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More on "Good Omens" the Movie and Coraline
In a recent e-mail exchange I had with Neil Gaiman he confirmed that Terry Gilliam is the director for the adapation of Good Omens to the screen. On a side note, Gaiman has been working on Coraline and will be doing a signing of the book in the Barnes and Noble in Union
Square, NYC on Thursday the 11th. That's today. Update: 07/11 13:15 GMT by CT : I just wanted to
say 'Curse Your Terry Gilliam'! Ever since I read Good Omens, I wished I
was a film director just so I could direct that book. I guess
Terry will do a good job too ;)
don't forget Terry is a writer
Get the EULA T-shirt
That's not a good omen...
I have been pwned because my
Is this new news its been on imbd.com for a while now.
I also heard that the two of them were thinking of working on Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" but someone else got the rights first.
callum
Perhaps you meant here, or perhaps here.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
Hmm, according to amazon Good Omens is a direct desendant of Hitchhikers guide... now when is that movie ever gonna get finished?!
Either way its good to see a Terry Pratchett book being made into a film, hopefully it'll get some Discworld books made into films too.
I imagine that'd be pretty cool if you combined it with LoTR style effects and cinematography.
made the best Sci-Fi movie of all times IMO : Brazil
Choosing Terry Gilliam to do Good Omens is perfect. His style and dark humour complement Pratchett and Gaiman's wierd little epic. Although Terry Gilliam is American, he is one of the few directors I'd trust to do this with the right British touch (not too much, but not too little as well).
Now we can hope for an intelligent comedy that doesn't resort to butt (fart) jokes.
In all seriousness; here is a marginally relevant link for the lazy.
Hey!!! the parentheses are good for something
I pushed the Good Omens on my son last year, and in conversations realized something...
Much of the humor is rooted in the 70's. He enjoyed the book, and much of the humor is not rooted in the 70's. But he wasn't culturally equipped to enjoy it as much as I did.
OTOH, he did get into Bohemian Rhapsody after that.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that there will be another movie based on a P.K. Dick novel, but I wasn't suspecting "A Scanner Darkly". It's one of my favorites and I hope they get a director talented enough to translate it to film. Of course, since P.K. Dick is so hot in Hollywood I wouldn't be suprised if some studio bought all the rights to his works and is just holding onto them, without definite plans for films.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I can understand why, as B&N is a little obfuscated in their language, but Neil's site seems to imply that while there will be a coraline release in Union Square at 6pm, he himself will be in San Fran at 6:30... which strongly conflicts with a personal appearance in New York...
Dont mean to put a damper on things but this is old news. Good Omens has been in pre-production for 3 years now and Terry Gilliam was always going to direct it. The Hold ups have been with money and financing, not the production team or cast list. Last I saw Terry was waiting to see if the finance would be tied up in time to shoot Good Omens or wether it would get moved down the list a way while he shot Tideland.
is great. It's been a little while since I read it, but it was definitely funny and worth the time. It does remind me of Hitchhiker's Guide now that I think of it. I'd love to see a movie version.
If you have actually read this book you would know that the footnotes are often the best and funniest parts of a all around good tale about the biblical apocalypse. How will any director mention the different misprint versions of the bible that the angel and sonetimes bookstore owner has collected?
I'm actually very interested to see if this thing pans out. I just hope that the history of the british monetary system actually makes it into the movie
Terry Gilliam is one of the most brilliant directors out there (and he is definitely "out there"). I consider Brazil to be one of the best films of all time. Terry is very willing to be dark. In fact, over the past 2 decades it seems that he's been trying to distance himself from his Monty Python past. None of his recent films can be considered comedies. The last film with any substantial comedic element was The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which was his last pythonesque film.
It will be great to see Terry doing a dark comedy again.
PS, is anyone else out there upset that his plan to do The Watchmen fell through? That would have been a fantastic film!
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
According to the large posters in the B&N entrance, Neil will be here in NY. I hope he's not in San Francisco. Or maybe he has access to some form of matter transport that he's not sharing?
This will sound like needless whining, but Hemos, can you please give the audience who isn't "in" on what's going on in your head a little clue as to what the heck you're talking about? It took other posters to correct your links and try to describe what it is you were talking about.
What is this, why should we care, and why is it on Slashdot?
Grr.
...the unread masses will poo-poo it as a Dogma ripoff, and it will unfortunately tank.
Make an adaptation of this? It's a superb novel, but reduce it to what can be conveyed via a screenplay, and you have something with a simplistic plot, thin characters, flat dialogue, a few sparse pieces of visual humour, and over reliant on FX to fill the holes. I mean, what kind of idiot would pay to see... oh, hang on...
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I really hope they do justice to the book. That has to be one of the most original books I have read since 100 Years of Solitude.
:-)
Especially the hellhound
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
I thought you were refering to a forth part to "The Omen" series...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I hope this isn't too far off topic... but if you want to see Terry Giliams flair for darkness & humor combined... go out and rent 'Brazil'. I think he's the man do to this movie right.
Blender And Linux Fan
Actually, Neil's site is a little confusing to read too - the West Coast launch event was at 6:30pm on July 2. (The 11th you're seeing on his site is June 11th - the date of the press release announcing the event).
The East Coast launch event is today (Thursday, July 11) at B&N, Union Square, NYC at 6pm.
Baron Munchausen could have been better (it ran out of money during filming and the finished result is somewhat less than planned) but I really liked it - and it turned out much better than some stuff that did get finished like "Waterworld".
To get a lot of the jokes in Good Omens it helps if you have read any of Richmal Compton's Just William books.
Read them to your kids; but do read a little bit. Your appreciation of the satire in Good Omens will increase.
StrutterX
"They are scared of him ***but*** he's funny, wise and brilliant."
Not sure thats the best word in that context!
Please use the comment system like everyone else. That is not an "update," it is a topical comment.
It's no wonder nobody respects the editors when they consider themselves too good for the discussion system used by the unwashed masses.
What are you afraid of, being modded down? Being flamed? If you don't have the peas for it, post it AC.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
This movie has been in production for a while; old news. A friend of mine from work told me about Good Omes while I was reading HHGTTG. It's all money at this point. I haven't read the book, so I'm not sure how much I think they should spend on this movie. Personally, I don't think any movie should cost more than $10 million dollars to make; unless it has a lot of special effects.
Hmm, according to amazon [amazon.com] Good Omens [amazon.com] is a direct desendant of Hitchhikers guide...
IIRC, the paperback book says something to that effect right on the front cover. Since I'm at work I can't check it out, but I remember reading it on the book and then thinking "what does this have to do with HHG?"
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Due to a lack of any posts on this article, and a few ignorant posts that are here, it would seem that Slashdotters don't really know or care about "Good Omens" or what it is. Here's a post to clue you all in. (If you've actually read the book, stop reading. No really! Go read something about Donald Knuth or some rant about Microsoft. Shoo!)
Good Omens is a book co-written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett in (I believe) the early 90's. Neil Gaiman is most famous for writing the Sandman comics (graphic novellas?). Terry Pratchett is most famous for writing the many books in the Discworld series. Basically, Gaiman writes dark and brooding stories, Pratchett writes intensely clever and funny stories. "Good Omens" is the brilliant collaboration of these two minds, producing a hilarious account of Armageddon. The book has been most compared to "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and while they do share many common qualities, "Good Omens" is more readable and enjoyable to me.
Why should you care? Because the book is THAT good, and Terry Gilliam is THAT good of a director, and the combination of the two could produce a movie that is THAT good. What's the last movie that came out in the theaters that is a genuine cult classic and will be for years to come? It's been a while. Several years. It's hard to come up with one, isn't it? Well, a movie based on "Good Omens" directed by Terry Gilliam has a lot of potential to be just that: a genuine quotable flick that we can watch dozens of times over and enjoy it each and every time.
Again, what I'm saying is important here is that the *potential* is there for a really great movie that we could all love and enjoy, and we should all be pushing for it's release. Wouldn't it be much cooler if we built up hype about this potentially great movie rather than lamenting about how much George Lucas sucks and how he flushed Star Wars down the toilet?
I was just looking at Terry Gilliam's filmography on IMDB and noticed that there are two Holy Grail movies. Can anyone explain the difference between "Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail (1996) (VG)" and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)". Also, has anyone read any of the books on Gilliam? Are they any good?
-dbc
Right you are - wrong Python. I have no excuse, the book is sitting on a shelf behind me!
Oh, crud. I just noticed that slashdot edited out the spaces in those links, meaning none of them work. Let's try that again with %20s this time.
Good Omens
Terry Gilliam
Neil Gaiman
Terry Pratchett
THOSE links will work.. I'm really sorry about that. Figures, the one time i forget to hit "preview", this happens.. blah.
If an echo filter adds echo, then what does a lameness filter do?
-- super ugly ultraman
I suggest consulting Gaiman's weblog which he tends to update at least daily. That way you get his writing without having to wait for the next book, comments, opinions, essays, little short stori es he throws in just because, cool things he's found, etc. a
*not
I had the good fortune to go to Gaiman's reading of Coraline last week in Berkeley (the day the book was released, he did a full 3-hour reading of the text to a packed cathedral of 800 people).
Before he began, he confirmed that Henry Selick (Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach, Monkeybone), who was in attendance, would be directing the movie version of Coraline, and that Michelle Pfeiffer was signed on to play the Mother/Other Mother roles.
It's a great story, and is sort of a shift for Gaiman, targeting a broader aged audience, while remaining dark but more polished (no footnotes, and a more constant narrative tone). The reading was fabulous, and I could totally visualize the movie version.
A friend of mine did a more thorough write-up of the reading for those interseted.
Kevin Fox
The full title of this book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
There are quite a few jokes related to occultism or magic(k), like the literal demonization of (Aleister) Crowley.
I was going to entitle this "why the movie will suck," but I didn't want it to get automatically tagged as Flamebait.
"Good Omens" was a brilliant book, and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett were the right people to write it. The problem is that the book has a religious theme, and while Gaiman and Pratchett pulled it off brilliantly, Hollywood just can't do religion. "The Last Temptation of Christ" was the last gasp of good, thoughtful religious movies (and I would put "The Omen" among these,too). Since then, we've had to put up with crap like "Stigmata" and "A Walk to Remember."
The combination of subtlety and humor seen in "Good Omens" when dealing with the interactions between Aziraphale and Crowley, Crowley's communications with hell, Aziraphale's interactions with heaven, and Aziraphale's comments on the author of Revelations, etc. etc. What we're inevitably going to end up with is a dumbed down, simpflified version of the whole thing that's going to insult our collective intelligence.
On the optimistic side, Terry Gilliam has a good track record, so I could give him the benefit of the doubt.
There's a Union Square in SF, too. Also, if a plane could make it cross country in 3 hours (not sure), then it could happen since 6:30 Pacific is 9:00 Eastern.
I just don't see how some of the subtle humour from the books will translate all that well to the silver...er I guess now the CCPL (Cypher Crypled Polimer Laminant ) screen.
Good Omens, or Equil Rights are probably one of the better ones to pick
I'd doubt that a studio would spend the money to option all of Dick's works considering that they're going for truly astounding amounts of money. A Scanner Darkly cost $2,000,000. Remember Impostor? That went for about $1,000,000.
Gilliam has been directing Good Omens for well over a year (I knew about it maybe even two years ago, but it wasn't official then) Whatever tho, any news about the Good Omens movie (even old news) is good news. I've read Good Omens at least three times and consider Pratchett on a par with Douglas Adams (Pratchett has the additional advantage of vitality). Gaiman is just a flat-out terrific writer with an incredible imagination and some steriods-fueled storytelling powers. (I've read American Gods Twice) In collaboration they make a powerhouse team, and to put it mildly, when I heard Gilliam was directing I practically shit my pants in excitement. This flick is going to be so FUCKING cool.
-- Nerds on toast in the new millenium
Technically, that's "The Internet Movie Database" - though admittedly IMDb could easilly mean what you say, but it says the full name at the top of their main page and as the title of the page as well.