21 Comments

I was to know the imagined moment that was one of your all-time favorites.

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To put it briefly:

In my memory, Jose Arcadio Buendia didn't die chained to the chestnut tree. Rather, he gradually turned into a tree. Then, near the end, he walks free of the tree he's become.

I don't know why I became so convinced of this happening, but it does not even a little bit happen!

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Wow! I think you should write a story where this happens! Such a cool idea!

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Ha, now I might since I know it didn't actually happen in this book!

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Sep 9, 2022Liked by radicaledward

I’m glad I’m not the only one who does this. For years I thought that in the original book Dracula, Mina was a reporter for a Ladies Journal and that part of the storyline was her trying to use her reporter skills to figure out what exactly happened with ship with the dead captain full of coffins, and then what happened to her friend Lucy, also the story is told as if this were part of a serialized report for publishing in a magazine or newspaper.

I think I just forgot that maybe that’s an idea I had for modernizing a movie version while staying in the original time period.

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author

That's pretty good!

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Well that IS incredibly cool!!

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Yes! Me too!

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Sep 1, 2022Liked by radicaledward

Perhaps it would be worth reflecting on the difference in quality between a work of art that creates new forms (One Hundred Years of Solitude) and a production made by a cynical, unoriginal, corporate machine?

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I mean, I could write that but I feel everyone already knows that. And, despite everything, Encanto is a pretty good movie!

And while Disney is a soulless corporate machine privatizing culture, the people making the movie are artists trying to make something they're proud of. Something meaningful.

And I do think they succeed. I'm being serious when I say the Buendias make me long for the Madrigals, just ad the Madrigals make me long for the Buendias.

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You might be serious, but you're also participating in the flattening of art into commerce, which is something that "everyone does" but also something they shouldn't do. "Pretty good" commerce is qualitatively different than art, and forgetting that difference produces nightmares.

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author

Art, for better or worse, has always been tied to commerce. Dickens padded his word counts for money. Dostoevsky wrote his novels to stay ahead of his debt collectors. Haruki Murakami wrote Norwegian Wood purely to be a bestseller so his ither books could exist and find larger audiences. Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Greene wrote for Hollywood so they'd have the freedom to write the novels they wanted.

The idea that some art is pure and other art is irrevocably tainted is just ahistoric and something that aspiring artists tell themselves to feel better.

There is a distinction between art and commerce, of course. I think I make the distinction clear here. But just because something was done for the money doesn't mean that it must be without cultural value.

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Sep 1, 2022Liked by radicaledward

I'm not surprised by your well-developed hypothesis about the literary roots of "Encanto" here. The film was marketed as having a "Magic Realism" theme set in Colombia, so it seems pretty obvious Disney was going to crib from the foremost example of that genre, 100YoS. And the message of most anything along those lines is going to be moderated by the Rated "G" - suitable for young children. I do appreciate your highlighting the differences between the GGM version of Macondo and Disney's.

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I avoid trailers so thoroughly that i rarely know anything about a movie before I see it, but that makes a lot of sense!

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I will have to read 100yrs again! It’s been decades for me, too.

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It's great! Also somehow way odder than I remembered. Seems like I don't even remember anyone talking about how strange it is.

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Nov 7, 2022·edited Nov 7, 2022

Nope… this movie is NOT an child friendly adaptation of this book… the movie was inspired by the colonization and violent past of Colombia… like the 1000 days war… the landscape was inspired by a few places like Salento (Cocora Valley), Caño Cristales in the Serrania de la Macarena national park, Cathedral de Sal (which looks like a church and carved out of rock but the halls lead to a complex), among other places.

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You're not going to convince me or anyone else that this movie made for and targeted to and loved by children is actually not child friendly.

Or if you're saying this isn't an adaptation of the book...those events you mention inspiring the movie? They're also what the novel is about.

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Yikes… comprehension either isn’t your strong point … or, you’re just responding looking for an argument… like I said this movie is not a child friendly adaptation of the BOOK. They paid homage to the books author by using yellow butterflies … they did this because of the similarities. Just because a movie has similarities doesn’t mean it’s the “movie version” of the book. It’s inspired by events… period. 100 movies and books can be inspired by actual events, with 100s of similarities… but still be uninspired by other works.

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Well, I never said it's literally an adaptation of the book.

I think my essay is pretty clearly demonstrating the overwhelming similarities between these two pieces of media while also highlighting the ways they're different.

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