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serynI am watching the movie Eragon. It was on TV and my TiVo recorded it as a suggestion. The movie is awful.
I blame the source material because the book was atrocious. I talked to a number of people whose children loved it. I thought about it and I understand why. It's because Eragon is pieced together piece by piece from pretty much every other popular fantasy work in the English language. If you had not read LOTR or seen Star Wars or Harry Potter or McCaffreys' Pern or read any of the other things everyone's heard of (there were even elements from the Robin Hobb books, especially watching the characters walk for several weeks and when they arrive, nothing happens) it might seem really interesting and satisfying. To me it read like plagiarism.
The movie uses the same horse scenes and similar settings to LOTR, with the angsty closeups of Luke mourning Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. So the movie feels like a parody.
I know I struggle with noticing when things are supposed to be funny. Most of the intentionally funny stuff seems just cruel to me since it focuses on isolating and excluding people who don't fit in, but I have a really good sense of the absurd. Jeremy Irons's character in Eragon, (I keep typing Eragorn... heh.) whose name is something like "Bum", sounds like a cross between Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It must be intended to be hilarious, right? There's an in-joke that the children just don't get? This was supposed to be the Hot Shots of fantasy films, right? I keep suspecting they didn't know they were making fun of themselves. If it wasn't intended to be a parody, there should be a lot of people complaining about copyright infringement.
I blame the source material because the book was atrocious. I talked to a number of people whose children loved it. I thought about it and I understand why. It's because Eragon is pieced together piece by piece from pretty much every other popular fantasy work in the English language. If you had not read LOTR or seen Star Wars or Harry Potter or McCaffreys' Pern or read any of the other things everyone's heard of (there were even elements from the Robin Hobb books, especially watching the characters walk for several weeks and when they arrive, nothing happens) it might seem really interesting and satisfying. To me it read like plagiarism.
The movie uses the same horse scenes and similar settings to LOTR, with the angsty closeups of Luke mourning Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. So the movie feels like a parody.
I know I struggle with noticing when things are supposed to be funny. Most of the intentionally funny stuff seems just cruel to me since it focuses on isolating and excluding people who don't fit in, but I have a really good sense of the absurd. Jeremy Irons's character in Eragon, (I keep typing Eragorn... heh.) whose name is something like "Bum", sounds like a cross between Gandalf and Obi-Wan Kenobi. It must be intended to be hilarious, right? There's an in-joke that the children just don't get? This was supposed to be the Hot Shots of fantasy films, right? I keep suspecting they didn't know they were making fun of themselves. If it wasn't intended to be a parody, there should be a lot of people complaining about copyright infringement.
