Feature Film Friday:

It’s been a little over a year since Ray Bradbury passed away, and a full fifty years since this awesome documentary was made. Enjoy!

Thurber gets a reboot

Here’s one I really want to see: James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is being re-made into a movie this year. The last time this was tried, in 1947, Danny Kaye turned the picture into a screwball comedy only loosely based on the original. Okay, fine, whatever. Thurber was a very humorous writer, and “Mitty” was a slightly campy tale that could certainly be taken that direction.

This time around Ben Stiller acts and directs in a reboot that promises to be much truer to the heart of “Mitty.” I can’t comment on its merits as a true-to-the-story adaptation, but it looks like it’ll deliver far less mad-cap comedy, and far more insight into the secret psyche of the inveterate daydreamer- which is really what the original story was all about.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is a link to the original story, and here is Stiller’s latest trailer:

For comparison, have a look at the 1947 version:

We're definitely getting better at movie trailers, but I also think we’re getting better at this adaptation thing…

Books on Screen

We hope you're making time for a few literary adaptations in between summer blockbusters, moviegoers. Here are a couple I've recently watched.

On the Road (2012)

I loved this book, and I was really looking forward to the film. After I missed it in theaters, though, it was kind of hard to get a hold of until it popped up on my On Demand offerings—I hoped this scarcity meant that it was just too awesome for the unwashed masses to appreciate, but that I would still love it. Alas, no, it was just okay. And it was a bit depressing. And it was kind of boring. I mean, look, there are moments in the book like this one:

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.”

…that clearly show there were some lulls and some downers in Sal’s adventures. But to see those moments pervade the entire film was a bit of a letdown. Here’s the other thing: what excitement there was, was mainly focused on drugs, sex and fast driving, all of which were played up disproportionately compared to the book. But where was the unbridled exuberance? And the sense of wonder? Where was the fun? They tried to sell us on Sal’s and Dean’s friendship with lots of intense, heartfelt man hugs—a constant coming and going where locked eyes and sincere, sullen glances were supposed to communicate everything. They didn’t. I thinkall but the most hardcore Kerouac fans, and even a good number of those, can skip this one.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

Ten years before he became Atticus Finch, Gregory Peck played the role of Harry Street in the adaptation of Hemingway’s classic short story. But while it starts off true enough to the original—the necrotic leg injury, the vultures, the desperate wait for a plane—it takes some liberties that rubbed me the wrong way. For one, the flashback action was just a cheap rehash of Hemingway’s own life story: Spanish Civil War, expat Paris, big game hunting, bullfights in Pamplona. I guess if you’re trying to get Hemingway nuts into the theater, that’s one way to do it. But it cheapens the work of fiction that’s supposed to be played out on screen. 

And while the trail of tortured romances opened up roles for Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward, that’s not what the story’s really about. Snows  is about examining one’s life, finding it wanting, resolving to change and redeem oneself… only to have the chance whisked away at the last second. Bittersweet brilliance. Which brings me to the most egregious crime of all: the ending. Instead of flying off into the metaphorical snows of Kilimanjaro, a peaceful resignation to death and dying, Harry Street (and his romance!) are saved. The plane arrives, the vultures disappear, and all’s well that ends well. I haven’t had a film betrayal like that since The Grapes of Wrath , the movie.

"People will come, Ray."

I am not a big baseball guy. And I don’t usually go in for magical realism. But… BUT—rarely a summer goes by that I don’t sit down and watch “Field of Dreams.”  It’s one of the few movies that can still make me cry like a little girl.

Now, you may know that the film is based on a book called Shoeless Joe , by W.P. Kinsella. And if you know that, then you probably know (or can guess) that the character of Terrance Mann was originally written as real-life recluse J.D. Salinger. But what you may not  know, is that we have none other than Salinger himself to thank for James Earl Jones’s memorable portrayal of Terrance Mann.  The producers were so worried about a lawsuit from Salinger, that they renamed the character and changed up his race. I, for one, don’t think you can argue with the results:

Feature Film Friday: Salinger

This isn’t technically a feature film, but it’s the trailer for one. And it looks amazing. Can’t wait:

Feature Film Friday: "VoiceOver"

Extended metaphors can be hard to pull off. To illustrate this, I thought I’d share this short film that tries, and tries, and tries to come up with just the right metaphor for… well, you’ll see.  It's pretty good. Enjoy!

Feature Film Friday: Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Paris twice, but for whatever reason, neither visit included a stop by the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. <cue the sad trombones>

Thankfully we can all take a virtual visit to this fabled bookshop by watching the documentary below, “Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man,” which takes a look at George Whitman’s re-incarnation of Sylvia Beach’s left bank book boutique, including the Tumbleweed Hotel, where travelers can overnight amidst the stacks in return for a little day-time labor and the promise of plowing through some good books while a guest. Here’s part 1:

(Fictional) First Line Friday: Chuck Stone spy novel, by Jay Pritchett and Manny Delgado

I’m a big fan of meta fiction. I love stories about writers and their stories. Movies like “Barton Fink” or books like Slaughterhouse Five  always seem to hit home. We’ve looked at fictional tidbits of fiction on Mad Men, and on Wednesday night’s episode of Modern Family (Career Day), Jay Pritchett and stepson Manny Delgado revealed their own dreams of penning the great American novel—or at least a compelling spy thriller—and we got a taste of what they came up with. Here are their first lines, in case you missed them:

Jay’s opener:

“Chuck Stone, six foot three inches of steely-eyed determination, sat at the interrogation table.”

Manny’s opener:

“Chuck Stone smiled and lit a cigarette as if he had all the time in the world, when, in fact, the world was about to end.”

And as a bonus, Manny’s final lines, which served as the episode-ending voiceover:

“We all weave a web of lies. Some we tell to try to help the ones we love, some we tell to try to fool ourselves, and some we tell because when you’re out of bullets and staring down the barrel of a Kalashnikov, the only weapon you’ve got left is guile.”

Love it.

The Great Trimalchio?

So the premiere of the new Great Gatsby movie was held last night in New York. I’ve been wrestling with whether I want to re-read Gatsby before I see the flick, but I think I’ve landed on ‘no.’ That is, until I learned that Baz Luhrmann’s film may not be an adaptation of The Gatsby Gatsby , so much as it is an adaptation of an earlier, unpublished version of Gatsby called Trimalchio – that features a much darker James Gatz, who is more menacing and violent than the character moviegoers are probably expecting.

"'Trimalchio' was a tremendous resource," says Mr. Luhrmann, noting that Gatsby and Daisy's relationship is more fleshed out in that version. Several key bits of dialogue between Daisy and Gatsby were pulled from "Trimalchio." Mr. DiCaprio became obsessed with it, and carried a copy of "Trimalchio" with him at all times.

Full story here. Luckily for all of us, the Trimalchio  version has been published for purists and curiosity-seekers alike. I just may read this one before I see the film. You should, too:

Feature Film Friday

Another short one today, How about giving 7 and a half minutes to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart?”

Feature Film Friday!

This one’s only 20 minutes long. The work of a German-speaking Jewish Czech writer, told through Japanese animation. I give you Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor:”

Feature Film Friday

Got a spare hour and 11 minutes this weekend? Then you might want to give this animated adaptation of Orwell’s  Animal Farm  a whirl. Enjoy:

Feature Film Friday

If you missed the American Masters episode on Margaret Mitchell yesterday, you can still tune in to PBS tonight to catch the one on Phillip Roth. Thanks to Tucker for the tip.

And speaking of things literary on television and in cinema, there’s a ton of free stuff out there that I’m going to start sharing over the next few weeks (-thus the title of this post.)

Did you know, for example, that some film-makers believe in a “curse of Quixote” that will undermine any efforts to adapt the novel on the silver screen? It’s a long enough book to discourage even the most ambitious directors, but it’s also a project that’s gotten the best of a couple who have tried: Orson Wells, for one, spent 20 unfruitful years on the quest, and Terry Gilliam flamed out some years later. This documentary chronicles the woes that beset Gilliam almost from the outset of his ill-fated efforts. The good stuff starts about 40 minutes in, when his first shooting location is harried by F16s and swept away in a flash flood. Enjoy:

A Few More Flicks for Oscar Week

Some other book-to-film quick hits:

The Sound and the Fury, 1959

Starring Yule Brynner and Joanne Woodward, this may be one of the worst adaptations known to man. It’s been a long, long time since I waded through Faulkner’s masterpiece, but even after almost twenty years I could immediately see that the film version bears little resemblance to the book. Remember that Stream of Consciousness section told from the perspective of Benjy that you hated in high school? Good news! None of it made it onto the silver screen. The section about Quentin away at school? That’s not there either. The section about Dilsey, the black servant? Nope. The only portion of the book they even tried to cover was the drama between Jason and Quentin (Caddy’s daughter, not her brother.) And it’s a pretty boring movie to boot.

Tender is the Night, 1962

Jason Robards and Jennifer Jones play Dick and Nicole Diver in this so-so adaptation of Fitzgerald’s famous novel. The film gets kudos for following the main arc of the story, from meeting Rosemary Hoyt on the beach and the Divers’ many parties to the couple’s eventual break-up and the slow doling out of their backstory. But there was so much left out, that will really bother readers who wanted a faithful adaptation. And you don’t get a full sense of the “fall” of Dick Diver as his wife gains mental health and independence. That dynamic is what makes the story so interesting in the first place. Psychiatrist saves/marries his patient, then descends into a kind of madness himself.

Atlas Shrugged (Part I), 2011

I’ll say up front that I liked the idea of bringing this story into the modern day (as a reader I was always a little thrown by clunky terms like “inter-office communicator” that hadn’t yet been shortened to “intercom” when Ayn Rand wrote her book. But the fact railroads still remain the focus of Dagny’s struggle kind of defeats the purpose of modernizing it. I generally liked the casting of Taylor Schilling as Dagny and Grant Bowler as Hank Reardon (pictured above), but this thing is low-budget, and you can tell. It got slammed by critics, though I think that was bound to happen even if Martin Scorsese had been behind the project. It was generally pretty true to the first part of the book, and I’d probably check out parts II and III if I ever got the chance.

To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie

So, To Kill a Mockingbird.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying it’s one of my favorite books of all time. But amazingly, until last week, I had never seen the film. Now that that has been rectified, let’s talk about the movie.

As with “the Grapes of Wrath,” there were some key omissions in the film version: Calpernia is almost non-existent as a character, there is no visit to the all-black church where she and Tom Robinson’s family worship, there’s no uncle Jack, or Christmas at Finch’s Landing, there’s no house fire to give Boo Radley reason to cover a startled Scout with a blanket, no morphine rehab for Mrs. Dubose, and plenty of other edits that strip color and richness from the original. But while we may have lost some of the scope of Scout’s coming of age story on the cutting room floor, screenwriter Horton Foote still manages to hone in on the main drama of the court case, and the main theme of Innocence Lost. The angry mob is still shamed out of a lynching by Scout, Jem and Dill at the jail. We still get to see Atticus squeeze the trigger on the mad dog while the Sheriff soils his drawers. And there was still apparently enough of Atticus’s heroics and wisdom to nab a Best Actor nod for Gregory Peck.

All told the film won three Academy Awards (Peck for best actor, Horton Foote for best Adapted Screenplay, and it also won for Best Art Direction, in addition to being nominated in 5 other categories) and has gone down as one of the classics of American cinema. No doubt its appearance in 1962, just two years after the novel’s release and right in the throes of the Civil Rights Movement, was a huge factor in its lasting legacy and influence. It has come to epitomize the courtroom drama genre. (Plus, it gave us the film debut of Robert Duvall, who dyed his hair blond and stayed out of the sun for six weeks so he could play the reclusive bogeyman, Boo Radley.)

Is it a perfect adaptation? No, but it’s a darn, good flick, and it’s true to the heart of Harper Lee’s Pulitzer-winning masterpiece. Check it out:

The Grapes of Wrath, the movie

Here is a film that is generally true to the text, especially in the first half of the action, but there were a couple key differences that will make fans of the novel gasp. There was no devastating flood at the end, for example, and since it was the forties, no breastfeeding of emaciated old men in barns. The ‘second-half’ sequence of events was reshuffled slightly so that the book’s happy interlude of life in the government camp was bumped to the end of the movie- to manufacture a happy ending where Steinbeck provided none.

But there are certain touching scenes that are right out of Steinbeck’s masterpiece: the kindly truckers in a Route 66 roadside diner, who leave huge tips to compensate the owners for their own kindness to the Joads, the kids’ wonder at the flushing toilets in the government camp, and the handwritten note stuffed in a jar next to the grandfather’s hastily buried body, just to name a few. The casting and acting is first-rate (except maybe for the sideshow character of Casy, who comes off as a village idiot.) In short, there’s a lot to love for Steinbeck nation.

In fact, if you thought the book was too dark and overly political, you’ll probably love the film- it’s a classic. But if you’re a literary adaptation purist, some of the changes may not sit well with you obviously. It is a gorgeous film, however, and it’s worth checking out if only to see Jane Darwell’s Oscar-winning performance as Ma Joad. (Henry Fonda is no slouch as Tom, and John Ford also took home the Oscar for best Director.) Give it a watch.

At the Movies

Oscar week is upon us, and I’ll try to review some classic literary adaptations as the days go  by. In the meantime, here’s a look at some of our other “film-inspired” posts:

• You’ve heard of movies based on books, but what about movies based on poems?
• Or how about some screenplays that came before the book?
• There’s the time William Faulkner rewrote a work of Ernest Hemingway.
• Here’s our look at Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris.”
• And our review of HBO’s “Hemingway and Gellhorn.”
• There’s this clip of Proustian Memory from Pixar.
• A hollow literary adaptation is reviewed here.
• A Raymond Carver Short Story takes a turn on the big screen.
• And of course, the bookish winner of Best Animated Short from last year.

Find your way to Oz

Okay, if you’re a fan of L. Frank Baum, or a user of Google’s Chrome browser, you may get a kick out of this cool site to promote Disney’s upcoming movie “Oz the Great and Powerful.” It’s basically an HTML5 video game, where you can wander around a travelling circus, explore various tents, take a hot-air balloon ride and, if you get too close to the twister, maybe even find yourself transported to the land of Oz.

Chrome users, go here.

For those of you with some other browser, here is a quick preview to give you a flavor for what you’re missing:

On the Road, the movie

In an ideal world, I’d have a babysitter all lined up for tonight so that Mrs. DeMarest and I could go catch the long-awaited movie version of On the Road . Alas, I don’t. And even if I did, the last movie we saw together was Skyfall, which means we’d probably have to veer back to the chick flick side of the spectrum on our next outing. So I may not get to see another literary adaptation this holiday season.

Now, I did see Life of Pi, but since I’d never read the book, I can’t judge it on adaptation merits. (Although the opening credits alone are worth your time- that is one good-looking picture.) Baz Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby was supposed to be a Christmas time release, but it got bumped to next summer, unfortunately. And I’m not exactly dying to see Les Miserables- I’ve never read the book or seen the stage version, and who are we kidding, Susan Boyle has ruined all other “I Dreamed a Dream” renditions for me, so watching a shaggy-headed Anne Hathaway belt it out isn’t going to cut muster. As for a singing Russell Crowe… I’m not sure I’ll ever be up to that (I’m picturing something slightly worse than Pierce Brosnan’s effort in Mamma Mia.)

That’s all a very long way of saying that I have really, really been looking forward to On the Road since I read the book for the first time this past summer. And I’m bummed that I probably won’t see it until it pops up at my local grocery store’s Redbox. Ah well… If you happen to have better luck, fellow movie-goer, or even if you don’t, let us whet your appetite with an On the Road roundup. Here is a smattered assortment of posts we’ve done on Kerouac’s rambling American masterpiece:

• There’s Kerouac in his own words.
• The follow-up post, documenting the Kerouac-Seuss connection.
• Myreview of the book that too many people hate.
• The map of Kerouac’s wanderings.
• A couple posts on his writing style, and how you can do it, too.
• A Kerouac look-alike.
• A medical diagnosis based on literary evidence.
• Some bookish nerd bait from the book.
• And of course, talk like a beat day.

Proustian Memory

Sometimes I’ll discover a half-written essay or unfinished book review months after I initially sat down to write it. The other day I turned up some incomplete thoughts on Swann’s Way  by Marcel Proust- a book I read clear back in April. 

To get me in the mood to finish it (and to prove to you that the world of kids movies and classic literature are not as far apart as you might think), I’m posting this brief scene from Ratatouille. It’s the perfect example of involuntary, Proustian Memory: