dianeseattle
Member
What did you think of the Coen Brothers' remake of True Grit? I just tried to watch the Sixties version with John Wayne and I don't think I made it five minutes before I had to give it up.
The biggest difference was the way it was cast. Every character in Henry Hathaway's version was horribly cast, and the way women were portrayed (even though the hero is a woman) was disgusting. No wonder 1969 was the rise of the Feminist Movement.
But my biggest gripe is how disrespectful the old version was to the book's text, written by Charles Portis (still alive & living in Arkansas last I checked). At that point in history, people spoke a specific patois exclusive to the Southwest. It was an effort to use proper English while really being uneducated in it. So there are a lot of malapropisms and idiomatic language you could only hear if you lived back then. The Coen's got it PERFECT. Reading Portis is a joy because of it.
And although common things were going on like rustling cattle and gunslinging, they were all described in this wonderful jargon. When Maddy explains why her Pa ended up in Fort Smith in November, she said:
They didn't drop their Gs and they didn't use contractions, like "He'd heard" instead of "He had heard," or "didn't" for "did not." To them, this sounded like proper English, even fancy English, and everyone spoke that way for a long time. Portis writes it beautifully. It's a book you can't put down. I bought copies for two people Christmas before last and they both devoured the books in one day.
So, The Coen Brothers have mad respect for Portis and his writing, just like they did in Fargo with the Scandinavian-based Minnesota accent and inflection, and in O Brother, which is just a rich pastiche of all kinds of language. Then there's the Big Lebowski. "It really pulled the room together, man...." And John Goodman's frequent rants about being Jewish while suffering from PTSD & packing heat. Then there's Jesus... "I'm d'Jesus..."
I'm a language freak except I'm not really enjoying its evolution over the last 25 years. Sometimes I think if I hear one more celebrity or influencer say, "I'm obsessed with these....", I'm gonna get me a baseball bat and take my tv apart!
Uh-oh. Off my own topic here. True Grit opinions?
That's my review. How about you?
The biggest difference was the way it was cast. Every character in Henry Hathaway's version was horribly cast, and the way women were portrayed (even though the hero is a woman) was disgusting. No wonder 1969 was the rise of the Feminist Movement.
But my biggest gripe is how disrespectful the old version was to the book's text, written by Charles Portis (still alive & living in Arkansas last I checked). At that point in history, people spoke a specific patois exclusive to the Southwest. It was an effort to use proper English while really being uneducated in it. So there are a lot of malapropisms and idiomatic language you could only hear if you lived back then. The Coen's got it PERFECT. Reading Portis is a joy because of it.
And although common things were going on like rustling cattle and gunslinging, they were all described in this wonderful jargon. When Maddy explains why her Pa ended up in Fort Smith in November, she said:
In November when the last of the cotton was sold Papa took it in his head to go to Fort Smith and buy some ponies. He had heard that a stock trader there named Colonel Stonehill had bought a large parcel of cow ponies from Texas drovers on their way to Kanasas and was now stuck with them. He was getting shed of them at bargain rates as he did not want to feed them over the winter. People in Arkansas did not think much of Texas mustang ponies. They were little and mean. They had never had anything but grass to eat and did not weigh over eight hundred pounds.
They didn't drop their Gs and they didn't use contractions, like "He'd heard" instead of "He had heard," or "didn't" for "did not." To them, this sounded like proper English, even fancy English, and everyone spoke that way for a long time. Portis writes it beautifully. It's a book you can't put down. I bought copies for two people Christmas before last and they both devoured the books in one day.
So, The Coen Brothers have mad respect for Portis and his writing, just like they did in Fargo with the Scandinavian-based Minnesota accent and inflection, and in O Brother, which is just a rich pastiche of all kinds of language. Then there's the Big Lebowski. "It really pulled the room together, man...." And John Goodman's frequent rants about being Jewish while suffering from PTSD & packing heat. Then there's Jesus... "I'm d'Jesus..."
I'm a language freak except I'm not really enjoying its evolution over the last 25 years. Sometimes I think if I hear one more celebrity or influencer say, "I'm obsessed with these....", I'm gonna get me a baseball bat and take my tv apart!
Uh-oh. Off my own topic here. True Grit opinions?
That's my review. How about you?
