Death And The Compass
"The work of a talented visionary." -The Los Angeles Times
In the startling story of power, pride and corruption, a brilliant detective investigates a series of strange murders in a totalitarian city of the future. But when bizarre crimes point to a labyrinth of occult conspiracy, the inspector discovers that his unorthodox methods may be leading to his own equally dark destruction.
Peter Boyle (Everybody Loves Raymond, Taxi Driver), Christopher Eccleston (Gone In Sixty Seconds, Existenz) and Miquel Sandoval (Jurassic Park, Three Businessmen) star in this visually stunning drama based on the short story by legendary Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Member Reviews
Disappointing.. - Moir
The film did not feel like it really worked ... except for what felt to me like a slight borrowed interest from Borges' story on which it was based.
I suspect one problem is that sometimes in making a film you end up putting a particular face on what can be left unspecified or hinted at in a story...
Of course, this can be affected by how the individual viewer responds to the images used on the screen.
If someone is described in a certain way, the reader can imagine or not details of how the person looks... showing something on the screen, there can be a problem in how the viewer will respond ... e.g. someone may find a certain kind of personality or character implied by a certain build, a kind of facial expression ...
while film has the great economy of one picture's conveying thousands of details, it also has the overhead that the viewer may be affected by these potentially thousands of details in ways the author or the story teller would not wish.
This is one, I think, of the temptations in films, to use type casting or visual clichés to try to minimise this. If one writes that someone is, for example, a formidable martial artist and fighter one does not have the problem that if one cast someone like Fedor Emelianenko or Karl Gotch to play someone as formidable as they actually were a certain number of viewers might object that they did not look like the image of some WWE professional show biz wrestler with buff showy bulging muscles.
I felt the images on the film in this presentation distracted from the flow of the story. I am looking for a copy of the story to read it in order to follow this thought out a bit more ... from other things of Borges` that I have read, I suspect the film really distorted some of the games that would have energised the actual story in its print form.
Member Reviews
Read All...
Disappointing.. - Moir
The film did not feel like it really worked ... except for what felt to me like a slight borrowed interest from Borges' story on which it was based.
I suspect one problem is that sometimes in making a film you end up putting a particular face on what ...