Ah, the brooding and the scheming. Really what they need to do is hire Kyle McLaughlin to reprise his role as Paul and, say, John Goodman, to be the Baron. Then they just sit them in the restaurant from My Dinner With Andre and let them brood and scheme at each other. Of course, all the brooding and scheming happens in internal monologues, so the scriptwriting will be very easy. Just Kyle and John, sitting at the table and brooding and scheming back and forth. Every once in a while Mr. Goodman can cackle a little. You know, to show he’s evil.
Actually, with modern CGI you could probably get by with just sticking their heads onto the bodies of Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. Overdub the whole thing with a bitching Toto soundtrack and slap some new title cards on that sucker and we’re good to go.
And bonus points! Every few years you can announce that there’s a super duper original director’s cut which is going to up the brooding and scheming ante in a way which has never before been seen on film. And then, you know, release the same movie again but have it play through twice before the credits roll.
I saw this with a buddy when it was in the theatres. The theatre actually handed out a two-page crib sheet that described the characters and the various relationships. Geeks that we were, we diligently studied it before the movie came on so we could follow the action.
I was there, and got this, too. I still have mine, but it’s a single sheet, two-sided, with a graphic of the sky of Arrakis in the background. It helps, but not enough to let those unfamiliar with the book figure it all out. (I’d already read the book countless times by the time this came out).The sheet was really just a glossary, n excerpt from the one at the end of the book. And THAT runs several pages.
By the way, the record for supplementary material at a movie has to be Executive Action, which was the pre-JFK, made before Oliver Stone ever made a movie. I swear that the handout was a multi-page newspaper. It was the first time I ever attended a movie with footnotes.
Dude, like David Lynch was TOTALLY into cheesing at the time. He was cheesing his ass off during that whole movie! /Southpark
I liked the movie. The extended version is a bit s-l-o-w…but overall, I felt Lynch really captured the look and mood of the books in a way that the miniseries didn’t. The weirding modules were dumb and the ending was incomprehensible, but it was entertaining at least - plus Francesca Annis will forever be Jessica - no one could top her in that role.
I really, really like the miniseries, but seriously, could someone just photoshop all the stoopid hats out so I can watch it without rolling my eyes so hard I get eyestrain? Damn those hats are stooooopid. The worst by far is the triangle thing that Feyd wears behind his head - though the Guild penis hat and the Bene Gesserit vagina hat in that one scene are also really really bad. The Sardaukar berets are hilarious too. I really felt that if they weren’t trying so hard to distance themselves from the Lynch film, the mini could have been much better. Also the guild representative guy should have been fired the first day of filming - what a ham. “The GUILD! - does NOT! - take ORDERS…from YOU!!!”
As if the hats were the worst clothing offenders in the Sci-Fi miniseries. I remember thinking “Ah, here comes Irulan, who is… being attacked by butterflies. WTF?”
The costuming department was like a junior high home-ec class gone mad.
Nonetheless, despite the costuming and the fact that Duke Leto was portrayed by the corpse of William Hurt, the miniseries was vastly superior to the Lynch movie. Not only did Lynch’s additions seriously undermine several points that Herbert was making in the books, but in editing the whole mess down Lynch’s version was left on the cuttingroom floor, leaving a disjointed series of incomprehensible vignettes.
It was like watching a strobe movie: flash!Calidan flash!Guild navigator flash!Arrakis flash!Shadout Mapes. audience: WTF?
Same here enjoyed the film but though a diehard SF reader for much of my life I could never ever get into the books even though I made several efforts with many years in between.
I’ve never gotten past the first fifty pages of the second book.
I read someplace that Sting was hired to do that scene naked, and was willing to do it, but the story was that the higher-ups freaked out and made them put something on him. I don’t know how true this is, though.
David Lynch’s *Dune *is a masterpiece of tone and atmosphere. I can’t think of another movie that so successfully places in you in an entirely unfamiliar world. I think Lynch was correct in throwing in the towel on a story that could never be shoehorned into a feature film. His approach was to treat the entire story as a MacGuffin and to make the movie an exercise in atmosphere. Brilliant, I could watch it any day.