#pagemaster

Ive been thinking a lot about what made and makes me afraid. This is kinda a bland board tbh, but it actually kinda helped to put these things together and see their similarities. Im gonna keep yammering below if you care.

A movie can overlap into either but, if you’re looking for a particular feeling, your favorite movie may not give it like a comfort movie.

Example; a relationship comfort movie of mine is 500 Days of Summer vs. favorite movie Dead Poets Society.

My all purpose comfort movie would have to be The Pagemaster because I play the game of “how many book references can I find” every time I watch it.

So I was just thinking that The Pagemaster is like, a prime example of a movie with a good premise but flawed execution which would actually be worthwhile to remake.

The fundamental issue with it is that it’s a MOVIE trying to promote reading, which it seems to be attempting to do by just showing you characters you could watch in an actual adaptation of the work they originate from. But also the main character’s arc is supposed to be learning that he needs to spend less time reading and go out and touch grass.

I think a good way to remake it would be to have the main character be someone who just doesn’t like reading. They think it’s boring and time-consuming and they prefer to just watch movies because they don’t respect the craft of writing.

 At the start they’re using movies, Wikipedia summaries, YouTube reviews, and TVTropes pages as a substitute for reading books for school, but when they get caught they’re forced to go to the library to actually read a book to do a report on. They get sucked into a literary fantasy world which has a magic system based on wordsmithing, and this is how you make the message actually work. Instead of just showing people things on screen and making them ask why they should read the book instead of finding a film adaptation, you show them the appeal of the language used to craft stories in a non-visual medium.

The way it would work is you’d use “magic words” to cast a spell that influences reality. But you don’t just say Latin-sounding phrases and shoot sparkles out of a wand. You have to write down exactly what you want to happen. When the main character tries to do this initially it doesn’t work because he just summarizes what he wants to happen. Like, he’s got two sidekicks who start bickering, and it annoys him so he writes “they stopped fighting and made up” but it has no effect. So he keeps trying until he realizes he has to actually write the dialog they have that ends the argument.