Eragon

This is about Eragon the movie version because I saw it yesterday and I read the book a year ago and I have good taste in men, so I know what I'm talking about.

It stars a brand new and totally lunchable 18-year-old British kid named Edward Speleers. He has sandy blond hair and a charming boyish face and that indefinable sexiness that comes of being a British 18-year-old. He is Eragon, a farm boy (because the only way to make a sexy blond teenager even sexier is to throw him in a farm and make him wrestle with his also-cute, also-blond cousin) and blah blah blah he finds this egg that eventually hatches into a CGI Rachel Weisz Dragon named Izzy Saphira. They have an adventure that's pretty much the plot of Star Wars. I'm not going through it.

Anyway, the book is better, obviously. Let's talk about that for a minute. People bitch about the book a lot because it's kind of a rehashed plot from Lord of the Rings and Star Wars... I guess it maybe is. I dunno. Lord of the Rings is so boring that I can't read it, and I'd use it's pages to proverbially wipe my ass if I weren't afraid the story's dryness would give me a vicious case of proverbial hemorrhoids. As for Star Wars my entire opinion of that movie series is "I like the Ewoks", which should give you an idea of much of the plot I remember. It's been a long time since I've seen them. So I'm not going to sit here and defend either side of the 'rehashed plot' argument because I quite frankly don't care. Eragon didn't change my life, but it's an entertaining read. If it's unoriginal, it's better than a lot of the other unoriginal crap out there.

The movie adaptation did a lot right and a lot wrong. The first thing it did right, which we've discussed a bit, is taking the characters as Christopher Paolini (the author) wrote them and making them sexy. Like this:

Also, the character of Murtagh is played by Garrett Hedlund and his eyeliner, a combination that made me want to jump through the screen and do something.... indecorous.

There was also a hot girl named Arya. She's an elf. A lot of people complained that she didn't have pointy elf ears, but I submit that with cheekbones and eyes like hers, prosthetic body parts are not only unnecessary, but a slight to her frail beauty. Bitch was sexay!

Lastly, I no longer hate Rachel Weisz because of The Fountain. She was delightful as Saphira. It's a huge relief. Hatred of people because they associate with bad talent is so tiring.

That's basically what the movie did right: hot, talented actors. Except for one, and we're going to use him to transition into the negative things. Cover your ears, I'm about to swear.

John Malkovich was so fucking bad!!!!!!! I could put a weight on my exclamation point button and leave for 90 years and that sentence would still not be emphasized enough. Now I'm not too familiar with the man's oeuvre, but I figure if you have a movie based on your brain, you must be pretty good at SOMETHING. But that something is obviously not playing an evil, tyrannical king, a part that--I'm sorry--is so not difficult. King Galbatorix is Eragon's Sauron except in the movies, that flaming eye thing had a bigger range emotions than Mr. Malkovich did. It felt like he was trying to do the Alan Rickman Menacing Monotone that makes Snape so sexy in the Potter films, but instead he sounded like he was annoyed at his wife for putting too much mayonnaise in the potato salad again. It was the most boring, uninspired portrayal of evil I've ever seen, and all I could think was "Didn't anybody notice this? Why didn't anybody say anything to him? Were they embarassed, maybe it's like when someone has something in their nose and you don't want to make them feel stupid so you hope they'll just sniff on their own."

The film also had a bunch of characters who were introduced and never developed and then they disappeared (which I had trouble noticing because I knew them from the book and they were fleshed out in my mind -- my friend Harry pointed it out.)

Other bad things include the glossing over of major plot points, no sense of a unique visual style (the movie doesn't look like the posters), Eragon too often portrayed as a whiny prat, the kids with the mullets who wouldn't shut up two rows back, and too few gay sex scenes between Eragon and his cousin (though I have high expectations for the DVD special features).

Ok, in conclusion, Eragon is mediocre, but if you're gay or 10 you'll really like it.