Steven Spielberg's THE BFG, after Roald Dahl's book

The BFG may be remembered for a climactic sequence involving British royalty and flatulence.

http://laist.com/2016/06/29/spielberg_rules.php

not liking the cgi of this giant in the trailers at all.

the giant looks like shit

yeah, this looks terrible

my mom really wants to take my daughter to see this (and she already read the book in school) so... unfortunately this looks like it may be my daughter's first exposure to Spielberg, and the first Spielberg movie I have to sit through in a theater since Empire of the Sun

what

I'm pretty selective about what I see in theaters, since my opportunities are few and far between

didn't mean to sound like I didn't like Empire of the Sun, I did (less so on rewatch - oppressive score mars a lot of it, which is otherwise impressive)

Yeah, you're missing some quality big-screen Spielberg.

I'm not a fan of the BFG book at all. For some reason I don't remember reading it growing up, but I've since read it with my kids, and it just bores me. It and "The Witches," tbh, which shares with it a certain structure, or lack there of, namely some authority sitting a kid down and just rambling at length about what giants (or witches) do. And then after a hundred pages of that, he introduces some random caper. We're going to crash Buckingham Palace/the witch convention! Love Charlie and the Chocolate Factory book (the sequel is another rambling mess), love James and the Giant Peach, love Mr. Fox, love Matilda, before it inexplicably goes all Carrie for no good reason. Love the Twits. In fact, I'd love to see a feature-length Twits, just a movie of horrible people doing horrible things to each other.

weird, I read a fawning review of this from Cannes, my first exposure to the film, but everything i've read since has called it total trash.

the title is stupid, too. why not The Big Friendly Giant? "The BFG" makes me think 'The Big Fucking Gun.' (Doom?)

makes me think of BFD tour

Big Farting Giant.

Everything I've read has pointed out what was obvious (to me at least) when I read it, that there's no plot, or certainly not enough for a feature. But then, Anderson pulled off "Fantastic Mr. Fox" with aplomb, and there's almost as little to go on there. So maybe it's just Spielberg as a poor match for material? Or Disney's meddling?

like JiC also a big fan of Dahl but def didn't read it as a kid. was actually totally unaware of it until the movie

xp

never knew the book

reviews are hardly all pans

http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-bfg/critic-reviews

Wld say that the BFG is easily one of the three most popular Dahl books in the UK (along w/ Matilda and Charlie)

http://www.arthouse-gallery.co.uk/WebRoot/BT3/Shops/BT3958/56E3/FED2/3F7B/4201/40C5/0A0C/05B8/3494/the_-bfg-could-you-make-me-dream-it-art-print-by-quentin-blake_m.jpg

A film that drew on Quentin Blake's wonderful BFG illustrations might have something going for it, but the grotesque travesty of Tintin already demonstrated Spielberg's utter indifference to hand drawn image-making.

yes bfg is very popular in Britain, most kids into Roald Dahl books will have read it - myself included. There was an animated tv movie of same that came out in 1989 where the bfg is voiced by "national treasure" david jason.

but the grotesque travesty of Tintin

o stuff it ward

line-drawing animation not being released to multiplexes in 2010s

missing Ward's point there, I think

I mean the Peanuts movie was CGI but it was clearly deferential to its source material. What I saw of Tintin in the previews was appalling, with zero consideration given to the look of the source material.

Love the Twits. In fact, I'd love to see a feature-length Twits, just a movie of horrible people doing horrible things to each other.

lol would watch

you can always look at the source material to yr heart's content.

does that make the movies better

to save time i no longer answer dumb questions

shocked to find out that how a film looks has no relevance to whether it's any good

^^^

Morbz do you answer rhetorical questions?

i liked tin tin a lot

fine, you didn't like the look of it. I like the aesthetics of both the Tintin books and the film. It's possible to!

xp

morbs otm!

I liked Tintin a lot, too, and my kids still quote it. But I never read it as a kid, and they don't seem to be into the books either.

bfg in the blake illo posted above just looks like a dude. neither good nor bad, but with potential for either. bfg in the spielberg flick looks kindly to the point where it becomes a bit sickening, like with rivulets of golden goodness oozing down his pantleg. can't stand the look of it. and hated tintin.

so you guys are saying we... shouldn't see this kids movie?

there's at least 3 posters itt (that I know of) that have kids fwiw

and Morbz is basically a child at heart, an eternal font of wide-eyed joy and wonder

4yo and proud iirc

I would def watch a good roald dahl adaptation

well he never topped "Lamb to the Slaughter"

yeah if you have a fragile ego that's based on things you consume, you shouldn't see this Kids movie, god knows what will happen to you.

don't know why i capitalized kids there

so you guys are saying we... shouldn't see this kids movie?

― queen elseq of ærendelle (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, June 30, 2016 7:53 PM (33 minutes ago)

fyi kids deserve to get to watch non-shitty movies just like anybody else

No they don't, they should be stuck watching grown up fare like Captain America or X-Men with the rest of us. If they really want kids stuff they should stick to kids music, like Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande or Justin Bieber.

Guys shut the fuck up and get back on point

This looks shit and feels wrong

and morbs is to be ignored on spielberg

It does seem utterly pointless. I love Spielberg, but he is not the guy I want making mo-cap movies I don't want to see.

Like, save it for Jackson or Zemeckis.

JiC otm - confine spielberg to mummified oscar bait we can all safely ignore

he's only made a few of those

do you want your mummy? xp

spielberg is fine a lot of the time, but his sensibility seems a bit at odds w/ that of dahl

also dahl's books, which at their best are like episodic bedtime stories (barely) held together by the presence of the narrator's voice, don't usually make for great films imo, i love matilda but watching it on film it's hard not to notice that the story kind of doesn't make much sense

Matilda actually made me mad. It was a great story about a smart girl and her nice teacher friend, outsiders in a crass, brutal world (including her horrid family). In other words, more than enough story/character, a classic setup. And then for no good reason at all they give her telekinetic powers just so she can toss a newt in the bad teacher's water? That's lame. What was wrong with the scenario before that? It was touching and sweet.

Anyone who dismisses Spielberg as Oscar bait needs to catch up on some real crazily generic Oscar bait, like The Imitation Game or Whiplash or something.

As far as children's books with telekinesis go I much prefer Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars. There at least it's accomplished through transcendental meditation, and the characters learn that it gets boring pretty quickly.

ooh Pinkwater vs. Dahl, not sure who I would choose

Pinkwater all the way. Though I didn't really grow up reading Dahl because my folks thought he was sick. Pinkwater's vision of the world is definitely the one I'd prefer my kids to grow up with.

certainly less jaundiced/more joyful

spielberg is fine a lot of the time, but his sensibility seems a bit at odds w/ that of dahl

well yes http://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/07/opinion/l-roald-dahl-also-left-a-legacy-of-bigotry-880490.html?pagewanted=all

Anyone who dismisses Spielberg as Oscar bait needs to catch up on some real crazily generic Oscar bait, like The Imitation Game or Whiplash or something.

I'm not saying that's all he's got, it's just the lane I want him in, enabling me to ignore him entirely.

oh so you want a great artist to make shit so you can ignore him

You ppl shoulnt be allowed read dahl tbh

xp yes, that must be it

also dahl's books, which at their best are like episodic bedtime stories (barely) held together by the presence of the narrator's voice, don't usually make for great films imo

otm, esp in the case of the bfg which is thinner even than usual and which i remember as being beatifically without peril tho i guess there are the mean other giants. the witches however is kind of a great movie (adapted from dahl's work of greatest peril, w the exception maybe of the moral peril of the golden ticket kids) feat.ing inspired stuff from mai zetterling and anjelica huston: the reason the world is ok and the reason it isn't.

have never seen the jeremy irons version of danny the champion of the world and didn't know it existed until ten seconds ago when i thought hey danny the champion of the world, that could be a movie.

waiting for a film of switch bitch

I remember loving the bfg and matilda and all those other books so much until i realised that the pacing and narrative didnt conform to american curriculum standards and obviously they were ruined forevermore at that stage

just talking about their suitability for the 2.5-hour-blockbuster format here

waiting around for wilder's flashes of genius in willy wonka is a pretty excruciating exercise

apparently the witches would have been way darker had roeg been let off the leash a bit more

Can tim minchin's musical of matilda be any good? Can imagine it basically being "miss honey and mrs trunchbull sing about blind watchmakers for three hours"

Im in

I need to worry more about things maybe idk

thinking too much gives you wrinkles

Oh aws

Part of the reason that I mentioned the Blake drawings is that the Dahl books he illustrated function as genuine collaborations, with the pictures doing quite a lot of the narrative work - so they're the kind of interesting hybrid form, somewhere between picture book, comic strip and novel, that might inspire a less plodding director than Spielberg to create something a bit fresher.

"Great artist" lol

waiting for a film of switch bitch

― oh, amazonaws (wins), Friday, July 1, 2016 7:09 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

:|

henry sugar and other tales as a 6-part series tho. 'the swan' will make every child depressed

"Great artist" lol

― Foster Twelvetrees (Ward Fowler)

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01112/mission_accomplish_1112950c.jpg

my favorite film adaptation of Dahl is The Witches. I saw Mathilda years ago. While it wasn't a success, Danny DeVito is much closer to Dahl's sensibility than Spielberg.

*Matilda

DeVito was built for that role in "Matilda," forgot that movie existed. DeVito would make a great Twit.

xpost We saw the Broadway (well, touring Broadway) performance of "Matilda" a few weeks back. With a couple of exceptions ("Revolting Children," "Naughty") the songs are generally unmemorable, and it sticks to the awkward narrative of the book. The colorful family (and Trunchbull, played by a man) got the most laughs, Miss Honey was mostly side-lined; there were entire sequences where she literally just stood there or sat there while all sorts of singing and dancing was going on, which is as much a problem with the direction/staging as it was with her character.

dahl's books, which at their best are like episodic bedtime stories (barely) held together by the presence of the narrator's voice

This is a good way to put it, and I think a good defense of Dahl as an alternative to traditional/stodgy lit. But often when I read him I get the impression that he was either dictating them to someone else off the top of his head, or put on the spot by pushy editors demanding "and then what happens?!"

"Erm, ok, and then ... she knocks over a cup with her mind! And, um, someone puts a newt in a pitcher of water! And then ... they solve the murder mystery of Honey's parents!"
"Sounds great, let's go to the printer!"
"Well, I was hoping to give it another pass ..."
"No, to the printer!"

"Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator" is utterly batshit in this way, if you've never read:

The story picks up immediately where the previous book left off, with Charlie and his whole family (including the three grandparents still in bed) aboard the flying Great Glass Elevator, en route to the Chocolate Factory which Wonka intends to give to Charlie. The dizzying height to which the Elevator ascends frightens Charlie's family, especially his grandmother Georgina, who panics and prevents Wonka from reversing direction. As a result, the Elevator goes into orbit about the Earth, where - making the best of a bad situation - Wonka decides to dock with a newly-launched Space Hotel.

In the White House, President Lancelot R. Gilligrass, Vice President Elvira Tibbs, the president's best friend, chiefs, and the U.S. Cabinet see the Elevator dock with the Space Hotel, and fear it contains hostile agents of a foreign or extraterrestrial government, while the space shuttle containing the hotel staff and three astronauts approaches the Space Hotel. On the Hotel, Wonka and the others hear the President address them across a radio link as Martians, and Wonka therefore teases Gilligrass with nonsense words and grotesque poetry. In the midst of this, the hotel's own elevators open, revealing five gigantic amoeba-like monsters, which change shape: each forming a letter of the word 'SCRAM'. Recognising the danger, Wonka orders everybody off the Space Hotel. These shape-changers, Wonka tells the others, are predatory extraterrestrials called Vermicious Knids, waiting in the Space Hotel to consume its staff and guests. Wonka also explains that the Knids have tried to invade Earth and consume its inhabitants like they have done with many other planets (Mars, Venus and the Moon, among others) but are always incinerated because of the atmosphere protecting the planet.

A lot of the Roald Dahl "Tales of the Unexpected" episodes are actually very solid. Good performances, and Dahl himself wrote many of the adaptations. Production values are shit (video lighting, etc.), but the stories are – by the fact they're super gestural to begin w/ – very suited for dramatization.

(not a patch on Ray Bradbury theatre, tho)

I remember loving the bfg and matilda and all those other books so much until i realised that the pacing and narrative didnt conform to american curriculum standards and obviously they were ruined forevermore at that stage

― poor fiddy-less albion (darraghmac), Friday, July 1, 2016 7:14 AM (11 hours ago)

this isn't what i meant, tho! they're great books -- just don't think most of them would really work w/o dahl's storyteller voice leading you around.

do love the film of the witches which (ha) actually does have a fairly solid plot.

My fave dahl is georges marvellous medicine

Now theres one youd struggle to film

dahl is such an ott misanthrope. his best stories are the ones where his bile is most evident. charlie and the chocolate factory, matilda, james and the giant peach among his kids stuff. lamb to slaughter, parson's pleasure, landlady, royal jelly, skin, pig u&k for old folks. publishing lore has it that original bfg draft has the "f" of the title character signifying something other than 'friendly' and is a filthy story about sophie's grooming by the BFG.

My god

lol

here is the only decent online reference to the ur-text I can find (though it's alluded to in plenty of the "unauthorized" dahl bios recently published). apropos of the movie, the innernet seems scrubbed clean of the dirtier bits of dahl apocrypha.

i don't doubt that dahl was an unpleasant guy in many ways but the ott tone of that this recording essay kind of gives me pause

lol at the casual description of james and the giant peach as "his least anti-semitic book"

Never noticed any references to jews in his childrens books tbh

well whaddya think Wonka was payin those oompahloompahs

The blood of christian babies?

i have no memory of how WW was described

just that the OLs were pygmies

oh he was 3' tall i guess

"i dont doubt that dahl was unpleasant in many ways"

list me ten pleasant ppl please

1. your mom

Ehh, not endorsing whole piece. Just relevant BFG bits for support. Mean SOB any way you slice it.

what if... i don't slice it.

My dead mom was a p unpleasant person tbh

Spielberg seems like a nice fella for a huge Clinton donor

Careful morbs that was v nearly a criticism

I liked the Danny DeVito Matilda film, though it's been a while since I last saw it. I remember being pleased that they retained the book's ending i.e. Matilda chooses to stay with Miss Honey rather than leave town with her awful parents, and this separation is presented as an unambiguously good thing (it's presented in a slightly more sentimental fashion in the movie compared to the book, but still, there can't be that many children's films where the happy ending involves the protagonist cutting her parents out of her life)

Kid who played matilda is the worst child actor ever

list me ten pleasant ppl please

― poor fiddy-less albion (darraghmac), Friday, July 1, 2016 1:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pleasanter than roald dahl? do you have a telephone directory to hand

dahl was on a personal level perfectly obviously an asshole by the standards of any time or culture including the braying imperial one that made him, and holds what must be almost the unique distinction of being a thatcherite who sided with the ayatollah over salman rushdie

i'd say "not that this affects the work" but of course it does, not always badly

have not seen the devito matilda but alfred obv otm that this is a wiser match than dahl-spielberg.

List me even five ppl in history that cant be described as unoleasant in many ways maybe then

Im up for the thought exercise

i liked this, perhaps b/c i had low expectations. unlike much other contemporary children's fare, the film didn't insist too much upon the audience's wonderment (there were a minor irksome exceptions). and i enjoyed the general good-naturedness of it, and i thought the animation of the bad giants was very fun. CGI, even with motion capture, still can't always get movement right -- some of the grander movements felt weightless in that familiar SFX way, but the BFG head was a marvel.

that said compared to the book there's a kind of inflation of scale (heh, not literally) and a kind of over-proliferation of detail in the mise-en-scene that made it seem a bit more lord of the rings than roald dahl.

but this didn't strike me as a failure.

and holds what must be almost the unique distinction of being a thatcherite who sided with the ayatollah over salman rushdie

off topic, but I don't think this stance was actually all that unique

Conservative MP Norman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".[11]

thought i'd end up standing corrected on that one as i posted it; i guess all permutations of yhwh were to be respected and feared back before the Clash of Civilizations reached its present thrilling pitch

I think a lot of folks like Tebbit were maybe torn between their instinctive dislike of the Ayatollah and their instinctive dislike of a liberal-intelligentsia ethnic-minority literary figure making a stand about freedom of expression (and costing the government money to provide him with 24 hour security protection etc)

Now that sounds like good spielberg material

Not good good, i mean more suitable good

there must be some other UK ilxors here who are the right age to remember Dahl and Quentin Blake's pamphlet about railway safety? so many phrases and images from that are seared into my memory, especially

https://tygertale.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/wpid-photo-201406250802406.jpg?w=500&h=515

i wonder if spielberg was tickled by the dream-dispensing angle the way he was tickled by john hammond's "aim not devoid of merit"

can't stop staring at that brushstroke of gore btw

when i was a kid i loved this one

http://images.paperbackswap.com/l/18/4218/9780590434218.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ygJ377WQ7Xg/Th2o1yMXdbI/AAAAAAAAKcw/KZ09mjTv50A/s640/a2.jpg

thinking about it now i delight in its savage happy ending (kid won't stop drawing monsters, worries parents w labors on one giant monster taking up endless new pages, is told to stop and sent to psychiatrist, monster eats psychiatrist) more than i do in any dahl kid's victory. w the exception prob of danny, in whom dahl's proudhon strain (repressed by editor in fantastic mr f) charmingly blossoms.

(otoh prob good reason to suggest changes to the shoplifting-fox story and the tone it introduces enables the wes anderson movie's animal-solidarity stuff, which i really liked.)

(actually i take that back cuz i bet the orig draft of fantastic mr fox had plenty of fuck-humans stuff in it that only lacked justification. as if an english fox would need any.)

on the subject of quentin blake illustrations of terrible railway accidents i did have this

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1312498117l/6328.jpg

which iirc had one that went "mother mother what's that / it looks like strawberry jam / don't worry that's just papa / run over by a tram"

how good is that cover btw: an infinite nested series of captive children

ya

the rail safety pamphlet was a good one - the one i have seared into my mind is blithe girl opening door too early collecting a platformful of people

http://variety.com/2016/film/box-office/steven-spielberg-bfg-box-office-flop-1201808161/

Wow. I couldn't and didn't want to finish the piece, but honestly, once again, The BFG just seems like such a bad fit. As far as properties go, it seems like the type of film any number of hacks (however talented) could have made. Gore Verbinski, say, or someone of that ilk, technicians not really known for being anything more than that. Whether or not it really was a dream project of his for decades - and if it was, why did it take decades? I would guess Spielberg can make anything he wants - the movie feels like something handed to him rather than something he drove. The piece said it has echoes of ET but I imagine only in the most surface sense. Unlike Tintin, which like it or not truly did have echoes of Indiana Jones.

To be fair, I can't think of the last movie of his I'd truly categorize as a film for kids. Hook?

Spielberg introduces a trailer for this as part of an anti-piracy campaign over here, which is how I discovered that I've been pronouncing roald wrongly all my life

Surprise the posters/ads/etc didn't emphasize the over-the-top reviews this received at Cannes. "SPIELBERG'S BEST SINCE E.T." would have moved a few more tickets.

(Then again, I had no idea Tarzan was a dark, realistic reboot with Christoph Waltz and Samuel L. Jackson until reading the articles about that one flopping.)

I skimmed the Variety piece. Even though I've been mostly unenthusiastic about Spielberg's work the past 20+ years (my interest was reawakened a bit by A.I. and Minority Report), the main point of the piece, which seems to be that he's out of step with the times, could easily be viewed as a virtue rather than a criticism.

(30+ years, I mean...since E.T..)

wait how do you say roald?

'roo-al dal or 'row-al dal

spielberg calls him raul in one interview i found

Yeah Spielberg definitely says raul in the trailer I saw and I was like lol what a clown but then I looked it up and it's roo-al so who am I to lol

The d is silent but obv that doesn't matter in this case. The thing I found quotes Sophie Dahl saying that even she sometimes uses the "wrong" pronunciation

Armond being Armond:

BFG is almost a shape-shifter. He eludes adult detection by stealth. His large, heavy head hangs on his skinny neck like a street lantern as he stalks the nighttime city. (The film’s first images of London’s Tower Bridge at night have the clarity and wonder of images in a View-Master stereopticon.) Sometimes hooded, BFG holds onto his dream-blowing trumpet/staff like an Old Testament prophet. He has Spielberg’s smile, but, when he’s excited, his large ears flap like fish gills. Those ears also suggest Spielberg’s cinematic idol David Lean (just as the Close Encounters alien suggested Jean Renoir), but BFG mostly resembles our current president, the phantom figure behind Spielberg–Kushner’s Lincoln. BFG’s Big Daddy Obama ears hear all. He’s a figure of liberal dreams who provides citizens their own dreams. The BFG is the most extravagant send-off Hollywood has ever given an American president.

Explore the metaphor: A transition from a sleeping boy imbibing dreams from BFG’s trumpet to an English landscape shaped like the boy’s body is a political transfiguration. Spielberg’s Obama idolatry becomes mythic symbology. This deification goes beyond anything in Lincoln. It even surpasses Darryl F. Zanuck’s effort to idolize Woodrow Wilson in the 1944 Wilson (a movie as forgotten as Spielberg’s Lincoln is already forgotten).

Timed to celebrate Obama’s last year in office, The BFG hides its hagiography behind the filmmaker’s personal self-delusion — and behind his skill.

damn, another year and SS coulda gotten Bam himself.

I would guess Spielberg can make anything he wants

You might be surprised -- he said he almost had to do Lincoln as an HBO film.

Omg not HBO!?!

He still would have done it, and I bet it would have been the same, more or less. There's a reason Spielberg has never mentioned unmade dream projects. He makes what he wants, afaict.

yeah, but relative to his sorta King of Hollywood status, you'd think he could do it easily on his own terms.

is anything in Hollywood really ever done "easily"

for Spielberg compared to, say, Alan Rudolph, yes.

anyway i guess you can't get the kiddies and their parents to something without the Pixar ADD-pace, not in huge numbers.

the simplest explanation is probably the correct one, ie, it just looked bad

haven't seen any clips or trailers, but if so then why has the Angry Birds movie has grossed $106 m?

I'm not sure if you're being glib or not, but I think there are a *lot* of reasons Angry Birds did better. Cheery color palette, parents' certainty that nothing scary will happen to frighten their special little dears, free advertising through the app/universal name recognition, aggressive campaign based on "hey, kill some time with this thing you know your kid already likes."

as opposed to "ugly looking adaptation of a book no one's ever heard of by a director old people like"

whose kids ask about the director?

exactly

they do ask, "Mommy, who made this crap?"

most kids will watch any crap that's noisy and fast

no

but old people will watch anything with Spielbergo's name on it

you're old!

b-b-but I won't watch anything with Spielbergo's name on it!

*shakes cane*

keep on with the 3rd-rate De Palma retro, gramps

it's either more De Palma or this Monte Hellman western Criterion twofer I got

(xp) ^ new username

the simplest explanation is that disney took a november movie and stuck it on the 4th of july 2 weeks after one of their biggest sequels ever and then completely abandoned any serious push once they realized it'd just encroach on the very pretty total BO of its very sustainable fish

sure the grotesque cgi man might have something to do with it but disney is supposed to be able to sell anything, they've proven that they'll leave a movie in the dust in favor of a catchier brand and the opportunity to brag about breaking records at shareholder meetings. they're not going to make a killing selling BFG plushies so nbd.

also lol xp this is a very popular kids book? has dahl completely dropped off in relevance in the last 20 years? this was always one of his biggest books when I was a kid

it is almost totally unknown in the US afaict. no parents know it, no kids know it.

also lol xp this is a very popular kids book? has dahl completely dropped off in relevance in the last 20 years? this was always one of his biggest books when I was a kid

Teacher of adolescents says: yes, Dahl is not nearly as popular as he used to be. And when he is read, he's read mostly in the very early now, at an age that would find creepy Rylance-face absolutely terrifying.

I am USian, idk what you're talking about

xp bummer

my children's librarian mom didn't know it, I'd never heard of it, my daughter didn't know it, I have not talked to any other parents in the Bay Area who know it

but my daughter does know Roald Dahl, has read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (and seen the adap. w Wilder), the Twits, several others, including some in school (she just finished 2nd grade)

xp

I fear that The BFG is this year's Tomorrowland--a big, ambitious would-be blockbuster by a respected auteur whose underperformance will only serve as proof to the suits that they should be investing in "franchise" films and nothing else.

that comparison is a stretch. Doing a big budget Dahl adaptation is hardly a daringly original move

I suppose it's better than adapting the collective jerk-off fantasies of the reddit hivemind though

that's Spielberg's next movie

xpost

Fair to say that I was reaching with that analogy in that Spielberg = Bird, but a Dahl adaptation in 2016 is hardly a sure thing either (Tim Burton's Willy Wonka remake had the original, and Johnny Depp, to coast on). But I think the lesson--anything that isn't a superhero or Star Wars--will end up being the same.

Formatting oops, there: was trying to say that Spielberg does NOT equal Bird.

Its flopped apparently

man how did I miss that Stephen Chow directed the 7th highest grossing film of 2016

it is almost totally unknown in the US afaict. no parents know it, no kids know it.

it was one of my favorite books as a child in the united states. then again i did buy it at obscure bookseller crown books

Armond White is so odd… all of his reviews are pitched as against some strawman that he seems to have created out of thin air. He could write "Unlike CITIZEN KANE, which has earned the unending enmity of all film critics everywhere…" and I wouldn’t bat an eye. I guess another way of saying this is that A.W. seems genuinely delusional.

Spielberg /could/ make any movie he wanted if he wanted to finance and distribute it himself (he’s a billionaire!). But then not many people would see it (relative to most Spielberg movies); he needs to marketing and distribution support of major studios to get his films widely seen. And thus he needs to work /with/ them, which means constraints, however minor, on what he can do and how he can do it.

as for

But tastes shift and the failure of “The BFG” this weekend hints that Spielberg may be a different kind of filmmaker, one who’s no longer attuned to the zeitgeist.

he's had several flops before! even in his prime! remember 1941?

when i read armond white i can't help but think he's either trolling or completely insane

if he actually thinks that bfg is meant to represent Obama o_0

Everyone is trying to figure out why this flopped

It's called "The BFG"

"hay kids do you wanna see the BEE EFF GEE"

"wat"

yeah, that must be why no one's ever read the book either

kids HATE abbreviations. can't stand em

i can imagine a kid or an adult thinking that name sounds stupid as fuck when other kids movies have cool names like "Wreck-It Ralph" and "Minions" and "The Boxtrolls"

And no one in america has heard of this book

When I worked at Waldenbooks some 25 years ago, there were two Dahl books that were required to be shelved face-out rather than spine-out. One was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the other was The BFG. (And, when the movie came out, James and the Giant Peach.

Come to think of it, The Boxtrolls was very dark and very, very Dahl - right down to the relative lack of plot - and it did great. Maybe something as simple as making it live action with no stars was the problem.

if people could easily figure out why some films flop and some do really well, everybody would be running a film studio.

i already told you why it flopped, it's not that hard !

was the boxtrolls brought up as a joke? it didn't do well

i did find this mildly disappointing, tho i loved Rylance's malapropisms.

And the farting.

xpost

The Boxtrolls earned a gross of $50,769,750 in North America, and $57,418,465 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $108,188,215 against a budget of $60 million.

As of July 13, 2016, The BFG has grossed $42.5 million in North America and $11.9 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $54.4 million, against a budget of $140 million.

boxtrolls is really good though.

but it also didn't have the studio backing or expectations this did

Yeah, I liked Boxtrolls fine - like I said, it's a very Dahl-esque property itself - but it puts things into perspective when a perceived box office disappointment does better than a would-be Spielberg blockbuster.

it's always so misleading when they write it "(total worldwide BO) against a budget of (probably excluding marketing costs)"

I've seen analysts generalize that studios take in about 2/3 of domestic and 1/2 of foreign, and I've seen others generalize that as a liberal figure, though every movie is different and there's no way to know for sure. but using those figures, yeah, it might've broken even, probably not if marketing isn't included in that budget. maybe it made a few million. but that still isn't a successful number, especially as a kid's movie that probably didn't sell any merchandise

not saying bfg isn't a wreck boztrolls just isn't a success story

studios don't know how to market movies that aren't already popular IPs anymore

boz scaggstrolls

This was tedious.

Two lovely sequences--an early one of the BFG improvising a series of disguises of himself around London, and a shadow-illustrated dream sequence that occurs about mid-film--aside, this was quite bad, snail-paced and tonally all over the place. Not at all surprised it flopped.

You don't need to see a Spielberg movie these days to know this.

At worst a trailer will confirm.

I liked Tintin when I saw it, but I think this review nails a bit part of what's wrong with The BFG:

It would be inexplicable within the recent arc of his career if not for the precedent of Tintin, which gave him an appetite for impossible camera moves that can really only be sated when the sets are virtual, as they are for much of The BFG. I can't help thinking of Spielberg's story about how the alien-abduction sequence in Close Encounters of the Third Kind wasn't working until he went back and added shots of the screws on a vent cover turning by themselves; he thrives in that margin of error, like when he let a sick Harrison Ford shoot the swordsman in Raiders of the Lost Ark and stumbled upon one of the most iconic moments in cinema. The amount of previsualizing necessary to make something like The BFG shrinks that margin considerably, and all foresight and no hindsight makes Steve a dull boy.

*BIG part

187 posts and i count three people who actually watched it! not including me since i bailed after 40 mins.

cgi is fine, except some confusion about scale - the bfg grabs sophie and hides her in his giant hand; later a giant twice the size grabs her in a hand no bigger; later still this same hand holds the entire torso of the bfg. you'd think the cg models would be the same. rylance is great. idk about the story since it hadn't started yet, 40 minutes and a third of the way through. last straw for me and my 4 year old daughter was the scene with the bad giants putting the bfg on a dustbin lorry and pushing him down the hill towards another giant on car rollerskates - i asked her do you like this and she said no, it's scary. yes, and pointless and tiresome. maybe she's too young and I'm too old, there might be a two or three year window where this might be amusing, if it was 30 or 40 minutes shorter and felt like it was actually going somewhere.