What did this book actually achieve?

What did this book actually achieve?

I'm stumped.

We can get calling me a brainlet out of the way, I'm already aware of that.

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Shameful self-bump

Syntactical mastery and an engaging story

Achievement unlocked: Overrated
Achievement unlocked: Friscalating dusklight

Those are pretty obvious, but is there not more to it than that?

What more do you want? What books engaged you?

What do you mean by achieve exactly?

Plot interests me very little. If I have to choose any favorite authors, they'd be Faulkner and Raymond Carver.

As for Blood Meridian, it engaging in parts and had some very beautiful passages. But most of it felt insignificant, and I cared cared very little throughout.

What did it manage to excel in, besides aethetics? Yes, we can certainly agree McCarthy's prose is God-tier, but what are the most significant aspects of the novel and why does it survive among its contemporaries?

I'm not really sure what to tell you. It's just a great existentialist novel with a lot to read into it.

Pursuits of man.
Violence, life and death.
The judge is an interesting character, completely original

I honestly cant remember, pretty forgettable

>existentialist
Really? How did you get that?
Seemed pretty nihilistic to me.

The judge's philisophical rants attempted to make an existentialstist's meaning, but it really in the end it was less about fate and more about chance. The judge was a crazy cynic.

That's my take on it, any way.

My reading of it is that the judge force you to either accept nihilism or make an absolute leap of faith because death is all powerful so there is no place to find moral meaning in the materialistic world, which is kind of a common theme in McCarthy's oeuvre.

It's a treatise on the flora, fauna, and geography of the American southwest.

And the human proclivity towards violence and savagery.

It kind of did for the Western genre what Lord of the Flies did for the Island Adventure genre.

I haven't read the book but easy on the carrots bugs.

Human conflict is grotesque on both sides

Life is often vast and empty, without meaning, and like that caravan early on, is just disintegrating the further along they travel

Evil lays dormant in most of us

Beautiful prose, almost scripture-like at times

Not to get a James Franco or Ridley Scott adaptation, thank fuck

> not to get a James Franco or Ridley Scott adaptation, thank fuck

I think Blood Meridian *could* work as a film. But only with a ludicrous budget and almost no mainstream appeal

> the rating that's above R which means most theatres won't even show it at all (maybe R after bribing the ratings board)
> 4-5 hours long
> 100% shot on 70mm IMAX film stock
> all practical effects where possible, absolute minimum cgi
> 1:1 adaptation, every detail in the prose captured on screen. Long sections of no dialogue just riding through the vista's

No idea who'd trust to direct it though. Christopher Nolan knows how to use IMAX and practical effects but he is not great at directing more intimate stuff, especially fight scenes.

Oh I agree, user, I just didn't want James Franco or Ridley Scott to do it

I think, out of Hollywood, Paul Thomas Anderson would be quite fitting. The Master shows he could film beautiful vistas while also remaining intimate and intense.

The perfect choice would be Bela Tarr, although he is retired and probably wouldn't have been open to making a film outside of Hungarian.

I guess George Miller could do it, but I have no idea if it would actually work out, nor do I think it will actually be adapted in the first place anyway. Blood meridian is simply unadaptable in my eyes but I'd love to be proven otherwise.

>> the rating that's above R which means most theatres won't even show it at all (maybe R after bribing the ratings board)
>> 4-5 hours long
>> 100% shot on 70mm IMAX film stock
>> all practical effects where possible, absolute minimum cgi
>> 1:1 adaptation, every detail in the prose captured on screen. Long sections of no dialogue just riding through the vista's
> Almost no mainstream appeal

I don't know, Blood Meridian could be one of those legendary Hollywood epics that are cherished for decades to come, like Gone With The Wind, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Pt 2, Heaven's Gate, Branagh's Hamlet, Lawrence of Arabia, etc. Lengthy films do come out of Hollywood from time to time and can be met with immense success.

although Heaven's Gate was a flop that killed its production company, it has, in recent years, been accepted as a flawed masterpiece

A critique of US Empire, and an and analysis of the violence that goes into the creation of the State.

Wait it's been some time since I read it but how was the State in any way related to this?

I like how the governor of Sonora hired them. Somewhere along the way they figured out that you couldn't tell Mexican scalps from Apache scalps. So it was easier to slaughter unarmed Mexican peasants than Apache warriors.

Also the Captain of the failed filibuster pretty clearly represents Manifest Destiny run amuck.

> Lengthy films do come out of Hollywood from time to time and can be met with immense success.

How many in recent years though? Hollywood producers is creatively bankrupt (creativity is there, just not getting green lit) and English speaking countries can't generate enough income to pay for production costs anymore, so appealing to Asian markets with easily translated disalougue and simplistic plots made exciting by visual effects are what's hot right now.

R rated movies seem to making a come-back though, Mad Max: Fury Road, Deadpool and Logan were all super mainstream pop culture movies that could have been toned down to PG13 with some edits, but went with R and got praise for it, and made lots of money. It's a trend that hopefully continues.

The only way I can see Blood Meridian ever getting done justice on film is if some Bill Gates rich level person, makes it thier mission to spend 100's and 100's of millions bankrolling it and not expecting a return on investment. You'd need the best equipment on the market, the best people to use it, the best costume designers and make-up artists available, same with props and set design and a cast of actors willing to go through hell for 8 months of shooting and being attributed to characters that do abhorrant things.

That's not even considering who would play who. The Judge needs to be perfectly cast, personally I'd go with Clancy Brown. But there's probably someone better.

Jodorowsky would be an interesting pick. He could do something really different with it

what does lit think of this spec trailer? youtube.com/watch?v=kjOmQB9qYmU

only thing i dont like is the judge not being bigger

Not really a big movie buff (which is why I'm here instead of /tv/), but I liked the Coen Brothers' adaptation of McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. If anyone could pull it off, they could.

But yeah, very impractical film to produce. No characters to really sympathize with; everyone generally just turns their head aside and spits into the ground instead of experiencing character development. Metaphor-laden scenery porn to the point where it becomes ludicrous. Minimal dialogue.

Imagining a proper adaptation of this scene would be amazing though:

>“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”

Relies too much on the sequence of a hand upon hair to begin with. Very little of the described landscapes portrayed in the actual book.

I don't think you would open the trailer with the author's name either. Have an image that captivates the viewer like one of the more distinctively disturbing images from the book like the man hanging from the tree in soiled trousers.

The R rated movie trend is mostly appealing to manchildren who haven't grown out of comic books yet.

Shave Tom Hardy's head and he could do a beautifully performed Judge Holden. Or Michael Shannon. I couldn't see anyone else doing it.

Busted leather flintcraw

>OP tries to discuss a book
>reddit turns the thread into autistic speculation on a movie that will never exist

>I think Blood Meridian *could* work as a film. But only with a ludicrous budget and almost no mainstream appeal

That range of optionalities is unfortunately not fully available.

>books can 'achieve' things

So just read Faulkner instead is what you mean

Filename got me.

>muh reddit boogeyman

You realize both Veeky Forums and reddit are publicly-accessible websites, right? That both offer avenues for anonymous discussion of various subjects in specifically-designated subsections, right? That your rabid allegiance to one over the other is utterly pointless and a surefire sign of mental deficiency, right? Right?

Keep 'em cucked, Reddit!