The world has a way of looking at people
Tonight at the Brattle I saw Angela Carter and Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves (1984) with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks; it was brilliant and I don't know why I haven't seen more criticism constellating it with Dennis Potter's Dreamchild (1985) and Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986). Terence Stamp is perfectly cast as the Devil in a white touring car, whose headlights through the forest gloom are the double flash of a beast's eyes. Stephen Rea should play more werewolves. So should Danielle Dax. I wish Carter and Jordan had gotten to make the film of Vampirella/"The Lady of the House of Love" they were discussing when she died; I did not actually expect how closely his visuals would translate her prose style, elaborately artificial and bluntly homespun at once. I'd had dinner earlier with spatch at Sapporo Ramen, where I got tantan-men with three kinds of extra seaweed; Rush and I went to Rosebud American Kitchen & Bar after the movie and I got the apple pie I had been wanting all this week of cold and rain. I came home to discover thisbluespirit had made, as part of their gorgeous series of original and other Elements, fanart for Curium from my story "Assignment 96." I'm still not sure about recovery from Arisia, but I've had a really nice evening.
rushthatspeaks; it was brilliant and I don't know why I haven't seen more criticism constellating it with Dennis Potter's Dreamchild (1985) and Jim Henson's Labyrinth (1986). Terence Stamp is perfectly cast as the Devil in a white touring car, whose headlights through the forest gloom are the double flash of a beast's eyes. Stephen Rea should play more werewolves. So should Danielle Dax. I wish Carter and Jordan had gotten to make the film of Vampirella/"The Lady of the House of Love" they were discussing when she died; I did not actually expect how closely his visuals would translate her prose style, elaborately artificial and bluntly homespun at once. I'd had dinner earlier with spatch at Sapporo Ramen, where I got tantan-men with three kinds of extra seaweed; Rush and I went to Rosebud American Kitchen & Bar after the movie and I got the apple pie I had been wanting all this week of cold and rain. I came home to discover thisbluespirit had made, as part of their gorgeous series of original and other Elements, fanart for Curium from my story "Assignment 96." I'm still not sure about recovery from Arisia, but I've had a really nice evening.
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I'm glad he finally got rid of that rusty truck with only twenty mile.
Okay, now that I've got that out of my system, fine, I have to add another thing to my list that is all your fault. (In the best possible way.)
P.
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I take it as an honor!
I really liked The Company of Wolves. I have in fact liked everything I've seen by Neil Jordan, but because I knew so little about this one, I was prepared for it to be an interesting failed experiment; Carter's prose is such a strong component of her fiction that I thought of her as essentially unadaptable. She did a beautiful job adapting herself and she was working with someone who absolutely got her play with registers, with structure, with sexuality and tone and the layering of genres within the same story: the script is built out of and fleshed around three of Carter's stories, "The Werewolf," "The Company of Wolves," and "Wolf-Alice," and all three of them are variations on a theme and the film adds more. It is as feminist as Carter's own fiction. There are horror elements in it I found actually horrifying. I truly wish she and Jordan had made more films together. It is interesting to me now that his Byzantium (2012) looks so much like a thematic sequel to The Company of Wolves; it came from a play by Moira Buffini.
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I can never recommend against reading Angela Carter. I really want to track down her screenplay.
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I would consider this a healthy life decision!
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P.
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She was really good at adapting her own work! I'm always impressed when that's true of authors. It's not a given.
I'm a little alarmed about the horror elements, which I find much worse in a visual medium than in prose, but forewarned is forearmed, I hope.
There are some impressive practical effects in the transformations. They are not the lingering note of the film for me, however, if that helps.