intfiction.org

Fictional characters rendered pictorally by police artists.

http://thecomposites.tumblr.com/

Conrad.

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http://tiltedcandle.wordpress.com

It is.

Daisy Buchanan looks a lot like Mia Farrow to me (but I'm terrible with faces).

That is so absolutely not Judge Holden! Avaunt, oh website, before I can never read Blood Meridian again!

(Though it is an open question whether I will ever feel the need to read Blood Meridian again. It is a good book, but so relentlessly unloving.)

Pinkie Brown is plausible, and the description of Sam Spade makes me wonder whether Humphrey Bogart was the right man for the role: I don't think Bogart looks particularly satanic, even in a pleasing way. Any thoughts on this?

Most of all, I think Tess looks suitable unimpressed.

Amazing idea. I never did picture Mr. Rochester quite like that (seems a bit too feminine, his features not as sharp as in my mind's eye), but I can totally see it working.

Maybe I'll suggest characters from Moby Dick. I loved that book, and it would be very interesting to see Ahab or Queequeg done this way.

"Ma'am, do you think you could describe your assailant?"
"Well, for one thing, he had a wooden leg and kept mumbling about white whales..."

Should be easy to pick on a line-up, anyway.

On an unrelated note:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0339.html

Joey - I suppose it would be hard to find someone who looked exactly like the picture and could also act it out. It's like Clint Eastwood in a western - if you were to describe the character beforehand, physically, you might end up with someone completely different, but Eastwood embodied the romantic ideal of the rough Western *so well* that, well, who cares what he looks like, he's perfect.

(if any of his westerns had been books beforehand, that is)

I appreciate the not entirely unrelated Order of the Stick strip there. As for Bogart, I'm inclined to agree. He became the prototypical film noir private investigator and in a sense it doesn't matter what colour hair or shape of face might have fit the character better. Perhaps though, there are people out there for whom Bogart as Sam Spade is as absurd as Keanu Reeves as John Constantine.

If you want characters that are spot on, then you could watch the movie Watchmen. Visually, they're almost perfect. Character-wise, I thought they were quite good too.

Anyway, just to expand on the Eastwood thing with better examples: Robert Downing Jr. isn't really like Chaplin, Meryl Streep isn't really a Thatcher lookalike, Geoffrey Rush isn't much like Peter Seller, Helen Mirren and Queen Elizabeth haven't really got more than a passing resemblance... but damn if all those people weren't *perfect* on their depiction.

Also, characterization always helps.

Everybody already knows about http://www.themonsterengine.com/artwork, right?

I think with the biopic actors the trick is in capturing the mannerisms of their subject. When you see someone you don't just see their surface appearance, you also take in the way that they move, the manner in which they speak and the kind of words that they choose.

As for Watchmen, that's a perfect example of a film that didn't need to be made: it's slavishly faithful (with good reason: the original is a masterpiece), but it left me wondering what the point was. If I wanted a ideal Watchmen-experience, I'd just reread it. Then again, there might be Dashiell Hammett fans that thought the Maltese Falcon didn't need to be made into film. In seventy years time, I hope people will think of Watchmen as the graphic novel and not the film.


That's brilliant and horrifying in equal degrees.

I suppose it was the challenge - "the film adaptation that could never be made", I think it was. And it does serve better as a "companion" to the graphic novel, best enjoyed by people who have read it, than as a standalone film, which does mean that, in a certain level, it's failed.

But I enjoyed (almost) every minute of it. I *love* works of art that are moved by love and/or admiration, and it was clear that it was made by people who loved the original. They tried their very best, and kudos for that. There's plenty of IF that fails on some degree or another (gameplay, narrative, puzzles, you name it) but deserves recognition and is an enjoyable experience because the author put so much love into it.