A Wind in the Door has the dumbest New Age-inspired climax ever. And who cares about Sporos?

i'm afraid to reread swiftly tilting planet which i recall had a cool framing story and then a lot of stuff that felt imported in from other more boring books.

I can't see how Swiftly Tilting Planet would even work, given there's a whole bit about the Welsh explorers or princes who ended up in North America well before Columbus and somehow helped reshape Native American culture. THAT'LL go over well.

It's got that bad early 29th century romance folded into it. More Echthroi please!

wrinkle in time suffers from lack of echthroi, who i always found genuinely scary. maybe it's the fact that they're constantly being likened to birds.

Echthros-Mr. Jenkins was the best

then they can make Wind in the Door 2: Echthros vs Skeksi

wow this looks really bad. I loved this book as a child and have a distinct impression of the imagery it created and this is not that by a significant margin.

It's quite remarkable to me how many people I know who consider A Wrinkle in Time one of the favorite books of their childhood yet who have never read the sequels. Even though the first book ends on one of the most brazen cliffhangers I can think of!

I don't know how old I was before I learned The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe was also one of several books. And not even the first book, right? Aren't there several Oz books as well?

yeah there are a ton of oz books

lion witch and the wardrobe is indeed the first of that series unless you go by the new 'chronological' sequence which to me is heresy

I recall reading them all but honestly I'm very hazy about what took place. The mood and the strangeness of everything is what stuck with me.

There are something like fifteen Oz books written by Baum and then at least that many written by other authors. Now there's a 'franchise' whose perpetual lack of exploitation (or, rather, myopic exploitation of nothing beyond the first two or three books) is both mystifying and relieving.

It's quite remarkable to me how many people I know who consider A Wrinkle in Time one of the favorite books of their childhood yet who have never read the sequels.

Could be as simple as A Wrinkle in Time being on a lot of school reading lists but the sequels not being on them... if you didn't read much outside of school, you might think "oh yeah, that's a great book" without really knowing there are more in the series. And it's a markedly different (and weird) book compared to the other standard school reads, so it would stand out.

wrinkle in time does end with an absurd cliffhanger but it's never taken up in any of the sequels, and the three mysterious visitors are never seen again -- tho we do get other characters who are more or less stand-ins for them.

Mrs. Which >>> Blajeny

awful-sounding Lucasfilm name too

akm otm re narnia sequencing. possibly the v first thing i was ever a tiresome hipster about, gets me misty

Magician's Nephew has way more impact if you're already familiar with Narnia, never understood why they would suggest reading it first. Also the huge jump in time from Nephew to the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe makes the surprise! time jump at the start of Prince Caspian way less interesting

Seeing the trailer was incredibly jarring in that I had no idea what film it was for until the end, and thought.. wait, this is A Wrinkle In Time? I know I read it uncountably many times as a kid but apparently the image of it in my mind was completely different.

The second time, I was able to immediately connect characters and events to their on-screen representations, but there's still this cognitive gap between what I thought the book was describing and how they've realized it on screen

Like Josh, I read The Lion unaware that six other books succeeded it, which made the disorienting opening chapters of Prince Caspian more effective: I didn't get to PC until three months after The Lion, mirroring the kids' own confusion about what had happened in the interim.

To start with The Magician's Nephew, follow it The Lion and The Horse's Boy is a...strange way to enjoy the series.

i too thought lion, witch was a standalone until my aunt and uncle gave me the boxed set of paperbacks for xmas

that was literally the best present i ever received

whoever did this chronological c.s. lewis box set thing is a monster, btw

magician's nephew has so much more impact if you read it after reading most of the other books, i can't imagine it'd have much of an effect at all if you didn't already know who aslan or the white witch were.

the ideal narnia box set would have lion/witch/wardrobe first, magician's nephew last, and omit the last battle

and Lewis does Jadis' Big Reveal rather well, and the book ends beautifully.

Anyway, this Friday! (Well, Thursday for me.) I think it'll work.

welp

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/a-wrinkle-in-time-review

I couldn't make last night's screening, but the reaction was...not good.

Saw a trailer for this today and for all that the cast is exciting, it looked like some Inception-lite foolery

Mind you it looked a DAMN sight better than the trailers for Duck Duck Goose and Peter Rabbit, which are going to ruin waterbirds and Britain respectively

"Kaling is tasked with delivering little inspirational tidbits from the likes of Rumi and, in perhaps the film’s most groan-worthy moment, Lin-Manuel Miranda."

hooo boy

This really does look like some Last Airbender shit.

There's just no way Disney can make a good movie out of a L'Engle novel. The DNA is just totally incompatible.

Honestly I'm kinda amused at how L'Engle would have reacted to her specifically Christian book turned into something NOT that!

By reciting Charles Wallace's rune from A Swiftly Tilting Planet?

"So why are you Welsh again?" "Look, shut up."

The book has a particular homespun charm and sheer weirdness that's impossible to pull off at the scale the studio intended. Plus, how do you show IT in 2018 without the audience rolling in the aisles?

i get Golden Compass vibes from this, though i think this is probably more expensive.

Seventies Disney could have made a good movie out of it... like, call John Hough and let him take a crack at it

decidedly mixed reviews

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/5450-the-daily-ava-duvernay-s-a-wrinkle-in-time

This is a weird movie to spend a hundred million dollars on . The story could be served by ten million and some far-out editing.

While waiting in the theater lobby before Black Panther this weekend, I spent several long moments standing before the Wrinkle In Time display and contemplating the random assemblage of objects pasted on Oprah's face, and I could so clearly visualize her character breaking into an impromptu futterwacken. It was disheartening.

Anyone heard the Sade song?

if the book is filmable, it seems to really want to be a mid-budget 70s/early 80s thing with a lot of eerily-lit and grainy/ugly uncanniness. like a "something wicked this way comes" or "watcher in the woods," or "children of the stones" ... something slow and unsettling. something that feels like the old book jackets. this seems wayyyy too bright, colorful, and pacey.

xpost -- yup, it's a treat.

As Meg’s precocious brother Charles Wallace, young Deric McCabe shows plenty of pluck, but his character’s shtick soon grows grating.

sounds about right

I haven't read L'Engle in a long time, but I recently found a copy of this children's book she did.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51bOPO1IC8L.jpg

I got it because it has nice Giotto prints, but L'Engle's style has this amazing tone for a kids' book, like Biblical cadence mixed with simple writing for kids.

Jesus was spared from the slaughter because Joseph had taken Mary and Jesus and fled into Egypt.
When Herod was dead, again an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "FEAR NOT! Herod is dead. Take the child and return to the land of Israel, for those who wanted to murder him are now dead."
Did Jesus know about all the babies killed because of him?

Peter said, "Lord, I am prepared to go with you, even to prison and to death."
"And I say to you, Peter," Jesus said, "that the cock will not crow today before you deny all knowledge of me three times."
Judas left the upper room. And it was night.
And Judas went out into the dark.
Into the dark.

Caiaphas then tore his clothes in the prescribed ceremonial gesture. And they all agreed that Jesus deserved to die.
Peter wept bitterly.
And Judas went out and hanged himself.

They spat at him, took the reed, and hit him with it. How is it that human beings find it easy and even, alas, pleasurable to hurt another human being? Jesus came to live with us to show us how to be human, truly human; and for this love he was betrayed, mocked, feared.
Will we ever learn to be human?

I love her so much.

Okay, just saw it and hands down GREAT, simply wonderful -- it made me absolutely happy to see a film that quite simply avoided cynicism. Earnest in a very moving way, a fusion of the original book's plot and general characters and DuVernay and team's skills. There's absolutely a ton going on on various levels in terms of making a very mid-century and white American story a much more current one on many levels, and then expanding on it -- and believe me, it's a story that aims directly at a young female audience and, from my own inevitably removed perspective, surely hits several bullseyes over and again. Plus it's just gorgeous to look at. Sorry any cynics, this is a keeper.

glad to hear it!

I don't want to see it, but my daughters - young and female both - do, so I will let you know if they feel inspired and empowered.

I took children to see it and they loved it. Especially the two 12 year olds girls. They were crying, gasping, hiding their eyes, immediately requesting to see it a second time, etc. Agree that it's nice to see a children's film that is sincere. And also not animated - so sick of the look of cgi kids films and I think my children are too.

Some lovely songs to hear ultra-loud in the cinema too.

I only just discovered the other day that Sade briefly emerged from hiding to record a song for the soundtrack before disappearing back into the ether.

I really didn't care for this at all, and even my son - who's fairly uncritical of most movies - was pretty 'meh' and preferred the book. Too brightly lit and colorful as noted upthread, it needed more eerieness. Fudderwacken mention not far off the mark.

My kids (10 and 13, girls) and wife were all meh.

My 8 year old nephew was disappointed in it. He loves the books.

saw this on an airplane and my god it is atrociously bad. principal kid actors put in a great effort (Meg and Calvin were great, Charle Wallace was... OK) but it's like... did anyone involved even read the book?

yeah really glad i skipped this one

i'm guessing they're not filming the sequels?