Genre Blast: By the Book – LitFlicks

Books have been the number one source for filmmakers since movies began. They come with a complete story, defined characters, dialog and, often, a built-in audience. So why, then, are many of the great books unfilmable? How many sour few versions of Moby Dick do we need to prove that point? More often than not we hear – or say – the movie wasn’t as satisfying as the book.

On the other hand, pop beach book fiction might not reap literary awards, but the blueprints they provide are responsible for some major cinema classics like The Godfather, Jaws and Gone with the Wind. I believe it has to do with simplicity – little or no subtext, uncomplicated characters, and a straight-line narrative so easy to follow that even Hansel and Gretel can skip the breadcrumbs.

Occasionally a complex literary work will connect with the right director and screenwriter who will select a point of view, edit the hell out of the details and modify the arrangement of various elements to support the change in medium from page to screen. When this happens, we, the audience, are handed a diamond that has been painfully pressed from the coal that is the written word. The flurries of words that challenge our imaginations when we read are replaced by the filmmaker’s creative interpretation that somehow maintains all the complexities of the original book.

This is no easy task. Here are five who succeed in the transition from classic literature to iconic cinema:

Fight Club – David Fincher (1999)

– based on the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk

One would think that Palahniuk’s bombastic work about identity, bloodlust, mental illness and….soap(?) would not be something one would pay to watch, unless the filmmaker happens to be the unflinching master, David Fincher. The film is bookended by brilliant opening and closing sequences, head of the class performances by Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, and images shot by freshly hired, now Fincher regular, Jeff Cronenworth. Audiences and critics alike initially either loved or hated the film, but as the haters wander off or die, the film has a solid legacy similar to other polarizing cultish films like A Clockwork Orange, Inception and pretty much anything by von Trier.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Philip Kaufman (1988)

– from the 1984 novel by Milan Kundera

Kundera’s novel of infidelity and revolt set during and after the Prague Spring of 1968 gets a handsome treatment in the hands of underrated auteur, Philip Kaufman. It’s an intricate literary work and Kaufman managed to capture most of the spirit and essence of the intensity of the time as well as the eroticism of Czech brain surgeon Tomas (Daniel Day Lewis) and his dalliances. The wonderful Juliette Binoche and Lena Olin could not be better as the primary paramours, Binoche as a frustrated waitress and Olin as a photographer with a penchant for derby hats. The chemistry of the actors, director, and source material melds into a stimulating, at times, exciting, and ultimately moving portrayal of people caught in the grist of change and their own natural search for direction. Shout outs to legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere. Mesmerizing.

Howard’s End – James Ivory (1992)

– from the 1910 novel by E.M.Forster

The Merchant/Ivory partnership, along with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, is responsible for some of the best literary adaptations ever filmed, so the selection of Howard’s End over A Room with a View, Maurice, The Bostonians, and Remains of the Day was pretty much a coin toss. They could easily fill all five slots, without regret. This was the showcase that put Emma Thompson on the A-List with her Oscar-winning portrayal of Margaret Schlegel and her plate-spinning interaction with her younger sister (Helena Bonham Carter) and the aristocratic Wilcox and his ailing wife (Anthony Hopkins and Vanessa Redgrave). The film is superlative portrayal of period detail and class structure that invites us to peer at the underbelly of social conventions at the turn of the century.

Treasure of Sierra Madre – John Huston (1948)

– from the 1927 novel by B. Traven

An American classic that, I’ll bet, most people didn’t know was adapted from the novel penned by who we think could have been a German anarchist self-exiled to Mexico. That’s correct, the book’s title at first printing was Der Schatz der Sierra Madre. Both the book and Huston’s film is probably the most existential and anti-imperialism western, laser-focused on greed, that was ever made – certainly until the 1970s, at least. How this nihilistic vision was ever greenlit for Hollywood development in the early days of the McCarthy Era is nothing short of a miracle. Fred C. Dobbs is quintessential Bogart.

Il conformista (The Conformist) – Bernardo Bertolucci (1970)

– based on the 1951 novel by Alberto Moravia

Bertolucci’s expressionist masterpiece based on Moravia’s novel presents us with Marcello, a mouse of a man searching desperately for “normality”. Unfortunately, the Fascist world he lives in is anything but normal, so “conformity” replaces the “normality” he seeks as he becomes employed as a state assassin. Jean Louis Trintignant gives a strikingly aloof performance that is almost painful to watch as a man willing to surrender all sense of self and moral consciousness simply to fit in. Georges Delerue’s score and especially Vittorio Storaro’s deco cinematography were career bests for both artists, but the real star of the show is Bertolucci, who spares nothing from his visual bag of tricks while making a convincing political point. Simply put, it is not only one of the linchpins of 70s cinema, it is one of the greatest – and most taciturnly elegant – films ever made.

LitFlicks will always be a staple for cinema. I’ve been pleased with some adaptations such as Life of Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Grapes of Wrath, but it’s a gamble, to be sure. By all accounts, Luca Guagdagnino’s rendition of Andre Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name is the latest to strike the bull’s-eye. As this is one of my favourite books, I sincerely hope so.

 

100 Performances Oscars Forgot – 18/20

RE-POST

Here you’ll find a couple of French, a couple of Greeks, not to mention a Dane, and a Norwegian. Your thoughts are always welcome in the comments section below. 

Aggeliki Papoulia / Mary Tsoni for Dogtooth (2010) – – – Robin Write @Filmotomy

Yorgos Lanthimos’s surreal Dogtooth is a bit like a scab you ought not to pick because of the resulting blood, but you just can’t help yourself. Bizarre, bonkers, bewildering, this is a dysfunctional family fable at it’s most head-scratching. Beautifully shot and thought-provoking though it is, there is no way any of he cast could expect to be considered for Oscar nominations. Not to say the performances are flimsy or uninspired, not at all. It is in fact hard to pick a stand-out contender in the acting stakes. The parents keeping their family locked away from the world in a huge house sweeps around notions of child cruelty for sure, but they are compelling authorities. It’s a strange parenting regime, to these poor kids a vagina is a keyboard and the salt is called phone. While the son expresses the more active, brutal tendencies, it is the two daughters, though still damaged souls, that provide what little genuine human emotion there is. The older sister (Aggeliki Papoulia) longs to escape not so much the physical confines of the house, but a way to see what is out there – inspired by a couple of actual VHS movies no less. The younger sister (Mary Tsoni) has a seemingly sullen face, but it somehow glows with innocence and enthusiasm. The younger sister leans on the older to some extent, signified through embraces, licks (yes), and a solid companionship. Both actresses rarely need the rather misguided dialogue (again not a flaw) to impress, gauging all manner of suppressed thoughts and intrigue through their faces and motions – not to mention their body language which speaks volumes in this discourse of film. They taint the weird a little bit, but nowhere near enough for the Academy to deem this worthy of votes in the acting categories. They have a long way to go with other social demographic issues first. There was an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, which given the material and execution is really something.

Liv Ullmann for Scenes from a Marriage (1973) – – – Asif Khan @KHAN2705

Liv Ullmann’s performance in Swedish master Ingmar Bergman’s 162 min film/281 min mini-series is one of the most hard-hitting portrayals of a woman (period!) ever captured on camera. She plays Marianne (a lawyer) while Erland Josephson plays Johan, her husband who is a professor. This tightly focused disintegration of marriage and brutally revealing account of two people sharing life and slowly finding that their love for each other cannot compensate for the anger they insight in one another, is one of the crowning achievements of Mr. Bergman. Same can be said for his supreme actress Liv Ullmann who gives her career best performance here. The theatrical version released in cinemas made her a BAFTA and Golden Globe nominee but the Academy overlooked her for reasons I don’t know nor care about. Bergman’s penchant for close-ups to serve a better relationship between the audience and his characters work in a different way here. Each verbal stab, slow realization, doubt and confusion wonderfully performed by Ullmann specially. Her erratic behavior, changes in expressions, internal havoc, masterfully acted and captured. A tale so intimate, it is impossible not to look at it as the most realistic account of love, marriage and breakup. With minute details, focus on the most ordinary things that one day, grow into something extraordinary and thus, impossible to ignore. This film leaves you bruised and Liv Ullmann leaves you stunned with her vulnerable portrayal in a commanding performance.

Melanie Laurent for Inglourious Basterds (2009) – – – Robin Write @Filmotomy

Christoph Waltz stole the majority of the limelight in Quentin Tarantino’s historical retelling Inglourious Basterds, winning at the Oscars and in Cannes. In a special, personal way though the heart and soul of the movie is Melanie Laurent as Shosanna, fleeing for her life only later to be floundered with her enemies. She is fearless and smart, though very aware of the dangers in her path, and eager to develop the means to banish them. Laurent is pitch-perfect here, portraying a young woman who must have the weight of the world at war on her small shoulders, but externalizes her cool and courageous attitude. Sure, Waltz was the showy masterclass, but Laurent had depth and feeling, a character you warm to instantly and root for right to her very end. She does somehow triumph with a great spirit and sense of freedom at the film’s close, in spite of what her writer-director had in store for her. Tarantino started to lose my fandom ever-so-slightly with the Kill Bill double-bill, but the fate he ultimately gives to Shosanna is unforgivable – I was heartbroken. The lack of an Oscar nomination for the marvelous Laurent doesn’t really tend to my wounds.

Mads Mikkelsen for The Hunt (2011) – – – Tobi Ogunyemi @spaceliontobi @SpaceLioncs

Pusher. Casino Royale. After the Wedding. Valhalla Rising. A Royal Affair. Hannibal – Mads Mikkelsen has been pushing a fantastic case that he is one of the single best actors in the world in all of his performances (his Hannibal Lecter is a new contortion of the iconic character for a new generation). Then, he teams up with fellow Danish patriot Thomas Vinterberg in The Hunt and serves up his best performance in his already stellar character. Mikkelsen plays Lucas, a teacher at an elementary school who is beloved by the kids, the parents, the fellow teachers and everyone around it seems like. Regardless, he holds a lonely (but still capable and livable) existence in his community along with sharing custody of his brash and admiring son and starts a burgeoning relationship with an English speaking co-worker. Lucas lives a full life, but as is the case with an depth character study such as this one, an event happens that turns his life upside down and slowly, and painfully, ostracizes him from the community that once so cherished him and vice versa. Mikkelsen pulls off two incredible bits of acting in this performance that showcases why it was one of the best of its year; while he is accused of the crime of what is assumed that he did, his Lucas never denies because he cannot believe that he is being accused of it in the first place. The lonely man who is surrounded by his supposed loved ones separates himself from them as they are doing the same to him, it’s a arms race of loneliness and Lucas is in the middle of it trying to beat everyone else to the race first. Secondly, in conjunction with his loneliness, Lucas is framed and shown in such ways that emphasize his considerable condition – sleeping alone with his dog, in his backyard, in the grocery store, and most memorably, in the church – Lucas becomes more and more attacked in increasingly brutal physical attacks and finally, in wordless psychological directions. The pained glancing looks, the way he carries himself at first above the hate and then with a stiffness that subverts, defies and crafts that same hate for himself, the gamut of emotions that Lucas – and everyone else connected to him – goes through. Eventually, Lucas is welcomed wholeheartedly back into the fold and time heals all wounds, but time also never forgets. The final shot of Lucas’ face while hunting in the woods carries such a notion, such an exclamation point, that Mikkelsen was deservedly recognized for numerous of platitudes around the world for this performance.

Juliette Binoche for Three Colors: Blue (1993) – – – Robin Write @Filmotomy

The first of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s miraculous Three Colors trilogy is certainly the bleakest. So Blue is the appropriate color, and Juliette Binoche is the perfect face that fits. Her beauty and magnetism is matched by her natural ability to display utter turmoil and self-depletion. You would struggle to find examples where Binoche has not demonstrated these qualities and such acting brilliance to this great extent in anything else she has done. Though she is never anything short of exceptional. In Three Colors: Blue the central character of Julie (Binoche) loses her child and husband in an automobile accident, and consciously fades away from the social world choosing some form of isolation and distance from society. She tries to commit suicide, before attempting to abandon her past, including an affair and her husband’s music (which she very well may have written). The somber and luminous Binoche and composer Zbigniew Preisner work in unison as the music haunts Julie throughout, following her like memories you can’t forget. It’s a mesmerizing, memorable central performance from the enigmatic Binoche – painful, poignant, and beautiful.

100 Performances Oscars Forgot – 17/20

RE-POST

So we reach the penultimate part of the Oscar Missables. A pleasantly mixed bag too, with a few out-there options as well as some that were pretty obvious – to us not voting that is. The Queen of Oscar Nominations also shows up here – so no, she was not nominated for everything she did…

Amanda Seyfried for Lovelace (2013) – – – Robin Write @Filmotomy

We tend to forget about Amanda Seyfried as an actress. She was the mean girl that couldn’t catch a ball, has sang wth Meryl Streep and Eddie Redmayne, she was Red Riding Hood, and very recently took it upon herself to hang out Mark Wahlberg and Ted for some reason. One of her finest performances as an actress is in a very recent, seemingly also forgotten movie, Lovelace. Opposite Peter Sarsgaard (the asshole top casting choice it seems), Seyfried plays the infamous adult film star Linda Lovelace in a kind of What’s Porn Got To Do With It, a rather typical, but worthy enough, warts-and-all celebrity biopic. Taking two very different narrative tones of the same era of her life (remember Deep Throat?), essentially telling her story in the early 1970s, it goes from Lovelace feeling beautiful before flipping over to Lovelace being brutalized. I had no doubt Seyfried has an acting talent, and here it is shown in mouthfuls (Oh I had to), she brings a bright shining light to the naive, self-appreciation of Lovelace, making you respect and like her regardless of her profession, before going even deeper (sorry) to show the true depths of pain and despair her life journeyed to. The Academy were going nowhere near this though, as the film seemed to pop it’s head up and then disappear completely. Which sucks.

Meryl Streep for The Hours (2002) – – – Jazz Tangcay @jazzt

Meryl Streep is without a doubt the greatest actress alive. She holds the record for most nominations and has won three, her most recent win was for The Iron Lady in 2012. Her work is extraordinary, few people might say she’s over-rated, but let’s face it, there are years when she has been the best of the crop and rightfully deserved the nomination. There are a few roles where Streep was snubbed, and one was notably for her performance in The Hours. Tariq Khan wrote a great piece on why Meryl missed out that year for The Hours. Streep gave an amazing performance as conflicted lesbian editor, Clarissa Vaughan tending to her ex-lover played superbly by Ed Harris. She takes you on the journey of pain and conflict and it’s another Streep great, every scene, every moment. Co-star Nicole Kidman took home the Best Actress honor that year. The prosthetic nose she wore to transform into Virginia Woolf would rule. Streep would have to make do with a nomination for the other film she appeared in, Adaptation. The entire female cast gave some of the best performances that year, but let’s just look at some classic moments from The Hours.

Benicio del Toro for Che (2008) – – – Tobi Ogunyemi @spaceliontobi @SpaceLioncs

The Oscar-winner won many accolades for his complete immersion of the infamous revolutionary, in a role that he along with Steven Soderbergh, Laura Bickford (and one point for a long time, Terrence Malick) have brought to the screen that is reminiscent of vintage historical epics held together by a sterling central performance. Portraying the practicing doctor turned solider from his arrival to Cuba and meeting with Fidel Castro to his end in Bolivia, Del Toro gives a tour de force in embedding a man who is single-minded in his purpose to bring a revolution to Latin America, and then the world, but also infusing that purpose with a personal vision anchored by desire, a personal honor and most importantly, love. ‘The most important quality a revolutionary can posses is love,’ and Del Toro’s performance in a labor of love, giving his performance of Che touchstones of personal and physical notifiers that is carried throughout – from the way he glances at his watches, to the way he smokes, speaks, embraces others and addresses them in his violent manifesto to everyone all around. It’s a physical endurance of an acting job in a physical epic, and Del Toro shows us that the further Guevara goes further up the river of darkness in his revolution, and the more maligned it becomes. He deteriorates, mentally and more to the eye, physically until he is but a shell of himself. But still, he forges onward. An entirely captivating job by a reclusive but top-tier award winner at his height of his craft, and given the year and the noted nominees of the Oscars in 2008, it stands out even further on not being considered accordingly.

Jean-Louis Trintignant for The Conformist (1970) – – – Paddy Mulholland @screenonscreen

Three of the great cinematic artists collaborate on one of the finest films of its era – The Conformist, written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, shot by Vittorio Storaro and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant. The French actor had earned his dues as the lead in well-received political thrillers with his turn in Costa Gavras’ Z the year prior, and the visibility that provided him, alongside this film’s Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, ought to have earned him a nod also. Trintignant is riveting as a man forced by both his own weak will and the increasing political aggression shown by society to disguise that weak will as the opposite of itself; his performance is beautifully shaded, projecting equally the tone of manufactured confidence that almost convinces his acquaintances, and the tone of simmering doubt and fear that is directed at us, the viewers, and that helps immeasurably to construct The Conformist‘s delicate, tangibly tense atmosphere. The film is one of similar dichotomies, those of political, gender, artistic and sexual natures, and the innate duality of Trintignant’s character makes it a particularly rich one, a challenge perfectly met by a particularly talented actor.

Robert Shaw for Jaws (1975) – – – Robin Write @Filmotomy

From the moment his fingernails claw across the blackboard, until long after the great shark takes him, there is a heroic and lasting impression left by Robert Shaw’s Quint. A character who ultimately grows on you more than you would have imagined as Jaws progresses through it’s small-town horror tale and becomes something of an encouraging, convincing buddy movie. Quint’s shocking, brutal death becomes all the more bittersweet in the end, no offence to Hooper or Brody, as he is the man you long to survive and be standing come the film’s close. Shaw brings the raw charisma and confidence to Quint not many other actors could have pulled off so effectively. With surprisingly only one single acting Oscar nomination to his name (A Man for All Seasons), Shaw was classic Supporting Actor material here. But we are sadly all too aware of the travesty of the Jaws Oscar coverage. Neither Roy Scheider nor Richard Dreyfuss made the acting short-lists, neither did the writers Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb, not to mention of course the film’s super-talented director Steven Spielberg. Like his remarkable career, Spielberg’s neglected Academy Award journey still had a way to go.