Is it filmable? On a behind the scenes scale it would need to be rather long and NC-17 which wouldn't be financially viable. Putting budget and rating aside though, could it be actually be translated from page to screen?
Cast it, anons. Is there any actor working today who could do justice to The Judge.
No impossible because all movies are made to conform exactly to the written text with no deviations whatsoever. Have you ever seen a movie that was in any way different from the book it was based on? No of course you haven’t.
I'll rephrase then, could it be filmed and actually capture what made the novel work?
Have you read it?
The whole allure of the book is the weird, thesaurus driven prose, which would definitely be hard to translate cinematically.
Of course, you'll always have plebs like , who'd probably cast the Rock as the Judge
It's one of the few books I wish I read on a kindle as opposed to on paper. Kept having to look words up that weren't clear from context. The Road managed to translate alright into film language, though that was less verbose.
>A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools
ah, blood meridian, monsieur that novel is the sark and chaparral of literature, the filament whereon rode the remuda of highbrow, corraled out of some destitute hacienda upon the arroya, quirting and splurting with main and with pyrolatrous coagulate of lobated grandiloquence. our eyes rode over the pages, monsieur, of that slatribed azotea like argonauts of suttee, juzgados of swole, bights and systoles of walleyed and tyrolean and carbolic and tectite and scurvid and querent and creosote and scapular malpais and shellalagh. we scalped, monsieur, the gantlet of its esker and led our naked bodies into the rebozos of its mennonite and siliceous fauna, wallowing in the jasper and the carnelian like archimandrites, teamsters, combers of cassinette scoria, centroids of holothurian chancre, with pizzles of enfiladed indigo panic grass in the saltbush of our vigas, true commodores of the written page, rebuses, monsieur, we were the mygale spiders too and the devonian and debouched pulque that settled on the frizzen studebakers, listening the wolves howling in the desert while we saw the judge rise out of a thicket of corbelled arches, whinstone, cairn, cholla, lemurs, femurs, leantos, moonblanched nacre, uncottered fistulas of groaning osnaburg and kelp, isomers of fluepipe and halms awap of griddle, guisado, pelancillo.
Any more meridian pepes?
why do people love this book so much? i got to page 90 something and it just didn't grab me, it's one of the few things Yea Forums recommends that i just didn't enjoy.
Not that I know. I was surprised at this one.
Blade Runner you fucking pleb.
To the OP, I think it would be an extremely visual film to the point of alienating all audiences (think hannibal tv show or spartacus "artsy" scenes). Most would dislike the thin plot and hard to digest themes.
But I will say this forever, it would be an excellent videogame adaptation since that way audienes actively particiate in the violence and would see themselves reflected in the kid. I so wished the GTA guys would buy the rights with billions they have, they already have RDR2 as a template.
>unable to pick up on heavy handed sarcasm
>wants Blood Meridian as a videogame
Cringe and autism.
I started to sweat reading this part for the first time recently so fucking good
>it would be an excellent videogame adaptation
shut the fuck up your stupid retarded fucking cunt actually kill yourself holy fuck this is the worst opinion i've ever read
It obviously should be a graphic novel/ webcomic
die
I’ve already started a Kickstarter it’s only a matter of time.
Would it work as a mini series?
This could only work if it was written and directed by James Franco
The Judge as Vincent D'onofrio
The Kid as Dave Franco
Kek.
Stop making this fucking thread
Read it on a transatlantic flight. You kinda gotta build a lot of momentum to get your head around the weird cadence. Additionally, you have to picture each and every word. It's like he's painting the scenes.
The Big Guy 4U himself is the obvious choice for the judge.
I'm about two thirds of the way in through reading this for the first time. Besides, as you stated, the gruesome violence(and of course the lack of commercial appeal vs budget requirements), I don't see any reason why it couldn't be made into a film. You'd just have to ditch some scenes or compress them, rearrange them or merge one or two scenes together(how many scenes do you really need where the gang rides into a town, throws a massive party, end up drunk/naked/violent/belligerent and fucking up the whole town?) Just keep the graphic and disturbing violence, the Judge's speeches, the important tentpoles of the story and it works out just fine, maybe stretch it to 3 hours if you want to pack as much material in while keeping the pace appropriately slower. The literate prose could be conveyed with artful cinematography. Totally doable.
Something that I visualise regarding adapting Blood Meridian (because who doesn't imagine how to tackle such a task) is The Judge's implied child murders. A shot after they ride into town of him giving candy to a child, we don't hear what he says. Him later excusing himself from the festivities of the night and slipping out the room. A hard cut to the child's defiled corpse out in the wild, her white dress torn and bloodstained.
I use that as a random example but it conveys that same heavy implications that announcing the locals grief of a child gone missing but through film as a language. I'm sure others in this thread have had thoughts ideas regarding how to convey aspects of the novel.
Can Ryan Gosling somehow be in the film? Also for anyone who read the book, wasn't the word 'and' used far to much?
no, he's too clean cut. everyone in BM is grizzled or morally deformed in some way.
how to portray the violence in the film, as shocking or so everyday as to not command attention? like when the Judge pitches the puppies off the bridge, it is delivered in such a matter of fact way as to appear shocking, and the characters respond as if they are shocked. but how to maintain that when you're inevitably going to be saturated with so much violence that you don't care anymore. a bush with dead babies hanging on it? meh, don't care.
Book was edgelord garbage with none of the poetry or art that Refn adds to ultraviolence. Shit prose. Awful writer, but to be expected of an American "legend".
How bout now?
I tried to read the first few pages of this and it was incomprehensible gobbledy gook
It's filmable, the problem is it would be just as shit as the book. Poor man's Moby-Dick. No content, shit prose, the ramblings of a retard. I used to think McCarthy was trolling readers until I read an interview where he ignored every question and rambled about the human condition while grilling bratwurst.
People regularly suggest Gosling for Glanton, and honestly he'd probably be great in such a role. Head of the scalp hunting gang which The Kid joins, Gosling has the intensity to pull the role off, though I'm not sure how often he's played a villainous role.
To give a brief synopsis, Glanton runs a gang of Americans paid by the Mexican government to kill bothersome Apaches, they collect the scalps of them and are paid for said evidence. They escalate to collecting the scalps of peaceful tribes and eventually mexican citizens themselves and are declared outlaws.
The book uses "and" far more than is normal, but to say that it's used too often implies it doesn't absolutely work. McCarthy doesn't use quotation marks and isn't too fond of comma, the reliance of "and" mixed with the very wide and vivid vocabulary really gives the novel a bizarre and kind of hypnotic flow.
It's not a book that's meant for people with lower-level reading comprehension.
I think an approach would be for the violence to be initially shot more dramatically before being presented more flatly and without consequence, if possible.
I felt initially shocked by the violence but by the end so worn down as to be almost desensitised to it. Question is whether a movie can do that within 2-4 hours or whether you change how it is presented to get that message across.
it would be hard to portray it as shocking when the Kid is so thoroughly into it and doesn't really swerve on it until right near the end and only then just a little bit. he's still wearing a necklace of human ears and murdering children by the time he decides that the Judge is probably a bad guy.
It needs to be CGI like Rango and directed by Gore Verbinski.
You have to read it through. its daunting, exhausting, but when you finish it you feel...altered.
I don't think character reactions are integral to being shocking. I was shocked by the dead baby tree when it didn't cause the character's much distress. I mainly meant close ups vs wides, fast cuts vs long takes sort of thing.
Bone Tomahawk shocked me, show something like that and the audience will be shocked regardless of what characters say or how they react.
true. the instance of shocking violence i am thinking of is something like in the shining where there is a snap zoom and dramatic music to explode the tension. you couldn't do that with the type of violence. maybe you could do it at the end where the kid opens the door of the jakes and sees who's inside.
>where the kid opens the door of the jakes and sees who's inside.
This brings up an interesting question regarding adaptation which is what story elements do you cut or change. Think of the final lines:
“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
That is a point where lacking Cormac's prose is a problem. So where do you end? Do you show the dance regardless in some overwhelming display? Do you end on the kid being foisted in? Do you make up something anew entirely?
obviously the kid, or actually given that we should have just seen the Kid's probable demise more likely someone like Tobin, is giving a voiceover of the final passage as we see the judge dancing in the hideous cold saloon to the fiddlers and whores
me as the Judge
Currently reading it right now. I think Terrence Malick is the perfect guy to direct Blood Meridian. It's slow pace and there's barely any dialouge and it's purely visual. I initially thought Cohen bros and Zahler could adopt this book but after reading it it doesn't fit to their style of film making.
We should resurrect Brando and let him play as the Judge.
Gosling is too metrosexual looking for a gritty violent western