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| After Wes Anderson's Fantastic Fox, what next? | Ben Child The results may be excellent, but should the offbeat director have been allowed to ride roughshod all over Roald Dahl's cherished tale?First of all, let's get one thing straight: Fantastic Mr Fox is a great Wes Anderson movie. It's sharper than The Darjeeling Limited, hangs together better than The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, and bears comparison to my favourite from the king of quirk, The Royal Tenenbaums, for sheer, rampant zaniness. It's as though the strong foundations of a simple Roald Dahl story have given Anderson scope to freewheel like he's never freewheeled before: there are more amusing mild personality disorders and examples of foolish but utterly believable human behaviour than in any of the above movies, and very little feels shoehorned in.This is remarkable, because Fantastic Mr Fox is not a Roald Dahl movie at all. It bears little relation to the original story, other than that it features a crafty vulpine who outwits a nefarious trio of farmers named Boggis, Bunce and Bean (one short, one fat, one lean). Dahl's Mr Fox was not an overgrown schoolboy incapable of ignoring his feral instincts to steal chickens for the sake of his family's safety. And his son, played here with wry insouciance by Anderson regular Jason Schwartzman, was not a sarcastic little blighter obsessed with his inability to live up to his dad's famous reputation. In fact, I'm not sure any of Mr Fox's three offspring had much in the way of dialogue in the book at all. Anderson is not the only indie film-maker delving into the field of children's literature for inspiration, (although Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are looks likely to be a far straighter adaptation), and Fantastic Mr Fox had me wondering which other directors might be suited to Dahl's back catalogue. After all, if Anderson can impose his kooky visions on such unlikely source material, why shouldn't others follow suit?Todd Solondz, writer-director of those cheerful tales Happiness and Welcome to the Dollhouse, might manage a passable remake of James and the Giant Peach – except that in his version, poor young Jimbo would never be rescued from the clutches of his evil aunts by a band of oversized insects. Rather, he would remain at home in a state of tortured misery that would increase over the course of the movie, like a pressure-cooker with no off switch, until viewers finally tore their own eyes out in a fit of abject wretchedness.Charlie Kaufman could have a bash at a new version of The Witches, which surely has enough powerful and threatening female characters to keep him scribbling away in merry neurosis for at least a couple of years. The Coens would no doubt enjoy turning Matilda into a screwball comedy: it already features a surplus of hideous adult characters who lurch from one amusingly horrid moment of stupidity to the next.My point, of course, is that it is possible to see one's own reflection in nearly any piece of literature if one looks hard enough. But is that an excuse to go as far as Anderson has done with his adaptation of Fantastic Mr Fox? Ultimately, I'm not convinced it is. The US film-maker has ridden roughshod over the original's light but amiable story in favour of indulging his trademark tropes. And even if the result is his best work in years, that does seem a bit like cheating.What do you think? Should film-makers tread with care when adapting cherished material? Or does the end justify the means? Would you have rather seen a movie closer in spirit to Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox? Or are you just relieved that Anderson is back on top form?Wes AndersonRoald DahlBen Childguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Book Buzz: What's new on the list and in publishing Stephen King is at No. 1 again; Andre Agassi's "Open" follows other memoirs to the top 10; and Anthony Horowitz is winding down ... rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Diagnosis: Hidden Clues Would a doctor have looked at Sherlock Holmes and seen a condition to diagnose? feeds.nytimes.com |
Give us our daily brand | Colin Horgan In the 10 years since Naomi Klein's No Logo exposed their insidious influence, we have created our own brandsAs a fresh-faced university student, I remember digesting Naomi Klein's No Logo with the kind of voracity with which I used to read Agatha Christie mysteries at the age of 12; I felt like I already knew the story. It wasn't as if the information she presented was old news, it was just a new take on a familiar context.Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s was really the only formal training needed to partake in the Naomi Klein clinic of anti-corporate brand diffusion. "Taking aim at the brand bullies," was effectively an exercise in self-deconstruction. Now, a busy decade and a 10th anniversary edition – just released in North America – later, No Logo's message is still applicable, even if the references to Microsoft now might feel outdated in our iPhone-toting Apple-verse.Part of that self-deconstruction that Klein facilitated was the recognition that brands had convinced us all that they represented our lives – or, conversely, our lives ought to reflect our brand choices. Recently, writing on True/Slant, Kashmir Hill asked: "What does your email address say about you?" That seems to suggest that the relationship remains. And it does. But in some cases it's actually just a connection made out of necessity. In reality, the branded of the 2000s would rather be reached, let's say, @colin, because we are now our own brand.For this we can probably thank the internet, the great democratic leveller, and where the idea of selling yourself is ubiquitous. Facebook introduced an interesting – if annoying – feature where the site recommends other people for you to "friend," usually based on a mutual acquaintance – similar to a human version of Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought..." tab. But it's perhaps an obvious symptom of social media sites like MySpace, which are really based on the idea that we are selling ourselves to each other.In the introduction to Street: The Nylon Book of Global Style, released in 2006 by Nylon magazine (possibly the Gen-Y-ist of Gen-Y fashion publications), is this telling passage:Style, ultimately, is as much about the wearer as what is worn. And the social and cultural mobility afforded by the internet means that people can, through the use of clothing, invent themselves.In the 1990s, corporations and designers like Tommy Hilfiger used people as walking advertisements, slapping giant logos across clothing. Now, the focus is instead much more on the individual wearing the clothing, who won't be upstaged by a fashion designer. The relationship that No Logo examined is still there, but it's been altered for a generation of children raised to believe that each individual is unique. Taking part in a consumer "experience" isn't as rewarding as it used to be – we'd prefer to be the experience.As Andrew Romano of Newsweek points out, there is no longer such a thing as "selling out." He approaches the concept from a musical standpoint, citing Pearl Jam as a prime example of a band that went from being synonymous with anti-corporate sloganeering to a shill band for the big box store, Target. Back in 2000, Klein wrote that the story of the "Seattle sound" subculture of which Pearl Jam was a part, was "a cautionary tale about why so little opposition to the theft of cultural space took place in the early to mid-nineties. Trapped in the headlights of irony and carrying too much pop-culture baggage, not one of its antiheroes could commit to a single, solid political position." It was co-opted by the "cool hunters," and ultimately destroyed and turned into a passing fad.But if the 2000s showed us anything, it's that being a passing fad is often rewarded. Anyone from Paris Hilton to Katie Price are passing fads, but have successfully gone from being people who were sponsored by corporations, into sponsoring things themselves. In 2009, we're wrapped in a come-from-nowhere culture, whose biggest stars are those who were most successful at marketing themselves as fully established and developed brands. It's a world of Lilly Allen and Justin Bieber.In other words, we've become our own "cool hunters," which has resulted in endless scenester nothingness, as cultural movements of the 2000 decade were immediately co-opted by their own participants. As Romano rightly points out, it is often the art produced by a subculture that proves a useful watermark in determining its message. If so, what does hip hop now stand for? What does the indie music scene actually mean?In her new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition, Klein accurately describes how the Obama campaign used the corporate model to launch the President-as-brand campaign. She writes:Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party monopoly through dogged organization and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate….Which was really no secret. The collective "So what?" that voters shrugged into the voting booths is perhaps more telling of where we've come since No Logo first went to print – that selling a mentally-constructed experience (in this case, "change") as political policy is neither an alien concept, nor is it that removed from what regular people do on a daily basis on their blogs. There is no such thing as selling out. There is only selling, and we are the product. It's just the way things are.Early on in No Logo, Klein introduces the concept of "cannibalisation" strategy, where a corporation, "instead of opening a few stores in every city in the world … waits until it can blitz an entire area and spread," a tactic used effectively by Starbucks. As I sit now in a Starbucks at the corner of Thurlow and Robson streets in downtown Vancouver and stare diagonally across the intersection at another Starbucks, I'm tempted to wonder whether the Gen-Y self-branders are engaging in the same practice. Our various online incarnations – the Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and blog personas – all compete for the same thing: consumption. Yet, while the model is initially successful, we haven't yet accepted that it is perhaps unsustainable. And if anything, it now defines us.Marketing & PRGlobalisationSocietyPoliticsStarbucksCanadaUnited StatesColin Horganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
All writers repeat themselves – but some recycle A degree of repetition is part of what we like about our favourite novelists, but this can be taken too farAll writers repeat themselves. And when we read a favourite author, repetition is in a sense exactly what we want. Kafka wouldn't be Kafka without the terrifying entrapment and metaphysical despair; Irvine Welsh wouldn't be Irvine Welsh without the junkies. As for plot, we keep being told that only four exist anyway (or seven or 36 or one million, depending what you read).Some writers try to focus on a completely different subject every time. You never quite know what you're going to get when you pick up the new TC Boyle or Toby Litt or Ian McEwan. Explorers or stoners? Outer space or gothic horror? Brain surgery or global warming? But these authors still leave their signatures, stylistically, thematically, ethically. You could say that one sign of a good writer is that he or she is distinctive (and repetitious) enough to be mimicked. Others, of course, prefer to stick to similar themes or genres: eighteenth-century prostitutes, medieval elves, irate London cabbies. Whatever. But what about the writers who insist on recycling the component parts of their novels, right down to small moments of detail? I was considering this recently when I picked up the new John Irving novel, Last Night in Twisted River. My first thought was this: I wonder when a bear will appear? This was followed by similar conjectures about severed body parts, young men being seduced/abused by older women, flatulent dogs and riffs on wrestling. Sure enough they all turned up (the bear early on; a severed hand and farting dog much later). And this annoyed me. It is one thing to make a genre out of your own writing and to return to the source of your preoccupations; it is another to litter your oeuvre with the same leitmotifs time and again. Irving's work is not about bears or wrestling or what it means to be (or be around) a farting dog. So why do these flights of fancy always seem to crop up?Haruki Murakami does the same: portentous cats, gloomy wells, well-cooked omelettes and girls in very tiny pants. Paul Auster too: lost children, obsessive writers, absent fathers and one incredible coincidence. Do these recurring themes have a wider point? Are they a sign of mischief? A checklist for trainspotter fans? Or simply a tic, a mark of laziness?Long before we learned to write, oral poets would tell yarns by stitching together prefabricated "scraps" of narrative to form a sort of patchwork literary quilt; the skill was in the stitching. But when a modern writer goes in for casual recycling I think we're right to feel cheated.There is nothing inherently wrong with finding more mileage out of familiar leitmotifs. Dickens made use of more than one orphan; Nabokov of more than one nymphet-obsessed old rogue. Samuel Beckett liked his bicycles and at some point in an Ishiguro novel, it is inevitable that a character will "suddenly realise" that he or she is crying.Nor is there anything wrong with authors playfully alluding to their previous work, or characters, or selves. I like it when "Philip Roth" appears in Roth's fiction, or Martin Amis is found in Money; so too when Alfred Hitchcock makes the inevitable cameo in his films.But there's a fine line between the playful and the hackneyed. Is there not a debt to originality? Margaret Drabble last year vowed to stop writing novels lest she repeat herself. She probably needn't worry: any writer so sensitive to the perils of repetition is probably halfway towards avoiding it altogether. Others have been rehashing their own work for years. With this in mind, my advice is this: beware the author of whose work your favourite is the first one you read.FictionJohn IrvingToby Lichtigguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |