[SFRA-L] John Carter redux

Tue Mar 27 09:38:10 EDT 2012

I LOVED IT! I am a woman between 8 and 80 and I thought the film creators did a good job of overriding ERB's sexism while staying true to his intent.

Gail Bondi
damereading1 at yahoo.com

________________________________
 From: "Sawyer, Andy" <A.P.Sawyer at liverpool.ac.uk>
To: "sfra-l at wiz.cath.vt.edu" <sfra-l at charlemagne.cddc.vt.edu> 
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 5:07 AM
Subject: Re: [SFRA-L] John Carter redux

>I've heard that some people walk out of the film having missed that the strange new world of the adventure is Mars

This reminds me of the people walking out of THE ARTIST because they didn’t know it was a silent film . . . 

On another list, several people have pointed out that the ERB “John Carter” books are virtually unknown among what is assumed to be the target demographic of the film, and that “of Mars” might have been shed because the last big film with a Martian setting also tanked. Dunno. There seems to be confusion all round. On the same day as it was put to me strongly that apart from under 25s the next biggest film-going audience is couples and that JC “was exactly the sort of film NOT to be liked by women from the ages of 8 to 80”, three women in their 20s told me that they very much wanted to see it. (OK, they are students of mine, but I don’t give credit for wanting to watch films.)

Meanwhile I still haven’t seen it – it’s still on locally but I don’t have any time this week L

--------------------------------
Andy Sawyer
Science Fiction Librarian
Special Collections and Archives
University of Liverpool Library
PO Box 123, Liverpool L69 3DA, UK.

Course Director, MA in Science Fiction Studies.
http://www.liv.ac.uk/english/ma_courses/post_ma_sf.htm

Reviews Editor: Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction http://www.sf-foundation.org/publications/foundation.html

The Science Fiction Hub: http://www.sfhub.ac.uk/

The Science Fiction Foundation: http://www.sf-foundation.org/

"... there is no higher life form than a librarian."
THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD: Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart, p. 10. 

From:sfra-l-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu [mailto:sfra-l-bounces at wiz.cath.vt.edu] On Behalf Of De Witt Douglas Kilgore
Sent: 26 March 2012 17:11
To: Gail Bondi
Cc: sfra-l at wiz.cath.vt.edu
Subject: Re: [SFRA-L] John Carter redux

I agree that the movie was poorly advertised.  I buy that they may have wanted to underplay the source novels for the reasons stated.  However, it also they also shied at the "of Mars" connection.  And this seems odd given that we live in the world of Avatar and Star Wars, etc.  And it worked:  I've heard that some people walk out of the film having missed that the strange new world of the adventure is Mars.  Naturally the attentive would have figured it out during the solar system map sequence. And the film has underperformed.

It all seems like another wasted opportunity.  Sigh.

De Witt
On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Gail Bondi <damereading1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
My husband and I saw the movie last night. The movie was poorly advertised. After seeing the trailers, I was fully prepared to miss it. They didn't look that good. However, I am not sure pushing the books would have helped. Disney may have been concerned that their implied racism and sexism would hurt the movie. I remember the Tarzan books better, but even 40 years ago I recognized that ERB's Victorian belief in the superiority of the white man irritated me. I enjoyed them but I was also embarrassed by them. 

I thought the part about the Apaches was more to show that Carter was a person who fought for a cause (or at least thought before he fought) rather than a political statement about the struggles on the plains. Since we don't know what the Apaches were saying (that part wasn't translated), Carter may have been saying a plague on both your houses. I don't think politics was a major point here. 

Gail Bondi
damereading1 at yahoo.com

________________________________

From:Sue & Bruce Rockwood <clan.rockwood at gmail.com>
To: Richard Erlich <ErlichRD at muohio.edu> 
Cc: "sfra-l at wiz.cath.vt.edu" <sfra-l at charlemagne.cddc.vt.edu> 
Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2012 7:16 AM
Subject: Re: [SFRA-L] John Carter redux

We have seen both John Carter and now The Hunger Games (which I have not read but my son enjoyed reading first). My son felt that the story of John Carter was not widely known and that explains why it may have been less of a film success than The Hunger Games appears to be. Maybe Disney or film makers in general, if they are going to mine old stories and legends for projects, need to consider marketing the source book or story(stories) somehow prior to the launch of the film, or do something to make viewers / nonreaders more aware of the story line and get interested in it. The film trailers for John Carter we saw in the theaters last summer, for example, did not give any hint of its source, and merely adding "by the author of Tarzan" might have got people looking into the stories prior to the launch. I find it amazing they can spend this much money, make a movie I as a fan enjoyed, and miss the point of putting the project in context for the general
 viewing audience if they want it to be a commercial success. I think John Carter will pull in money overseas, but I think Disney needs an embassy from SFRA to explain some of these basic points to them!  I know the coherence of the story line and quality of the film making of these two films is not much different, in my view, and so the success of only one in the marketplace has to be explained by the lack of a prepared audience.

Bruce Rockwood
On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 8:45 PM, Richard Erlich <ErlichRD at muohio.edu> wrote:
On 24/03/2012, at 16:59, pierceqfpl at ewwpi.com wrote:

My wife Marcia and I just got around to seeing it this afternoon, and we're glad we did. I'm more familiar with the original story, of course, so I could tell that the movie followed its broad outlines but was a lot different in detail. One thing that impressed me was that CGI has reached the point that the tharks could be individualized, even when there were a lot of them on screen. I don't think most of the $250 million budget went into that, so we can look forward to movies with puppeteers and other aliens -- if Hollywood suits have the nerve to make them. The stars were good, and I don't mind in the least that Dejah Thoris was made into more of a modern woman. She should have been redder than she was, however (ditto the rest of the people of Helium and Zodanga), and not had conventional Terran makeup. The biggest problem with Carter is that they went too far with his feats under Martian gravity -- it's one thing to leap ten feet into the air, quite
 another to leap a hundred. The thoats were good, but I thought the calot was too big and too cute. Designs for the cities and the airships were too busy, and the landscape too much like Arizona -- no helping that. Making the therns the brains behind everything may have been better than using astral projection to get Carter to Mars, but it also ate up screen time with the prolonged prologue and the epilogue, and there was a lot of story on Barsoom itself that had to be crammed in tighter as a resullt. Making ERB a character was a tad too precious.
>
>Just my two cents.
>
>--John J. Pierce
>_______________________________________________

Did you find the politics of the film coherent, John? It seemed to be saying something on war and the destruction of the Plains Indians, but for me that got lost. 
(I also wasn't sure how I was supposed to respond to a chastened but possibly unReconstructed Confederate, but that's a problem I have with several movies [plus bumper stickers, mud guards, state flags, politicians …].)

Rich E.

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-- 
De Witt Douglas Kilgore
Associate Professor of English, American Studies and Cultural Studies
Indiana University
812-855-4148

" ... remind people of reality, which is that we are all stuck in a big SF [science fiction] novel now, and there's no escape; might as well accept it and dive in."
-- Kim Stanley Robinson

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