LogFAQs > #893611602

WhiskeyDisk posted...

Finally! Someone else that knows those books. I was starting to think my having read them as a kid was a Mandela Effect in the making since quite literally nobody else I've ever talked about books with for 30 years ever seemed to know what the hell I was talking about when I've brought them up.

I got them from a Scholastic book fair around the same time I got the entire Narnia series and the first few Bunnicula books.

I definitely liked the more occulty, mythological books in the series (ie, the ones with Will, Merriman, and Bran) more than I did the ones with the Drew kids, and The Dark is Rising itself was probably my favorite of the series (with Silver on the Tree a close second), but I did (and still do) like the series as a whole.

If memory serves, I think I came into them before I actually read Tolkien, but after I'd already fallen in love with Tolkien by way of the animated Lord of the Rings cartoon. So I was pretty much primed for fantasy but hadn't yet graduated up into purely adult-aimed works. It was also around the same time that I was transitioning from more vanilla CYOA books into gamebooks like Lone Wolf.

As an aside, I never really liked Narnia as much, though I did sort of like The Silver Chair and The Magician's Nephew.



WhiskeyDisk posted...

I was certainly not aware they'd made some sort of movie based on them but it wouldn't surprise me to hear it was terrible, even though those books seem exactly like the sort of thing that would translate well to film if the people adapting the screenplay actually read the source material and not a summary.

Never, ever, EVER attempt to look into its existence, no matter what. You might think that you want to know, even in a "can't look away from a car accident" sort of morbid way, but you don't. That dark abyss of torment was not meant for mortal eyes or souls to know.

>_>

<_<

>_>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQrfaRFucbI

For the record, it's actually worse than that trailer makes it seem (and that trailer makes it seem very, very bad).

Basically, after Harry Potter came out and was a success, studios started rushing to find the next young adult property they could cannibalize into a film series (see also, the main reason why The Hunger Games got greenlit, and why there are so many Hunger Games clones now), and someone found The Dark is Rising. And then, because film execs are 100% assholes who are actually incapable of understanding concepts like "art" or "joy", they decided they had to rewrite the entire thing into a localized and focus-tested nightmare mess (ie, what some execs had initially wanted to do with Harry Potter as well, and similar to the notorious original intention for how DiC was going to localize Sailor Moon back in the day), in which nearly every single role was utterly miscast, and terrible on almost every conceivable level. Like, it was the movie you'd make if someone asked you to create the fundamental, antimatter universal opposite of The Dark is Rising.

I saw it in a theater for free, and still almost walked out to demand my money back at least three times.

The movie is also the reason why I loathe Alexander Ludwig on a visceral, primal level, and assume literally any movie he is cast in must be terrible. Like a Dark Midas, everything he comes into contact with turns to shit.

I did not like the movie, is what I am saying, in case you didn't quite pick up on that.


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