The Top Ten Adaptations of 2015
When it comes to movie adaptations, this year was such an embarrassment of riches that making a top-ten list of best adaptations proved a tough task – if also a fun one. (No one’s ever going to pity a film critic for having to revisit movies she loves.) Of course, every top-ten list is sure to enrage as many people as it pleases, so read on and then tell me: What would be on your list of best 2015 adaptations? Here’s what I have on mine.
10) “45 Years”
Amid all the “Exotic Marigold Hotel”-style films about the Endearing Habits of Elders comes this shadowy and formidably honest portrait of an aging couple who discover they may not know each other as well as they’d thought. Sixties icons Tom Courtenay and Charlotte “The Look” Rampling star in this deft adaptation by screenwriter/director Andrew Haigh (“Weekend,” “Looking”) of David Constantine’s short story “In Another Country.” A final scene comprises the best minute of acting in 2015 cinema.
9) “Carol”
Adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s groundbreaking 1952 novel, director Todd Haynes’s latest film is easily the most hopeful love story of the year. Cate Blanchett stars as a married socialite with red lipstick to match her talons; all kewpie doll eyes and tiny pouts, Rooney Mara plays the shopgirl with whom she has an affair. Though this at times devolves into a Douglas Sirk museum, it also is a stunningly rendered paean to the courage that intimacy universally requires.
8) “The End of the Tour”
Though it may prove less satisfying to ardent fans of the late author David Foster Wallace, this adaptation of David Lipsky’s book, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, about a five-day interview he conducted with the Infinite Jest author, offers flashes of insight that far outstrip its source material. Starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky in a feat of casting that’s almost too on the nose, it it is directed by James Ponsoldt (“The Spectacular Now,” “Smashed”), who excels at exposing self-delusions with the gentlest of bedside manners. Continue Reading →
On ‘Anomalisa’ and Meta-Narcissism
“Anomalisa” may be the most meta-narcissistic movie ever written by Charlie Kaufman, which is saying a lot given that he also wrote “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” and “Synecdoche, New York.” It also is not necessarily a slam. Like Lars von Trier, Kaufman has an uncanny ability to globalize his solipsistic sadness with such psychogenic flair that he makes us believe nihilism is a legitimate form of creation. It’s the ultimate inversion of the old hippie phrase “think global, act local,” and, against all odds, it usually works. Alas, it only sort of does in this catalogue of depersonalization masquerading as a love story – perhaps because its subtext reads as supertext in a way that doesn’t stimulate the senses so much as bum them out. Continue Reading →
Video Footage: Me, Musto & 2015’s Best
I’ve been sick for three days–it’s no surprise, really, given that I’d been running ragged for months and was feeling no small amount of heartbreak–but I felt compelled to rally when HuffPost Live asked me to do a roundup of best and worst films of 2015 with the great Michael Musto and Decider.com’s Olivia Armstrong. Try to ignore the high phlegm content rumbling in my voice.