Entries tagged with “Books Into Film”

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Roughly halfway into Gone Baby Gone, Ben Affleck's directorial debut, the movie is finished. The plot involving a kidnapped youth has been apparently, tragically resolved.

But the movie still has an hour left, a clockwatcher will tell you. And even if you're not a person regularly calculating how the anticipated remaining X plot will unfold in the remaining Y minutes, you know that there's plenty left to come. So what will it be? What will this movie be about, having dispensed with what appeared to be its primary story?

One of the great joys of cinema is a movie that genuinely surprises you — not with a twist ending but by being something different from what you expected or (even better) different from what you've previously experienced. (Surprise endings are so obligatory in thrillers nowadays that the only real surprise is their absence.)

So I was seriously jazzed about Gone Baby Gone at its midpoint, wondering where it would take me and excited that it seemed to be a nearly honest drama about missing children. It might actually substantively explore grief, responsibility, repercussion, community, and healing.

It didn't take long for it to disappoint me, for it to choose the false path I should have expected.

The turning point in The Shining comes when Jack Torrance encounters a woman in Room 237. Naked, lithe, and beautiful, she gets out of the bathtub and wordlessly approaches Jack. They kiss, but when Jack looks in the mirror, his arms are embracing a decaying old woman, flabby and with patches of her skin missing.

It's not your typical turning point. A heretofore pedestrian movie doesn't begin to redeem itself, and a previously engaging work doesn't go off the rails.

Instead, things start to get muddled. The movie becomes instantly less creepy — actually uncreepy in my eyes. The horror turns mundane. As Jack goes insane — or more insane, as Jack Nicholson's performance starts somewhere south of healthy — the casual, drunken violence of his past floods out furiously, dammed up for too long. It becomes clear that an abusive husband and father poses a graver physical danger than the ghosts of the Overlook Hotel.

More importantly, this juncture befuddles the audience's understanding of the supernatural elements — a confusion that's reinforced as the story progresses. And most critically, it expands the film's scope from a haunted-hotel and haunted-child narrative to something messier and richer.

My first thought after watching Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men — amid groans from others in the theater — was that I understood why some people hate it.

This was prompted by something I'd read earlier that day, an item from Roger Ebert's Movie Answer Man column:

"I went to see No Country for Old Men with a group of my friends. I was absolutely fascinated and riveted by the film and think it is the best film I have seen thus far this year. My very good friend, who also happens to be a very smart guy, thought the film was terrible. I was shocked. Should I debate the merits of the film with him? Is it even worth debating such a wonderful film when the person you are debating with has no appreciation for it, and does it pose a risk to the friendship?

It's a fair and fascinating question, but Ebert's reply was unfortunately glib:

"As Louis Armstrong instructs us, 'There are some folks that, if they don't know, you can't tell ’em.'"

I might accept that dismissive response if he were talking about Transformers or some tony, repressed period romance; we all have things that we just don't like, no matter how well they're done.

But No Country for Old Men subverts audience expectations at just about every turn, and despite its considerable pleasures and a straightforward chase-the-drug-money plot, it's a willfully difficult film. In that context, why wouldn't you want to argue about it? It's the rare movie that's open enough to foster malleable opinion; thoughtful people who dislike it initially can be won over if spurred to look at it differently.

The contradictions of director/co-writer/composer Tom Tykwer's Perfume: The Story of a Murderer start in the title, with the onomatopoeic softness and ether of a single word paired with a morbid, blunt descriptive subtitle.

Both components are drawn from the novel by Patrick Süskind, but the associations that pile up and pull at each other during the movie's opening scenes are equally Tykwer's, cinematic and lovingly ambiguous. The main character is introduced by his nose emerging from the darkness, deeply but measuredly drawing in all that the air carries. There's something refined in the control of the gesture, yet it recalls vermin assessing its surroundings. Normal humans treat smell as a secondary sense.

It's been a decade since I read Christopher Buckley's Thank You for Smoking. I remember it as slight but laugh-out-loud funny, one of the few books I did not hesitate to recommend to anybody. The movie adaptation, written and directed by Jason Reitman, didn't make me laugh out loud, but I was surprised at its modest depth — and the sources of that richness.

Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum has so much to say that it can't survive as a narrative. Still, slogging through it might be worth the effort if the movie spoke meaningfully to the human condition, but the essence of the film is distilled misanthropy, and its flavor is so outrageously bitter that you immediately reject it.

It probably sounds like faint praise to say The Quiet American is a good story well told, but it's certainly not intended that way. I mean that the movie is a solid, unpretentious, straightforward, compelling narrative that is skillfully written, directed, designed, filmed, and acted. It won't knock you over, but you can't find much fault with it. Plus: The Hours

After watching David Cronenberg's Spider the other night, I was acutely underwhelmed and disappointed. It could be that the movie's impact on my first viewing — akin to dropping a light object onto a feather pillow — was a function of overblown expectations. Or it could be that the movie was designed to end with more of a whimper than a bang.

I had more fun at Holes at age 32 than I've had at an "adult" movie in ages, and Louis Sachar's screenplay features a number of subtle but important improvements on his novel, and it's a model of efficiency and pacing. It's going to take a damned good batch of movies to knock Holes off my list of 2003 favorites.

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