JR Ackerely is one of my very favorite writers, one of the great stylists of the 20th century and way ahead of his time with his concerns for the homosexual, animal rights etc. Although he didn't think much of himself as a poet he produced a small body of brilliant verse. He also wrote a short play that kicks arse. His use of language and his humor are outstanding as a matter of degree - so funny, so beautiful as impressive as anybody else's work that ever wrote anything, are his books. His bittersweet oddly sympathetic misanthropy, his audacious lack of shame/total honesty are however incomparable/one of a kind. I've read "My Dog Tulip" at least 4 times and it's not my favorite of his works by any means.
First of all, I'm disappointed that the lack of creative imagination in this effort resulted in a script consisting of nothing beyond excerpts simply cut from out the book and strung end to end which are delivered as voice-over to images which despite the not entirely uninteresting style of the drawings, serve merely to illustrate the spoken text in a straightforward/pedestrian manner that serves only to subtract from what the mind's eye would see sitting down with the text.
What horrifies, mystifies and utterly confounds, though, is that a book that is so LOL funny, and so transcendent / touching happy/sad is thus reduced, somehow in the performance, I think, notwithstanding the addition of so much window dressing (which is frankly at its worst perhaps, actually, in the sequences in which it attempts to do a wee bit more than simply depict in 2 dimensions what we're reading flat out - as for example in the sequence in which Tulip marking her territory urinarily is depicted as a kind of ballet dance which I suppos o u g h t to be funny (especially, I suppose, if you find those pfeiffer "here is a dance to..." comic strips to be funny) but simply falls flat as a loose stool), to coming off as no more amusing than it'd be to be stuck listening to some old codger who has absolutely nothing to say but to blab incessantly, humorlessly, without much enthusiasm/verve at all in fact, enough to put you to sleep, if you wanna know the truth, about his beloved pooch (this, of course, a direct result of the reader's digest treatment the book gets in "focusing" it). As an example, his writing about the battle between his sister and Tulip over the territory that is JRA's bedroom is just too hilarious on paper, but on screen it barely elicits a smile from this viewer.
I don't suppose that "My Dog Tulip" was the best subject for film treatment, yet it might have worked beautifully and surely would have played better as a plain old "movie movie" (ie a narrative film/story) than to serve up this ultimately lazy kind of multimedia presentation of 'highlights' resulting in a show and tell snoozefest. I'm sure there actually IS a 3 act drama in there to be divined, written afresh, shot and shown. This movie most assuredly is not it dammit!
Disclaimer - after about an hour I packed it in.
"We Think the World of You" is another film that does an abysmal job taking what his most popular novel offers in the way of dramatic material and turning into a movie. So sad.
First of all, I'm disappointed that the lack of creative imagination in this effort resulted in a script consisting of nothing beyond excerpts simply cut from out the book and strung end to end which are delivered as voice-over to images which despite the not entirely uninteresting style of the drawings, serve merely to illustrate the spoken text in a straightforward/pedestrian manner that serves only to subtract from what the mind's eye would see sitting down with the text.
What horrifies, mystifies and utterly confounds, though, is that a book that is so LOL funny, and so transcendent / touching happy/sad is thus reduced, somehow in the performance, I think, notwithstanding the addition of so much window dressing (which is frankly at its worst perhaps, actually, in the sequences in which it attempts to do a wee bit more than simply depict in 2 dimensions what we're reading flat out - as for example in the sequence in which Tulip marking her territory urinarily is depicted as a kind of ballet dance which I suppos o u g h t to be funny (especially, I suppose, if you find those pfeiffer "here is a dance to..." comic strips to be funny) but simply falls flat as a loose stool), to coming off as no more amusing than it'd be to be stuck listening to some old codger who has absolutely nothing to say but to blab incessantly, humorlessly, without much enthusiasm/verve at all in fact, enough to put you to sleep, if you wanna know the truth, about his beloved pooch (this, of course, a direct result of the reader's digest treatment the book gets in "focusing" it). As an example, his writing about the battle between his sister and Tulip over the territory that is JRA's bedroom is just too hilarious on paper, but on screen it barely elicits a smile from this viewer.
I don't suppose that "My Dog Tulip" was the best subject for film treatment, yet it might have worked beautifully and surely would have played better as a plain old "movie movie" (ie a narrative film/story) than to serve up this ultimately lazy kind of multimedia presentation of 'highlights' resulting in a show and tell snoozefest. I'm sure there actually IS a 3 act drama in there to be divined, written afresh, shot and shown. This movie most assuredly is not it dammit!
Disclaimer - after about an hour I packed it in.
"We Think the World of You" is another film that does an abysmal job taking what his most popular novel offers in the way of dramatic material and turning into a movie. So sad.