Favourite Male Character // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 15

Today is the fifteenth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "favourite male character".

I know that I have complained about these challenges being difficult every day since I started (almost as if they were meant to be challenging or something), but I genuinely think this is the hardest prompt I've attempted so far. I tend to read more books by and/or about women than those which have male authors or protagonists, so I had somewhat fewer options to choose from than I will for tomorrow's prompt, "favourite female character". That said, I think I have finally settled on a character I am happy to select for this challenge. He might not be my all-time favourite male character, although I'm not sure who would be, but I think he is worthy of having a post dedicated to him all the same. The character I have chosen is Mercutio, from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

While I'm sure most of you reading are familiar with at least the basics of Romeo and Juliet's plot, you may not be familiar with how Mercutio fits into things. As you are probably aware, the story of Romeo and Juliet focuses on two teenagers who fall in love despite coming from two warring families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Mercutio appears as one of Romeo's two best friends, along with his boyfriend the significantly less-memorable Benvolio.

To me, Mercutio is without a doubt the best character in Romeo and Juliet. He's at times moody and rude, at others fun and jovial, but he's always witty and humorous, sometimes inappropriately so. This is the person who, while dying from a stab wound, took the opportunity to make a pun about being a "grave man", after all.

Mercutio has little patience with Romeo's pining or the Montague/Capulet feud, and he's often found winding his friends up with his sassy but facetious comments. However, he also has a short temper, one which ultimately leads to his death.

Mercutio brings some much-needed levity and wit to Romeo and Juliet, and his charisma and theatricality remains iconic whether he is acting grumpy or funny. It's no wonder that many of the actors who've portrayed him appear to be having such fun with his character, like Harold Perrineau in the scene below, from Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

More than being a great character in his own right, Mercutio represents for me some of my favourite and yet most frequently side-lined aspects of Shakespeare's plays: their wit, their humour, and their infectious, campy theatricality.

Book Turned Movie and Completely Desecrated // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 14

Today is the twelfth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book turned movie and completely desecrated".

Quick note: I would like to apologise for the rather large delay between this post and the previous one. I've been feeling unwell recently and had to take a break from the challenge, but hopefully from this point onwards I will be able to get back on track. Now let's get on to the post.

This prompt is somewhat difficult for me. Although I've read more than enough books that have been turned into movies, I often end up avoiding the film adaptations of them out of fear of them being, as this prompt phrased it, "completely desecrated". The problem is so bad that even when I read a book for the sole purpose of seeing the movie (because everyone knows you should always aspire to read the book first), I often end up not seeing the movie afterwards, or at least seeing it much later than I had intended. Then, those few that I do end up seeing after reading the book are those that have been recommended to me on their own merits as films, so they tend to be fairly decent. All this to say, I was fairly stumped for an answer to today's challenge.

So, I decided to cheat. The film I've chosen for this post's prompt is not based on one specific book, but rather what might be defined as a broad genre of literature: Greek mythology.

While Greek mythology itself does not have one specific text, I am going to focus on one specific adaptation of its stories in this post, the 2010 film Clash of the Titans.

Before I get into what I dislike about this film, let me give you a quick summary. Clash of the Titans is an action-adventure film that stars Sam Worthington as Perseus, a demigod adopted by humans who is drawn into a huge conflict that pits gods against humans. Apparently it's loosely based on a film of the same name that was released some 30 years prior, but I know nothing about that one and thus will conveniently ignore its existence.

Now, let's get into my issues with this film. First of all, it's just not very good. It's hardly the only bad film in the world, but it doesn't even have the decency to be amusingly bad. Mostly, it's just boring. Its poor quality is even more offensive given the source material. There's a reason Greek mythology has had a massive influence on popular culture, and why people still enjoy reading about it today; it has some brilliant stories. The fact that Clash of the Titans is based on these stories gives it an advantage from the start, but it somehow manages to bring these legendary tales down to the level of the rest of the film - which is to say, quite low.

As a whole, the film is basically your typical action-adventure young-man-goes-on-a-quest tale, just with the allure of Greek mythological references thrown over the top. It's a jumble of sepia tones, eyeliner, and muddled accents, in which neither the actors nor the characters ever seem to know what they're trying to achieve. Many choices in the film are questionable, but they could be redeemed if it was steered in the direction of something fun and pantomime-like. Instead, it simultaneously acts over-the-top and takes itself too seriously. The result is awkward and decidedly not entertaining to watch.

So, we shall move on to my issues with the way this film has adapted the mythology it's based upon, but first, a couple of disclaimers. I am not an expert on mythology; I'm just someone who has enjoyed reading about Greek myths and legends for a long time, and I have some strong feelings about them. I also don't think it's impossible to do a good Greek mythology film - Disney's Hercules and the classic 1963 version of Jason and the Argonauts are both films that I adore, for example. The reason I chose Clash of the Titans to write about is it hits several of the points that I see recurring in movies based on mythology, so a lot of the criticisms I make of this film can be applied to other adaptations of Greek myth as well.

The first problem I have with Clash of the Titans concerns the scope of the plot. Most Greek myths do not, typically, deal with world-altering conflicts. They might involve some heroes, some monsters, maybe a god or two, but they don't generally involve something on the level of, for example, an all-out war between humans and the Olympian pantheon (as Clash of the Titans does). Greek mythology is not one story, but rather a collection of interconnected ones - the trouble is that often filmmakers bite off more than they can chew and attempt to incorporate every little myth into one single film, with the result being a messy and contrived plot.

This brings me to the second thing that bothers me about this movie. It tries to cram too many mythological references into the plot, in a way that is perhaps meant to appeal to mythology nerds but just ends up seeming (like so much of the film) a bit messy. On top of a plot that bundles as many elements of the Perseus mythology together as it can (Medusa, Pegasus, Andromeda, etc.), we are also given random additions such as Io, who appears in this film not as a cow as she normally does in mythology, but as some kind of immortal-oracle-slash-love-interest. We get random allusions to the Hydra and Nemean lion, plus single-scene appearances of creatures that appear to be a cross between the Furies and harpies, as well as.... djinn?

If you're thinking, "hold on a minute, djinn are from Islamic mythology, not Greek", then you're not going to like what I have to say next. My third gripe with the film is that its main draw, the origin of its most iconic line ("Release the kraken!") completely clashes with the rest of the story. Now, I know that there is no one conclusive canon of Greek mythology, and anyone who wants to create media based on it needs to make decisions as to which versions of the stories they're going to follow. I know this. But. The. Kraken. Is. Not. Greek. It is Norse. It's entirely the wrong mythology, and furthermore it doesn't even look like the Norse description of the kraken, which is usually something along the lines of a giant squid rather than whatever Cloverfield knock-off we ended up with here. Why the filmmakers decided to include this bastardised kraken instead of any of the plethora of Greek monsters that would have worked just as well - or even, you know, the monster Cetus that exists in the original story - is beyond me.

Lastly, there is one issue in Clash of the Titans which is a real pet peeve of mine when it comes to adaptation of Greek mythology: the depiction of Hades. I wrote a piece some time ago about why this seems to happen so often, and why it annoys me so much. My theory was that since our Christianity-centric society has become so used to the idea of a benevolent, monotheistic god opposed by the unambiguously evil Satan, depictions of gods as flawed, complex characters who are not wholly good or bad is sometimes difficult for people work with. The result is that we get characters like Zeus and Hades repeatedly flattened into the roles of Good God and Bad Demon, with little room left for the nuance that made their characters so fascinating in the myths.

Granted, the version of Zeus depicted in Clash of the Titans is not entirely good. He's arrogant, vengeful, and also rapes a woman to get revenge on her husband. So yes, not exactly your typical good guy. Still, he ends up presented as the good deity in contrast to the villain, his brother Hades.

The depiction of Hades in Clash of the Titans is a travesty that even the great Ralph Fiennes couldn't salvage. This Hades is unambiguously the Bad Guy. He hates humans and the other gods for the vague reason that Zeus once betrayed him, and his grand plan in the film is to pit the two groups against one another as a way for him to eventually get his own back on Zeus. He swirls around in clouds of black hostility, popping up uninvited at events looking like a hungover Tim Minchin doing his best Maleficent impression. It's not enough that the filmmakers had to make Hades - who, I would argue, is actually one of the least problematic members of the Greek pantheon - into a villain; they didn't even have the decency to make him into good one.

Now, I know that Greek myths (and perhaps mythology in general) are not easy to adapt for the screen, but nor is it impossible. My issue is that so many of the things that make Greek mythology special - the interconnected stories, their absurdity, the deeply flawed characters - are too often diluted in favour of creating generic, family-friendly popcorn films, of which Clash of the Titans is one of the worst examples.