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.
Mystic River is a prime example of the danger of adapting rich novels for the screen. When screenwriters fall a little too much in love with source material, they become afraid to pare it down, and the result is often unwieldy. What’s curious with Mystic River is that the novel was adapted by Brian Helgeland, who took a meat cleaver to James Ellroy’s sprawling L.A. Confidential and miraculously produced a work that captured the spirit of the book without much fidelity to the plot.
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, 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.
