Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: Gunslinger on July 17, 2005, 12:17:56 AM
-
OK I know there is previous posts on this subject but this is kinda a different sway so bare with me and ignore the poor spelling I've been drinkin beer all day.
Have people never heard that this was actually a book?
I've seen the movie and loved it. Besides all the Tom Cruise scientology hollywood drama recently he did a great job in the movie and I thought the movie held to the book really well.
the biggest complaint about the movie I've heard was that the ending sucked. I will join them in saying the climax in the movie was kind of a sizzle instead of a bang but it held to the book. If you've read the book the movie made sense. It just dumbfounds me to hear people say "why the heck are aliens gonna die after conquering a planet"? Was in not beleivable in the book? I mean really the ending was published. Do people not read? I read this book in High School, it's considered a classic. From what I've heard the brodast reaction has actually been studied by the DoD for disaster releif reasons. but over and over I've heard from people that they just don't get it.
Personally I blame Katie Holmes. If she would have just said "tom...it's great bangin you because your twice my age and stared in Top Gun but I really don't beleive in Scientiology" all the confusion and hype would never have melded together and people would have just concentrated on the umph of the story originally pened by a great classic writer. I just don't get it.
anyhow that's my rant....carry on.
-
If yah had a breaker bar, you'd have no trouble puctuating your explanations to numbskulled movie goers that regardless *whack* of how big *whack* a sweetheart Cruise is, *whack* HG Wells wrote *whack* a great book.
And you'd a been able to drive home, too.
;)
-
I wanna bang Katie Holmes too. No doubt I could bang her better than Cruise, perform in a film just as poorly as Cruise, all for a fraction of the price. I'm waiting for a phone call.
-
From what i have heard they didn't stage the most impressive scene from the book, with a destroyer, "Son of Thunder" (at least it's how it was translated to Russian 100+ years ago) shooting one tripod and ramming another...
I am reading a book again now. Amazing for what was written in 1898.
When I was a kid I have read all Welles 15 volume "collected works". Some stuff like "War in the Air" (sorry, I have to translate titles back to English from Russian) is still "actual" (that's why we build tanks and Americans buid bombers, our leaders have read Welles ;)) and was a real eye-opening back in 1900s.
-
Besides HG, the other Welles version was the best. Still heared on the radio on Halloween.
(http://www.mercurytheatre.info/images/welles2)
You can download the audio (that's all there is) from this website:
Mercury Theatre (http://www.mercurytheatre.info/)
-
BTW, can anyone give me a link to original text of "War of the Worlds", of simply send part one, chapter 17 to tengrie [dog] sky.chph.ras.ru ? Please, do me a favour!
-
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/warw.html
Boroda, this looks promising. check it out.
-
i forgot the part bout the destroyer boroda.. ill have to go back and read it again
the glaring omission for me was the absence of the poison gas that the martians used after one was taken down by a concealed army emplacement. that took part right around when the main character holed up in the house if i remember correctly but never occured in the film
nevertheless, it was a good movie and there were a lot of jaw dropping moments. the scale of the tripods versus the humans was done very well
-
Many thanks!
About a couple of miles out lay an ironclad, very low in the water, almost, to my brother's perception, like a waterlogged ship. This was the ram Thunder Child.
It really shows how many things may be lost in translation. Even when professionally translated in the times of good old Russian Empire. In Russian a "Thunder Child" turned into a "minonosets" (destroyer, torpedo-boat), it was "covered with armour"...
I still can't understand why they didn't make this pathetic episode into the film :( Contrast between the crowd running to escape and unseen people aboard the "Thunder Child" making a suicide attack, seeing a battleship formation on the horizon...
-
Originally posted by moose
i forgot the part bout the destroyer boroda.. ill have to go back and read it again
the glaring omission for me was the absence of the poison gas that the martians used after one was taken down by a concealed army emplacement. that took part right around when the main character holed up in the house if i remember correctly but never occured in the film
nevertheless, it was a good movie and there were a lot of jaw dropping moments. the scale of the tripods versus the humans was done very well
yea I'm thinking that too now. I'm just sick of talking to people that never read the book that say this was a bad film. Even in film version it was excellent.
Hang. I ran out of beer about an hour ago and I quit smokin 3 weeks ago. Unless you want a pissed off Marine on your bellybutton I sudgest you shut your suck....THERE that more "enlisted type" and less "louie" for ya? ;)
-
LOL!
Quit smokin? Outta beer?
Good time to take up cat punting.. careful how yah pick 'em up.
:D
-
I suddenly understood that English books I have read before were only some crap for semi-illiterates. Welles is absolutely great. Thanks for the link, it's really a great experience for me, I can compare it only to reading Leskov after some post-Soviet pocket-book fiction.
He sprang to his feet and saw to starboard, and not a hundred yards from their heeling, pitching boat, a vast iron bulk like the blade of a plough tearing through the water, tossing it on either side in huge waves of foam that leaped towards the steamer, flinging her paddles helplessly in the air, and then sucking her deck down almost to the waterline.
A sweetheart of spray blinded my brother for a moment. When his eyes were clear again he saw the monster had passed and was rushing landward. Big iron upperworks rose out of this headlong structure, and from that twin funnels projected and spat a smoking blast shot with fire. It was the torpedo ram, Thunder Child, steaming headlong, coming to the rescue of the threatened shipping.
Keeping his footing on the heaving deck by clutching the bulwarks, my brother looked past this charging leviathan at the Martians again, and he saw the three of them now close together, and standing so far out to sea that their tripod supports were almost entirely submerged. Thus sunken, and seen in remote perspective, they appeared far less formidable than the huge iron bulk in whose wake the steamer was pitching so helplessly. It would seem they were regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves. The Thunder Child fired no gun, but simply drove full speed towards them. It was probably her not firing that enabled her to get so near the enemy as she did. They did not know what to make of her. One shell, and they would have sent her to the bottom forthwith with the Heat-Ray.
She was steaming at such a pace that in a minute she seemed halfway between the steamboat and the Martians--a diminishing black bulk against the receding horizontal expanse of the Essex coast.
Suddenly the foremost Martian lowered his tube and discharged a canister of the black gas at the ironclad. It hit her larboard side and glanced off in an inky jet that rolled away to seaward, an unfolding torrent of Black Smoke, from which the ironclad drove clear. To the watchers from the steamer, low in the water and with the sun in their eyes, it seemed as though she were already among the Martians.
They saw the gaunt figures separating and rising out of the water as they retreated shoreward, and one of them raised the camera-like generator of the Heat-Ray. He held it pointing obliquely downward, and a bank of steam sprang from the water at its touch. It must have driven through the iron of the ship's side like a white-hot iron rod through paper.
A flicker of flame went up through the rising steam, and then the Martian reeled and staggered. In another moment he was cut down, and a great body of water and steam shot high in the air. The guns of the Thunder Child sounded through the reek, going off one after the other, and one shot splashed the water high close by the steamer, ricocheted towards the other flying ships to the north, and smashed a smack to matchwood.
But no one heeded that very much. At the sight of the Martian's collapse the captain on the bridge yelled inarticulately, and all the crowding passengers on the steamer's stern shouted together. And then they yelled again. For, surging out beyond the white tumult, drove something long and black, the flames streaming from its middle parts, its ventilators and funnels spouting fire.
She was alive still; the steering gear, it seems, was intact and her engines working. She headed straight for a second Martian, and was within a hundred yards of him when the Heat-Ray came to bear. Then with a violent thud, a blinding flash, her decks, her funnels, leaped upward. The Martian staggered with the violence of her explosion, and in another moment the flaming wreckage, still driving forward with the impetus of its pace, had struck him and crumpled him up like a thing of cardboard. My brother shouted involuntarily. A boiling tumult of steam hid everything again.
"Two!," yelled the captain.
Everyone was shouting. The whole steamer from end to end rang with frantic cheering that was taken up first by one and then by all in the crowding multitude of ships and boats that was driving out to sea.
The steam hung upon the water for many minutes, hiding the third Martian and the coast altogether. And all this time the boat was paddling steadily out to sea and away from the fight; and when at last the confusion cleared, the drifting bank of black vapour intervened, and nothing of the Thunder Child could be made out, nor could the third Martian be seen. But the ironclads to seaward were now quite close and standing in towards shore past the steamboat.
-
Originally posted by Hangtime
LOL!
Quit smokin? Outta beer?
Good time to take up cat punting.. careful how yah pick 'em up.
:D
the wife would kill me. Then I'd have marital problems. If that's the case I should have worked on the Mustang anyways this weekend.
Maybe Nash is right. roots of Karma and all.
-
"To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves. "
I think i'll never learn the damn language. 9 years at school, 2 years pre-school, 2 years at the college (this probably doesn't count because in fact it was me teaching others) - all futile. You have to be born with the language.
-
For me - the main idea of the book was to evaulate a society and it's reaction to facing an irresistable, inhuman, but absolutely rational (in it's behaviour) force.
Welles foresaw the nazis.
-
(http://antichrist.no-ip.com/site/images/albums/0000021C.gif)
As a kid in the 6th grade this album was one of my favorites. I still listen to it every so often.
-
Originally posted by Boroda
"To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves. "
I think i'll never learn the damn language. 9 years at school, 2 years pre-school, 2 years at the college (this probably doesn't count because in fact it was me teaching others) - all futile. You have to be born with the language.
Boroda, I've spoken english my entire life, and I cant make any sense out of that sentance either.
I wouldn't think there would be many people who could without the few sentances before and after it to establish context at least.
My best guess would translate it as "Not being very smart, they might mistake the giant for one of themselves"
-
Originally posted by Bluedog
Boroda, I've spoken english my entire life, and I cant make any sense out of that sentance either.
I wouldn't think there would be many people who could without the few sentances before and after it to establish context at least.
My best guess would translate it as "Not being very smart, they might mistake the giant for one of themselves"
Even English changes over the years.
This is Victorian English. Substitute "awareness" for intelligence.
How else would one translate a typical military question of "any intelligence of the front?"
-
I think that particular sentence is almost lyrical.
They just weren't sure what to make of it.
-
didn't wells steal his idea of "war of the worlds" from an earlier russian work?
lazs
-
I hope the Jeff Waynes album is re-released soon, it's a good listen. I've heard that there's a CGI version of it coming out in a year or so.
-
We saw the movie the other week. I enjoyed it but was constantly comparing it to the radio show and the earlier TV show. I think the effects were better but the earlier show was more entertaining IMO. That little girl sure has one heck of a set of bugged out eyes!
-
Boy even a tripod could fit through the plot holes :)
Daniel
-
all I came away with from the new WoW is that Gene Barry was a better actor than Cruise.
-
Hey Boroda.
I have the text somewhere on my HD, - and that was from the net anyway. Still need it? I'll try and look, and mail it to you if still interested.
Books by Wells that are quite famous:
The War of the Worlds
The Time Machine
The Invisible Man
-
Originally posted by Chairboy
I hope the Jeff Waynes album is re-released soon, it's a good listen. I've heard that there's a CGI version of it coming out in a year or so.
7-disc Collector's Set (http://www.sonymusicstore.com/store/catalog/MerchandiseDetails.jsp?merchId=85020&sms=alt-wotw-legacy)
-
Originally posted by Bluedog
Boroda, I've spoken english my entire life, and I cant make any sense out of that sentance either.
I wouldn't think there would be many people who could without the few sentances before and after it to establish context at least.
My best guess would translate it as "Not being very smart, they might mistake the giant for one of themselves"
I have a Russian translation here, from http://www.lib.ru, it was made in 1935, in the vintage era of translation, but the style of Wells is completely lost there. I have never thought that he used such a... hmmm... interesting language. I think we had extracts from "Invisible Man" in our school English textbooks, and IIRC there was nothing like that.
-
Originally posted by Seeker
Even English changes over the years.
This is Victorian English. Substitute "awareness" for intelligence.
How else would one translate a typical military question of "any intelligence of the front?"
I never thought that changes were so visible, and I thought Wells is more like a "modern" author.
Russian language didn't change that much. When you read Dostoyevskiy or Tolstoy - you can see difference in style and some lexics, but no such figures of speech as I quoted :( I understood what it meant (mostly because I was comparing English original text to a translation), but I don't think I'll be ever able to write such sentences myself :(
English: "It would seem they were regarding this new antagonist with astonishment. To their intelligence, it may be, the giant was even such another as themselves."
Russian: "Марсиане как будто с удивлением рассматривали нового противника. Быть может, этот гигант показался им похожим на них самих."
Back to English: "Martians looked at a new enemy as if they were surprised. Maybe they thought that this giant looked similar to them."
English original should be read with a hard British accent, by an aristocrat wearing a monocle. A Russian translation sounds like it is told by a third-class provincial theatre actor.
I have almost finished first part between drinking on weekend, the overall impression is very strange. Wells's hero looks like a professional journalist who simply flows down the stream making only theoretical conclusions. People he meets are something like stupid NPCs, even those who are drawn more carefully like artillerist or vicary.
Re-reading the book after 20 years is like reading it for the first time.
-
Duplicate post -- BBS wierd today. See below
-
Originally posted by Boroda
For me - the main idea of the book was to evaulate a society and it's reaction to facing an irresistable, inhuman, but absolutely rational (in it's behaviour) force.
Welles foresaw the nazis.
Now that makes me want to read the book. I found the movie somewhat less than inspiring.
Sure the FX were great but to me it was nothing more than two hours of brave Sir Robin.
Run away...run away...
-
Originally posted by Boroda
For me - the main idea of the book was to evaulate a society and it's reaction to facing an irresistable, inhuman, but absolutely rational (in it's behaviour) force.
Welles foresaw the nazis.
In context of late Victorian Britain, i think of the book as a pointed allegory about colonialism -- a comparison that couldnt help but occur to Wells' audience.
Just consider -- change the martians into British colonial forces, change the Londoners into indigenous peoples, leave the tecnological disparity the same, and convert the generic microbes into malaria or yellow fever.
The message of humilty even when powerful must have been obvious.
Cross refernce the attitude in Kipling's poem "Recessional" -- in that sense the themes are similar.
And Boroda, that sentence you struggled with is a tough one. It uses imagery that seems artificial and stretched now. During the 1800s, writer's styles tended to be far less direct than is the modern norm. It's aproblem you'll run into if you try reading jsut about anyone before Hemingway... If you want a real taste of flowery, overdone prose (by modern tastes), check out Nathianiel Hawthorne.
Makes Abraham Lincoln stand out all the more. Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugeral speech are masterpieces of sentiment and language....
-
Originally posted by Steve
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/warworlds/warw.html
Boroda, this looks promising. check it out.
You can also read the original text here. (http://www.bartleby.com/1002/)
My regards,
Widewing
-
Originally posted by Boroda
I never thought that changes were so visible, and I thought Wells is more like a "modern" author.
Russian language didn't change that much. When you read Dostoyevskiy or Tolstoy - you can see difference in style and some lexics, but no such figures of speech as I quoted :
Well; English has it's advantages and disadvantages.
Advantage: There are no indiscipherable English dialects. A strange claim; but a true one. Linguistically, if you can speak Danish; then you can speak Swedish and Norwegian; only..you (they) can't. The same is true for Dutch and Flemish. They're only dialects; but a Dutchman will claim that a Belgian is incomprehensible; while an Australian and a Scotsman can talk comfortably together (how does that work with Russian; can a Muscovite talk with some one from the Gobi?)
Disadvantage: You "think" you understand it. English does change. While most people think they understand Shakespeare; they'd be better off making the effort to sit down and translate it. The written language doesn't change much; but the meaning changes all the time through the years.
A case in point: The oldest text generally regarded as "English" are Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury tales". It's very old English; but most modern speakers would"think" they understand it (they don't). I showed some to my Danish wife (who does speak good English); and to my surprise her reaction was "why are you interested in old Norsk; and where did you get it from? (she thought I was showing her an old scandanavian text which she didn't recognise).
Rather in the same way that Chinese and Japanese use the same writing; but insist they speak separate languages even though they can read the same newspaper.