Bad times for adventure/fantasy movies lovers like me. Only movie I watched this year was “Sherlock 2”, and I have to admit it´s not nearly as good as the first one. Oscar presented some movies full of sensibility, nostalgia, and social concerns about families reconnecting or breaking apart and bleeeergh! What are those guys thinking? Do they really believe only serious sensible people watch movies? What about the kids who couldn´t care less about a silent black and white movie? What about immature middle aged men who don´t give a damn about families disintegrating? What about people like me?
Anyway, I’m planning to watch Disney´s version of John Carter, as I always loved ER Burroughs books, especially the Tarzan series, but I’m afraid I´m just going to see yet another beloved book being defaced by Disney studios, like they already did with CS Lewis Narnia’s books. So I place all my bets on the adaptation of a book I’m not so crazy about, Seth Grahame-Smith´s ‘Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter’.
I have just finished the book, and I must say, for those who liked ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ as much as myself, it´s not as good. Now Seth is on his own, and he doesn´t have the frame of a master (mistress???) novelist, like Jane Austen, to work upon, so the plot is somewhat weak. Also, the task of faking the biography of a historically authentic character demands an accurate and complex picture of daily life on Lincoln´s time, and tough I’m not into details of day-by-day life realities in US frontier, on the middle of 19 century, I just felt the book lacks that flavor a rich full portrait should convey. And the worst of all: it doesn´t have zombies!
But the book has the potential to be a very fun movie. It has a dark gloomy humor that I did appreciate, and may appeal to some of you. It also presents vampires not as sexy tragic sensible souls (how can having sex with an undead not be necrophilia?), doomed to an eternal search for impossible love, but as the soulless bloodsucking predatory sonnafadevils they were always meant to be.
Beyond that, I can only hope some indie movie will arise from nothing and steal the scene, but that´s not a thing we can really count on. Ah..., and I’m still crossing my fingers for Peter Jackson getting to finish the first of the ‘cursed’ hobbit movies by the end of the year, but that seems even less likely.