On the Road (Walter Salles)

[Stay Puft]

ON THE ROAD
Director: Walter Salles

IMDb link (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337692/)

http://i.imgur.com/X90dj.jpg

[Stay Puft]

Because we were all waiting for a film adaptation of the Kerouac novel, apparently. (Seriously, why would anybody think this is a good idea?)

Anyways, it's not as bad as all that. It's a well mounted film as far as production design, Gustavo Santaolalla's musical score, that sort of stuff goes. Which, to put it another way, means it is wholly predictable and obvious. This is what a competent cinematic adaptation of literature looks like. It starts out a bit breezy and rambling as one might expect, eventually settles into a clear narrative trajectory, Kerouac's prose provides the source of voiceovers, there are shots of Sal banging away at a typewriter or scribbling down notes on a pad, because that's what you do when you make a movie about writers, and so on.

The actors generally do a good job, I even liked TRON guy. Viggo is great, even though he only has two scenes. More importantly, his balls make their first return to the big screen after getting smacked around in Eastern Promises. Everybody seems game (minus Stewart, who just kind of Stewarts the whole thing), everybody gives their best, it's passably entertaining, I still find myself resonating with the themes (though that again owes to the source), but yeah...unfortunate to see so much work go into something that ultimately just feels lazy. They went for the most obvious artistic choice, every time. Assuming a closeup of a typewriter hitting letters to paper doesn't make your eyes glaze over, this could be worthwhile, but I pretty much check out at that point.

[Raiders]

Sounds like a Walter Salles film. Well made, but predictable/safe and dull.

[Ezee E]

Still curious. Wonderful cast for this.

[dreamdead]

I don't understand how the playwright Jose Rivera can simultaneously write excitingly surreal plays and utterly mundane screenplays, since he's worked with Salles on the last couple projects.

[eternity]

It's a very attractive movie in just about every sense of the word, but it's a slog. Glad to see Garrett Hedlund really deliver in a role, though.

[Melville]

Terrible. It seems to think some jazz music and rapid cuts do the job of the book's electric verve, it puts dull hedonism in place of the book's search for transcendence in spiritual excess, and its Dean Moriarty is a drawling depressive rather than a sad holy fool possessed of boundless manic energy. It's elegant and contrived in exactly the way its voice-overs would suggest it shouldn't be.