Excellent. So let's figure to gather at my place at around 6-ish. I'll start the movie around 7 (I know that seems early, but when we did a test run with The Ruling Class, there were a couple of movie-lovers struggling to keep their eyes open...).

We'll supply microwave popcorn and soft drinks. If you want other snacks or beverages of a more "adult" nature (though what's more adult than spicy ginger beer... really?), feel free to bring 'em along.

Anyone who needs my address or directions, please PM me.

See you there!

At least that wasn't mangled as horribly as Earthsea was.

No, I kinda liked the Dune miniseries. Cherny was kind enough to give me the DVD set as a gift, which I cherish. But I kinda combine it in my head with the David Lynch version - - which compeltely sucked, but had fantastic production design.

Heheh, I saw Cherny reading Dune recently, and was reminded how that was a fantastic book ... but the sequels, imo, were lame. I never bothered reading any of the recent spate of heir-authored sequels and prequels. But the original novel is stupendous.


None of this has anything to do with Earthsea, except I'm beginning to look more forward to reading the book after movie-inspiration than I am to the movie itself.

How many Earthsea books are there anyway? Is there an original and several sequels?

There are five novels and a book of short stories. I would read the first three books first: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore.

And all of the books are quite short too.

Not to totally shift the focus to Dune, but to respond to what iSm said, the Frank Herbert sequels were great IMO... I haven't read any of his son's Dune novels but I'm not incredibly interested in those. Apparently they are readable, but pedestrian.

I remember that the first time I read Dune I was 16 or 17, and it took me a whole summer.

I've only read the first 4 books.

Well, in preparation for the language vote for the actual Earthsea movie which is, hahaha, the purported subject of this thread ... I did a little basic Wikipedia research which did not help me at all.

I'm surprised the Ghibli movie is not based on the original novel, or even the second one ... but rather loosely on the 3rd and 4th books. That gives me the same pause I have in reading the books in that I just have this general assumption that the first story is great ... and the subsquent ones not so great ... for any series of books or movies.


BUT, the key question here of whether the language of EarthSea is better represented by English or Japanese is still an open one for me. Apparently, most of our good guys vaguely resemble Pacific Islanders ...and most of our bad guys resemble Northern Europeans? Is that right?


I really don't give a hoot if the film's original language is Japanese. I find it very distracting to watch films that clearly take place in Europe, but have everyone speaking as if they're in Nippon. This will not be case with EarthSea, of course, but the trailer mousepod linked to made it look like the film takes place in quasi-Arabia!!

Also, since I find reading the subtitles ever so, but noticeably, distracting from the beautiful images so vital to animated films ... I really can only condone the Japanese language track for stories that actually happen in Japan.

Um, and it would be hard for me to vote against Timothy Dalton and Willem Dafoe as two of the actors I'd be hearing.



Will of the majority (or the casa de mousepod dogs) will rule ... but I'm giving fair warning that my vote will likely be for the English language version.

:iSm:

I've only read the first Dune book (must go back to the Sci-Fi thread and post that) and loved it, but I never had enough interest to read on. The only Le Guin I've read is the Catwings series. (Duh.)

We're in, btw

And yet you accept American-made movies set in France consisting entirely of spoken English?

For me, watching dubbed is so grating. It's not about what the people look like or where they're from, it's about the pace and rhythm of the language matching the visual pace and rhythm of the movie. Even if Miyazaki has said he doesn't animate to the voice acting, there is simply a narrative sensibility that is inseparable from the native language of the story teller and that sensibility comes through in the animation. I don't care how good the translation and subsequent voice acting is, there will always be a disjoint in a dubbed movie between the spoken word and the visuals and to me, it's a glaring disjoint that detracts from the whole.