A film based on the novel Blood Meridian will never work, and this is why.Films about deliberate incoherence exist - see the "works" of superhack Matthew Barney, for example - but celluloid masturbation for the sake of beating its methamphetamine-injected penis to Oingo Boingo and ejaculating swizzle sauce, can only be done on a small scale. The film must be representative of something intensely-personal to its creator, in order for it to "succeed" - for lack of a better word.Cormac McCarthy's novels are largely-unfilmable because in a sense they are the opposite of this. They are incoherent tales of masturbatory grandeur, but on a very large scale. No Country For Old Men and The Road - both of which were heavily-flawed - still worked to some extent because the respective directors of the films understood the thinnest amount of cohesion with regard to a "plot" - and I use that term loosely - and worked strongly around that.Blood Meridian is an altogether different kind of beast. It signifies all the grotesque excesses of Cormac McCarthy's other works, but piles on Grand Guignol-levels of wankery and a pathetic attempt at "introspection" over an enormous, sweeping design that, in the hands of other, ACTUAL authors might have worked - but instead forms an extraordinarily-boring yarn of impossible, incomprehensible excess. Almost as though the novel itself was penned from McCarthy's own ink-tainted semen.Such an "adaptation" - and I use THAT term laughably - would cost in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, be six+ hours long, and leave you simultaneously disgusted at its attempts of sophomoric edginess, and yet unrelentingly-confused as to what the creators of the film were actually attempting to signify. It's The Stand, but re-written by an eighth grader with Down's Syndrome, high on meth and smearing himself frequently with Vaseline as he typed, giggled and blew spit-bubbles.Not necessarily in that order.
The fact that it has been in development several times and fallen through each time, as well as what I always hear about it being unfilmable due to the graphic and gratuitous violence makes me think that the best medium to bring it to life on screen wouldn't even be a film. I think the perfect medium would be an anime. Gratuitous violence has never been a problem for anime. On top of that, it's a style of animation that really excels at depicting the kind of vivid landscapes that McCarthy describes. Also, anime lends itself well to depicting human emotions with close ups and stills and such. If the voice cast is good, and the animation team is good, I think it could be better than an actual movie.
>>223597515A woman wrote this.
This would just be No Country but in the 1800s. Already been done. If you want the Glanton gang, better to do this instead. At least it would be fun to watch.
>>223597809only logical explanation. there is no other way someone got filtered this hard
>>223597515I just finished reading it and it's not even close to incomprehensible. It's detached and largely impersonal but the actual content of the plot is described in plain English. It's the descriptions of the landscapes and unknown character motivations where the ambiguity lies. I don't know what you mean about introspection. There is next to zero introspection from the characters. Only the kid and the judge say anything about themselves.
All books that aren't genreslop are "unfilmable" and even genreslop is rarely as good on film as it is on paper. Film is an inferior medium compared to literature because it's passive.
>>223597515No studio has the balls to film the Judge scalping a 5-year-old redskin. It's not happening.
>>223598592This, it seems like the people always asking for a movie of this were just too dumb to sit through the book and only like the idea of it. Unrelated but anyone who likes corncob should read suttree.
>>223599736>suttreeMore like pseudtree, contrarian.
How the hell is Blood Meridian unfilmable?It's a fucking coming-of-age Western adventure story packed with actions, climax, and a clear arc.The only thing that would be unfilmable is the constant use of the word nigger
>>223597515>No Country For Old MenThe early drafts of this was for a film screenplay before McCarthy had a “what am I doing” moment and rewrote it as a novel much later
>>223597515I tried the read this book. Dropped it halfway because I couldn't take the way McCarthy wrote it anymore. He manages to make the text so complex. I'm not talking about words, I'm talking about the sentence structure etc.On the contrary, I think a movie would work great because the topic is very interesting and they can strip out all the hard to read text and it would be a masterpiece. It would be great to see the Judge in big screen.
>>223599913The ending showdown between the kid, the priest and the judge was playing out like a film as I was reading it. The violence, language and epic scale is what make it unfilmable
>>223599891suttree is just a really fun experiance to read. parsing out the hallucinations and occult elements was something ive never gotten from a contemporary novel. So much of the biggest events are so understated and written so matter-of-fact it's a really rewarding book.
>>223599913Nothing about the events of the story are hard to adapt but you'd lose a lot of the point of the novel by just straight adapting the events into a film, the prose is part of the point.
