Hacker Cinema
The Count of Monte Cristo
Le Comte de Monte-Cristo
2024 · Film · 178 min
Directed by Alexandre de La Patellière, Matthieu Delaporte
Edmond Dantès becomes the target of a sinister plot and is arrested on his wedding day for a crime he did not commit. After 14 years in the island prison of Château d’If, he manages a daring escape. Now rich beyond his dreams, he assumes the identity of the Count of Monte-Cristo and exacts his revenge on the three men who betrayed him.
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16 comments on Hacker News
To be fair, reading new fiction is… Well, it is not a waste of time, but you really need a good recommendation from another reader you trust to find the gems in the manure pile. I don’t know how much of ”booktok” and whatnot is just cynical marketing and how much of all this ”romantacy” or whatever is generated by LLM’s, but it might as well be. And same goes to literature awards, oh boy are some of those award-winning books trash.
But the thing is, bad art dissappears. People simply forget, because bad art just is not interesting. Maybe it has a nostalgia comeback or two, but eventually it just dies away with the people who made it, who sold it and who read/experienced it. The great art stays, because it is found again and again by yet another generation. I heard kids have somehow found Count of Monte Cristo again. They are still making movies of Homeros’ texts. Joyce never went out of fashion, neither did Shakespeare, Rabelais, Cervantes nor Proust.
So only thing you need to do is wait, really. Meanwhile there is more classic’s around no-one reads in a lifetime.
Easy disagree from me. I could watch a movie like Das Boot if it was twice the already lengthy 4+ hours. Not to mention the 4-part Count of Monte Cristo among other more obvious ones like LOTR.
Movies you watch in theatres are one thing. It’s uncomfortable, you can’t pause it, you can’t contemplate it, there’s people all around you. It’s not an immersive experience despite a big screen.
So not all movies are best seen in a theatre. And the ones that aren’t are probably not long enough.
It's a fine movie, agreed. The movie's focus isn't on revenge, but on the interaction between the protagonists. Anyways, the story outline heavily reminds me of the classic "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Dumas.
Disclaimer: I never read Stephen King's original short story, on which the movie is based, so I cannot say how this compares to Dumas' classic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo
Curious about your view on The Count of Monte Cristo. It's one of my more disappointing reads of the year. I'm familiar with the story line from various film adaptations, but I wasn't prepared for the sheer amount of repetition and drawn out bullshit. That's when I learned it was originally published in a journal where Dumas was paid by the word over 18 parts. Then all the meandering bullshit and repetition made so much more sense.
It’s just not true in practice: it’s pretty typical to find films with high rotten tomatoes scores and not very high metacritic scores; rotten tomatoes scores are pretty much useless unless you are not very discerning.
Examples:sovereign, how to make a million…, count of monte cristo, etc
You probably won't. French cinema is americanizing. Good movies are still made, but 'les 3 mousquetaires' showed that most huge french productions are poor copies of 2000 era Ridley Scott (well, Ridley Scott himself make poor copies of his 2000-era films). 'Le Comte de Monte Cristo' was better (way better), but the colour filters,the lack of sound (or the music too loud and too epic), the useless sword fight and the 'reading letter' trick, all inspired by Hollywood action movies pushed it down from Good movie to 'almost as bad as Marvel' imho.
And the dialogs not inspired from the book are as expected, but that's modern cinema, not Hollywood in particular. That noone took the torch from Audiard or Prevert is a shame.
It's only part of the tapestry of the story, but IIRC in the New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, she notes that the USA stopped funding the creation of courts/judges after the 1960s as it had in prior years so now the number of cases per judge is much higher than it has ever been, this is also mentioned the season three of Serial podcast which indicts the American criminal justice system for a variety of reasons through the entire process, but both indicate the perverse incentives to avoid trial, it kind of reminded me of the persecution of innocent protagonist in The Count of Monte Cristo simply by having the justice system work the way it was supposed to with just one bad actor condemning the guy to years of injustice.
Tangentially: the 2024 version [1] of the movie has been a huge success in France (quite deserved in my opinion), and is about the open in the US.
The imagery of the movie has a definitive "Batman" vibe - sort of "full circle", even though, apparently CoMC was not _really_ an inspiration for the Dark Knight, as the legend went. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo_(2024_film)
[2] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/254769/was-batman-based-on-the-count-of-monte-cristo
> Using the wrong honorific or inappropriately not using one at all can be tantamount to shouting "fuck you" to someone here in the Anglosphere, an insult and offence of among the highest order.
I didn't mean it like that! I meant when they're being used normally and not meant to stand out. They're normal pleasantries and a bit of character voice, and both those things can be represented in English.
America isn't a honorific-heavy society, but there are certainly people who get offended if you don't call them Dr., etc, but this is rarely a plot point in a TV show and I don't think it's used that often in manga/anime either.
Though I don't find it that bad. My English copy of Count of Monte Cristo does have French honorifics (it uses M/Mme instead of Mr/Mrs) and that doesn't look weird. Japanese stories set in Britain also seem to like using British titles like "Milord" although, um, they don't really do it right.
Meanwhile I've seen subtitles for clips of Japanese vtubers where they don't put /enough/ swearing in. First one I ever saw had Pekora saying something was 気狂い, which they definitely didn't translate right. (Means "crazy" but it's a really bad word, kind of like "retarded".)
I've watched a fair number of movies (100's, maybe even 1000+), that one easily sits in my top 20. Definitely recommended. And afterwards, the Count of Monte Cristo...
There optical telegraph and its semaphores featured crucially in Alexandre Dumas's 1845 book "The Count of Monte Cristo" and were depicted in multiple film versions.
Or rewrite The Count of Monte Cristo as a science fiction novel and get The Stars My Destination. Or rewrite Heinlein's Double Star into present-day and get the movie Dave.
With movies - especially remakes and adaptations there is additional motivation to see another take on familiar material (I suppose it also works with music and covers). I personally love to watch adaptations of Count of Monte Cristo - despite same overall story the differences are staggering ( which remainds me and makes me a bit sad that there was no new movie adaptation since Cavieziel one some 20 years ago)
I did mention Alexandre Dumas as a case study in a previous article. Here's a snippet:
"But there used to be another way. When Alexandre Dumas debuted The Count of Monte Cristo it was published as a feuilleton—a portion of the weekly newspaper devoted to fiction. From August 1844 to January 1846 his chapters were published in 18 installments for The Journal des Débats, a newspaper that went out to 9,000 to 10,000 paying subscribers in France—and readers were rapt by it.
In the forward to a 2004 translation of the book, the writer Luc Sante wrote: “The effect of the serials, which held vast audiences enthralled… is unlike any experience of reading we are likely to have known ourselves, maybe something like that of a particularly gripping television series. Day after day, at breakfast or at work or on the street, people talked of little else.”
It was basically “Game of Thrones.” Readers could not wait to get their hands on the next chapter and that bode very well for the writer who was not only paid by the newspaper in real-time for his work (by the word), but also grew the popularity of his work over the entirety of the time it was being published.
“The ‘Presse’ pays nearly 300 francs per day for feuilletons to Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, De Balzac, Frederic Soulé, Theophile Gautier, and Jules Sandeau,” Littell’s Little Age, Volume 10 wrote in 1846. “But what will the result be in 1848? That each of these personnages will have made from 32,000 to 64,000 francs per annum for two or three years for writing profitable trash of the color of the foulest mud in Paris?”
That “profitable trash” earned those writers an annual salary of between $202,107 to $404,213 in today’s dollars—and the obvious disdain of that Littell writer who, even then preferred the merits of a bound and published book. The same volume goes on to say that Dumas earned about 10,000 francs ($65,743 today) per installment when he was poached from The Presse by The Constitutionnel in 1845."
https://ellegriffin.substack.com/p/publishing-industry-truth
Nice job !! I finished the count of Monte Cristo a few years ago, and I must admit I fell in love, I cannot wait to read it again. Side note, I'd love Tarantino to make his version of it, either as a movie or even better, as a show ! Maybe even in today's time kinda like Sherlock did !!
a leading academic has cast doubt on how much of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo he actually penned. A new film will also suggest they were largely written by an unsung assistant [1]
Who wrote the novels of Alexandre Dumas? [2]
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7198679/Alexandre-Dumas-novels-penned-by-fourth-musketeer-ghost-writer.html
[2] https://flcenterlitarts.wordpress.com/2010/02/11/who-wrote-the-novels-of-alexandre-dumas/