Movies:Spielberg's Tintin

[ttaaee]

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE

The nominees are:

Keisha Castle-Hughes - WHALE RIDER
Diane Keaton - SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE
Samantha Morton - IN AMERICA
Charlize Theron - MONSTER
Naomi Watts - 21 GRAMS

And the Oscar goes to...

Charlize Theron - MONSTER

[ttaaee]

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE

The nominees are:

Johnny Depp - PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL
Ben Kingsley - HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG
Jude Law - COLD MOUNTAIN
Bill Murray - LOST IN TRANSLATION
Sean Penn - MYSTIC RIVER

And the Oscar goes to...

Sean Penn - MYSTIC RIVER

[ttaaee]

BEST MOTION PICTURE

The nominees are:

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING
LOST IN TRANSLATION
MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD
MYSTIC RIVER
SEABISCUIT

And the Oscar goes to...

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

[ttaaee]

Take a look at this picture. The one on the left is Speilberg's War of the World's poster. The one on the right is the poster of a Thai Movie called Dub Suriya (darkening the sun) released almost 20 years ago.

This picture has been emailed around and been discussed among Thai forumers on pantip.com whether the WOTW poster was "inspired" by the Thai one or, 20 years ago, Dub Suriya's poster designer actually "borrowed" the idea from some American novel covers which also "inspired" the poster designer of the WOTW.

[ncr]

Tintin Finally Does Tinseltown - 8 March 2007

It was a quarter-century in the making but then again, nothing is easy for cartoon heroes such as Tintin. Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks, a division of Viacom Inc., has committed to produce at least one movie about the adventures of the intrepid Belgian reporter, said Nick Rodwell, head of Moulinsart NV, Tintin's commercial studio, on Thursday.

"After 25 years, they finally said, 'OK, let's go,'" Rodwell said of the protracted talks with Spielberg. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rodwell said the Hollywood company will go into preproduction for a movie, which should appear in theaters in about two years. It wasn't clear whether the film would be cartoon animation, computer animation or a movie with actors, or which of the 24 cartoon books of Tintin's adventures would be picked. "If movie No. 1 works, we will continue," Rodwell said.

Talks about a Hollywood movie on Tintin, who saves the lives of countless people and makes sure criminals end up behind bars, have long stalled on financial issues and production questions. The first plan surfaced just before Tintin's creator, Georges Remi, aka Herge, died in 1983. Even at that time, Remi, one of the world's foremost cartoon strip authors, delighted in Hollywood's interest.

"If Steven Spielberg wants to make a Tintin film I cannot imagine anything better," Rodwell said of Remi's thoughts, and he fully realized that a movie adaptation might well change the way Tintin looks. "Let's see what he comes up with," Rodwell said. Tintin books have sold 220 million copies worldwide and have been translated in 77 languages.

___

On the Net:

http://www.tintin.com/

[ncr]

Also: this thread at www.tintinologist.org

[Pas]

That's awesome! I'm a big fan of Tintin since I was a kid. I wonder which actor will get the leading role (for the sake of god I hope it's not Jean Claude Van Damme)

[ncr]

Originally Posted by Pas

for the sake of god I hope it's not Jean Claude Van Damme

Well, he's Belgian, as Tintin, so that should surely qualify him....?

[ncr]

So I finally got hold of the infamous "Tintin in Thailand" parody (where Hergé's heroes visit the bars of Patpong and constantly bombard each other with filthy language....)

Information on Wikipedia
(There's even a Thai Wikipedia article.....)
See also this BBC report from 2001.

I had once seen a copy for sale at Pattaya bus station and pondered whether I should buy it, but finally thought it was not worth the expense. Probably a good decision.

The drawings are not that beautiful and only in black & white (well, it's an underground production after all); it's rife with lewd expressions (though not particularly offensive either..... no explicit drawings, for example); and the simple plot and rude dialogues quickly get boring.

Nonetheless, it's good for some chuckles. Plus the story, though altogether rather uninspired, takes an interesting perspective: The comic characters lament that after the death of their creator (Hergé) they are confined to their cold and moist castle, as they aren't sent on adventures anymore. Relief to their misery comes when Jolyon Wagg's wife hires them to find her husband who hasn't returned from a trip to Thailand..... only for them to be spied on by the publishers, who try everything to safeguard the clean and family-friendly image of the series....

It can be downloaded via this link as a PDF if you are inclined to give it a try. (Hurry before someone decides to ban the site. )

[Yappofloyd]

Bookstore removes 'offensive' Tintin, July 18, 2007 - 5:22PM The Age

The classic comic book Tintin in the Congo has been removed from the children's section of Borders stores in Australia because some customers may consider it "offensive", the bookseller says. The move is in line with action by Borders stores in the US and UK, sparked by complaints that the book was racist. "We are committed to acting responsibly as a retailer and with sensitivity to all of the communities we serve," Borders said in a statement issued today. "Therefore, with respect to the specific title Tintin in the Congo, which could be considered offensive by some of our customers, we have decided to place this title in a section of our store intended primarily for adults."

Tintin in the Congo would remain in the adults graphic novels section because "we believe adults have the capacity to evaluate this work within historical context," Borders said. Borders Australia did not respond when asked if there had been any complaints here.

David Enright, a London-based human-rights lawyer, was shopping recently at Borders with his family when he came upon the book, first published in 1931, and opened it to find what he characterised as racist abuse. "The material suggests to (children) that Africans are subhuman, that they are imbeciles, that they're half savage," Enright said in a recent interview.

In Britain, the book also will be stocked with graphic novels and it is receiving similar treatment in the US. The move comes as the world marks the centennial of author-cartoonist Herge, the pen name of Georges Remi who created the Tintin series. The book is the second in a series of 23 tracing the adventures of Tintin, an intrepid reporter, and his dog, Snowy. The series has sold 220 million copies worldwide and been translated in 77 languages.

But Tintin in the Congo has been widely criticised as racist by fans and critics alike. In it, Remi depicts the white hero's adventures in the Congo against the backdrop of an idiotic, chimpanzee-like native population that eventually comes to worship Tintin - and his dog - as gods. Remi later said he was embarrassed by the book, and some editions have had the more objectionable content removed. When an unexpurgated edition was brought out in Britain in 2005, it came wrapped with a warning and was written with a forward explaining the work's colonial context.

- agencies

[Yappofloyd]

The world of Tintin may be gone, but that's why we like it
Ray Cassin July 20, 2007 The AGE

THE adventures of Tintin, the globetrotting boy reporter with the ludicrously improbable hairdo and preposterously Edwardian attire, has always been something of a guilty pleasure for those of liberal inclinations. Tintin's comic-book career stretched from the gloomy 1930s, when the Western democracies so often seemed in danger of being eclipsed by the rival totalitarianisms of left and right, well into the Cold War era, when notions of an international order and universal human rights gradually became ascendant.

Yet somehow Tintin himself always seemed resolutely stuck, in mentality at least, in the decade of his first appearance, when the several European empires still held sway over most of the world. Wherever the young Belgian went, whatever exotic evils beset him, his triumph over them seemed to assume the superiority of the culture that produced him.

It is no great surprise, then, that Borders, the international chain of bookstores, has finally succumbed to complaints about one of the earliest of his adventures, Tintin in the Congo. Since its first publication in 1931, the book has been a target for campaigners against racism and defenders of endangered wildlife. In the ensuring decades Tintin's creator Herge conceded their case. He acknowledged — perhaps ruefully, perhaps peevishly, and certainly out of a desire not to lose sales — that Tintin in the Congo reflected the "purely paternalistic spirit" of the time in which it had been written.

So the most offensive episodes were recast. Instead of Tintin lecturing bemused Congolese on the history of "their fatherland, Belgium", in a 1946 version he gives them a mathematics lesson. There's safety in numbers. And the youthful great white hunter was made less predatory after a request from Herge's Scandinavian publisher: a bizarre scene in which Tintin dispatches a rhinoceros by drilling a hole in its back and inserting a stick of dynamite was replaced by one in which the animal dies when his rifle accidentally discharges.

These patchy and pallid concessions to liberal sensibilities have not, however, preserved Tintin in the Congo from the ire of Britain's Commission for Racial Equality, which this year demanded that the book be withdrawn from sale. A commission statement declared that "it beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable to sell Tintin in the Congo. The only place that it might be acceptable for this to displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying 'old-fashioned, racist claptrap'."

So should Tintin go the way of Noddy, who in the 1980s was banished from lending library shelves around the world because the Golliwog who made his life a misery was a racist stereotype? Does Borders' response to the critics of Tintin in the Congo, namely transferring the book from the children's to the adult sections of its stores, amount to continuing by devious means the sale of "racist claptrap"?

In truth, the rhetoric of both Borders and the thought police seems to contain a hefty dose of claptrap. Of course, Herge never completely removed the racism inherent in Tintin in the Congo, as a glance at the artwork will attest: the thick-lipped Congolese he depicts bear a closer resemblance to the infamous Golliwog than they do to any real African. And the excision from the original narrative of one exploding rhinoceros still left behind rather a lot of dead, provoked or otherwise molested animals.

But literate adults, as Borders has decided, can surely be trusted to work all this out for themselves. It is in the prissy tone of the book chain's announcement that its particular line of claptrap may be found: "We believe adults have the capacity to evaluate this work within historic context."
So we do, Borders, so we do. And yes, the sensible response to those who would ban the book is simply to remove it from the shelves most frequented by those who might take the wrong lesson from Herge's celebrated, if tainted, ligne claire images. But there is more. There is that guilty secret.

The truth is that these days Tintin is largely an adult taste anyway. Many children no doubt enjoy the comic books simply as ripping yarns, but their appeal lies most of all in the nostalgia they evoke. Tintin's world is a lost world, like the world of Indiana Jones, or, for that matter, that of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.

Which is precisely its appeal, exploding rhinoceroses and all.

Ray Cassin is the former editor of the Opinion page.