Tintin: a cry from the heart

[sawyl]

Tom McCarthy has a Guardian piece bewailing the horrors of Spielberg's Tintin move and he doesn't mince his words. After praising the opening sequence, he sets out his position on the rest of the film:

From then on, though, it was downhill, and then some. Steven Spielberg's adaptation is not just a failure; it is an assault on a great body of art so thuggishly moronic as to make one genuinely depressed.

Before eventually concluding:

In the books, money both stands for genealogical fakeness and is fake itself (a brilliant scene in The Crab with the Golden Claws shows Thompson and Thomson tricked into passing off the very counterfeit coins they've been charged with tracking down: a doubling of illegitimate faces and false "metal"); in the film it literally pours down, in one scene, from the skies, Haddock's reward for being "true to himself". Hollywood's idiotic "message" is forced on an oeuvre that is great precisely because it drives in exactly the opposite direction. It's like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj.

Which has served the double purpose of ensuring that I avoid the movie for ever more and encouraging me to try, next time I'm back in Coventry, to borrow my nephew's copy of The Crab with the Golden Claws.

ETA: I've noticed that Rachel Cooke has included The Castafiore Emerald — always my favourite — in her list of ten graphical novels that transcend the comic book medium.