Make This Holiday Season Special - With The Movie Version Of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"!!!

[hatrack]

Now THAT's going to be some family fun!

Screenwriter Joe Penhall's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's bestselling novel opens with the two survivors of some unspoken earthly catastrophe enduring an earthquake, witnessing a forest fire, stepping around a severed human leg and discovering a family of three who have hanged themselves -- all before Page 8. In Penhall's script, father and son also encounter a man stumbling along in near blindness, his hair singed, his flesh charred; run from a pack of gun-toting cannibals; and find a crudely painted billboard proclaiming, "Behold the Valley of Slaughter." The world -- and everything in it -- is dying, and the Man and the Boy are determined to keep moving, knowing that if they stop, some horrible fate will claim them. The shopping cart's mirror isn't for decoration: It's to see if anyone is gaining on them. In such dire circumstances, the least comfort -- fresh food, clean water, a blanket -- is magnified into the greatest luxury, and that has made the scene that "The Road" director John Hillcoat was filming on a late spring day even more difficult to execute.

With a little more than a week of principal photography left on production of the film, the Man (Viggo Mortensen) and the Boy ("Romulus, My Father's" 11-year-old Kodi Smit-McPhee) had reached Horsetail Falls, a cataract thundering into a verdant gulch an hour east of Portland. Especially by Oregon standards, it was a stunning early May morning: The weather was T-shirt warm, with songbirds flitting about in the waterfall's mist. As Penhall and Hillcoat imagined the scene, which falls in the screenplay's first quarter, the two actors would wade into the waterfall's icy pool and, for a moment, pretend as if there was nothing wrong and the world hadn't become a soot-covered graveyard.: The Boy even remarked to the Man, "Look. Colors."

But as Hillcoat saw it, the Oregon setting was proving to be too picturesque. "It's a beautiful day," the Australian-born filmmaker said somewhat dejectedly. "I hope it clouds up."

It was a fair summation of the film's tonal balancing act. In adapting McCarthy's National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, Hillcoat and Penhall (as well as the actors and production team) toiled to weigh hopelessness against faith, the worst of humanity opposite the possibility of civilization. But for some, including one top distributor of specialized film who passed on the Nov. 14 release, the cinematic version of "The Road" was ultimately still too bleak to appeal to moviegoers. So even as the filmmakers were ratcheting up the story's danger and despair, they also were pushing to make the movie as uplifting as possible, emphasizing its intrinsic father-son love story and promoting the notion that the Boy embodies some sort of messiah. Along the way, movie version also became much less a story about a post-nuclear catastrophe and more a tale of climate change and a dying planet.

EDIT

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/movies/la-ca-road17-2008aug17,0,5958148.story

[kestrel91316]

1. GREAT book! The best, and most literary of the post-apocalyptic genre.

And with Viggo Mortensen starring as the father, it's going to be a GREAT film.