Discworld Movies

IJBM: I am utterly unsatisfied. The pacing is extremely slow, the dialogue is rendered in an extremely passive deadpan, the disguises and background music are utterly corny...

The Colour Of Magic could have been a freaking EPIC to leave Avatar behind and to rival The Lord Of The Rings... and instead we got... well... an extremely old Rincewind, a Vetinari with a lisp and a FAKE widow's beak, a Twoflower with an American accent, extremely crappy dragons, a Cohen the Barbarian that didn't actually fence... (SRSLY, couldn't they have found an old fencing master and actually demonstrate Old Master use of angles and other awesome martial tricks?), the avoiding of Bel-Shamaroth made a freaking Running Gag, the absence of the Gods Playing With Mortals subplot...

So much Missed Moment of Awesome. So much They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot. And the delivery of the comedy was just terrible, terrible I tell you...

I haven't seen any of the others, but Hogfather is awesome.

edited 14th Jan '11 11:22:21 PM by storyyeller

It was very weak except in the parts where Death was. Why?

• Christopher Lee
• Death's dialogue should be slow and clunky.

Everyone else has no excuse. The wizards sucked. I want my Boisterous Bruiser Ridcully! Lord Downey sucked. The Auditors sucked. AND THE SOUNDTRACK WAS PATHETIC.

As for the guy who played teatime. It was passable. No Heath Ledger, but barely passable. But I think he could have been much creepier had he actually tried.

No, really, Death is the Once Scene Wonder that makes the movie worthwhile by being in most scenes.

Haven't seen The Colour Of Magic, but the feeling I've got from Hogfather was that if you hadn't read the book, you couldn't really understand what was going on in its entirety. What it comes down to for all those movies is Made-for-TV Movie. There just isn't enough money behind it. I am also not convinced that Pratchett's style translates well onto the screen. Too much of his humor is text based, comes from humorous narration, background story and footnotes.

A quick, efficient narrator can do wonders. Don't you remember One Hundred Girls? Or Forrest Gump? Benjamin Button? A movie can pull off a fun and obstrusive narrator.

So the Disney film may be the best one yet... Not that there's much competition.

Twoflower is just a typical tourist. So him being American was no problem with me. It would have been nearly impossible to have the Temple of Bel-Shamaroth.

I thought Hogfather was great, personally. Also the actor who portrays Death in Hogfather was Ian Richardson, not Christopher Lee. Much as I love Lee, I found Richardson's Death to be superior, unfortunately he can't reprise the role since he is now...well dead.

If I were to list some of the things Hogfather got right and some of the things it got wrong it would be the following:

Right:

• Death, as I have already touched upon, I found Ian Richardson to be perfect in the role.
• Susan, while she wasn't as good as Death, she was certainly not bad.
• Albert and yes, I'm aware I'm just making a list of characters, whatever.
• The most important thing that the movie got right was atmosphere. I think it really captured the feeling of the book, though I'm certain some people found it far to long and meandering, but most of those parts were necessary.
• It was funny. This is essential to a Discworld movie and most of the humour was dialogue lifted straight from the book.
• It had so many awesome scenes from the book, like Death's speech about belief at the end. Or his destruction of auditors. HO HO HO

Wrong:

• Some of the scenes with the wizards were pretty good (Hex, interaction with Susan), however they generally came off as a little to slap-sticky for my taste. I'm aware that they are sort of slapstick in the book as well, but not to the same extent. They may be childish, but they are also competent when they have to be (well, for a certain definition of competent). Also, Ridcully isn't suppsoed to look like that.
• While you can follow the plot without having read the book (in fact I did, back in 2007 where I fucking loved it, which lead me to give Discworld another try. Now I own every book Pratchett has ever written and went to the Discworld Con 2010 in Birmingham), there are some instances of the movie that doesn't entirely make sense. But yeah, most non-Discworld fans (and fans for that matter) I've showed it too liked it, so it can't be that confusing.
• I didn't mind the length personally, but objectively speaking, it was probably to slow in certain places.

Mr.Teatime was ok, I could see his peformance as a little artificial, however in all honesty I didn't mind and found that he worked as a villain. Still that probably had more to do with the writing of mr. Pratchett than the acting, so yeah.

I liked the Coulor of Magic too, though not as much. Not at all. However this is mostly because Hogfather is a great Discworld novel, while The Colour Of magic/Light Fantastic were...not. So there isn't much for me to compare it too, since I don't really like the first 3 Discworld novels (interestingly the sci-fi novels that Pratchett wrote earlier are actually quite a bit better than those 3, though of course not on par with his later stuff). In fact the entire reason why I needed to give Discworld another try was because I had read some of the early ones in Danish when I was younger and wasn't impressed. Of course the crappy Danish translation did it's part, but it's also because the first 3 simply aren't that good. Anyways, with this in mind, it didn't take much for me to like the adaption and in fact I was happy that it was cut down compared to the novel, which contained far too much useless stuff. To be fair about Vetinari, the patrician of the first books was nothing like the Vetinari we later came to know and love. Though, I'm aware that the film crew tried to portray him more as the later Vetinari than he was in the book.

Now, the Going Postal movie sucked. Big time. As you can see from my above posts I liked the other two, making this suckage even more of a letdown. They completely took all the energy out of the book, made it far more moralising and basically made it the worst thing that could possibly happen to a Discworld movie: Boring. Going Postal was one of my favourite Discworld novels too, so I'm still a little annoyed about that.

As for the animated adaptions. Wyrd Sisters was crap, Soul Music was OK. Not great, but OK.

edited 18th Jan '11 1:37:36 AM by Mathias

I really liked Hogfather, but not so much Color of Magic.

I thought the casting was great in Hogfather, and while I know that take on Teatime is different from the book, it worked really well.

I guess Color of Magic deserves props for being a Pragmatic Adaptation of what in the books was mostly Wacky Wayside Tribe and not that well plotted. However, the take on Rincewind was just so off. I know British people love David Jason, but while he was well-cast for Albert, he's totally wrong to play Rincewind. I didn't really have a problem with American Twoflower though.

"Then I would sue my face for slander".

What was it with Vetinari and the lisping? I was expecting him to start talking about his fwiend in Wome, Biggus Dickus anytime...

edited 18th Jan '11 1:19:23 AM by RawPower

I forgot, I also saw the Going Postal movie, and have a really mixed opinion on that one too. A lot of the characters are close to their book counterparts (and well cast) but kind of "off".

I did think Charles Dance made a good Vetinari and in some ways seemed to get the character more than Jeremy Irons did. Dance's Vetinari is avery nondescript (I initially thought he was one of Vetinari's clerks), and he plays up the idea of Vetinari pretending to be humorless. While I thought Irons' Vetinari was pretty good, his version is kind of hammy and more "Bond-villainy", while Dance's really gets the Straight Edge Evil part.

Going Postal is excellent, book!Angua is pretty and badass; movie!Angua is ugly, but she is so bad-ass that it works! Havelock is menacing. Most of the changes were forgivable given that they only have 2 hours.

Bad news book!Ridcully has gravitas. I have seen Timothy West doing gravitas in a million shows, but not in this one. Theory: West is such a luvvy that he will only bother to act if he is the main character.

Hogfather lacked jokes. Death, Susan, Teatime, Nobby and Banjo were fine, but it just didn't come together as a whole.

I only saw a bit of Colour of Magic. Jason was fine in that, but crap in Hogfather. I explain it with the luvvy theory.

Richardson played Death in the live-action; Lee played Death in the cartoons, hence the confusion

I have so far only seen Hogfather, which I thought was okay. Three bits of casting struck me as particularly mistaken though.

Joss Ackland was alright as Ridcully, but neither as physical or as loud as he's supposed to be in the books. It really should have been Brian Blessed, and unless Brian was up Everest at the time, I can't think why it wasn't. Perhaps Joss Ackland could have played the Dean, instead of the thin man who played him in this. Why cast a thin man as the Dean? He's supposed to be big and fat!

David Jason was too nice as Albert. He's supposed to be a miserable old bastard. Whenever I read the books, I imagine Wilfrid Brambell from Steptoe And Son. Obviously, it couldn't have been him, but David Bradley, who played Cohen in The Colour of Magic and who is also Mr. Filch in Harry Potter, would have been able to play it like that. But then, I gather that the Discworld films were made by David Jason's production company, which explains why he got to play Rincewind as well...

That Tony Robinson was in it as Vernon Crumley and not playing Nobby Nobbs. It does make me wonder what the casting department were thinking, really it does. Unless they thought he was too old.

Although Ian Richardson did play Death in Hogfather, he had passed away by the time of The Colour of Magic, and that was when Christopher Lee took over.

edited 22nd Aug '12 5:55:54 AM by DorisWildthyme

After watching Blackadder, I have trouble picturing Tony Robinson as anyone but Nobby.

Who do you think would be the perfect actor to play Rincewind?

Ooh yeah, David Bradley would be a perfect/much more faithful Albert.

As for Rincewind, I have the impression from how he's illustrated that a young Michael Palin would be the perfect Rincewind- not sure about a modern actor though

For some reason, I'm thinking Arthur Darvill who plays Rory in Doctor Who might make a good Rincewind.

Great suggestion.

Why haven't they make a Witches movie yet? I would die for one.

edited 23rd Aug '12 9:01:30 AM by Nightwire

I love David Suchet, but his take on Reacher Gilt was... all kinds of wrong. Reducing the polished Magnificent Bastard of the books to a slimy Smug Snake that played Corrupt Corporate Executive totally straight was one of the biggest failings of Going Postal.

You'd have to get the casting of the witches dead right though. My personal choices would be Sian Phillips (Livia from I Claudius) as Granny, Lynda Barron (Nurse Gladys Emmannuelle from Open All Hours) as Nanny, and maybe Rosie Cavaliero (Paula Breeze in Nebulous) as Magrat.

Alternatively, even though she's a bit petite to play the character, Katy Manning in Iris Wildthyme mode might make a good Nanny.

Were she still alive, I'd have suggested Beryl Reid.