Navigation

Archive | Book Matters

‘The Fault in Our Stars’ Delivers

June 5, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Reviews

The following is a review originally published in Word and Film.

The movie does justice to the book. I’ll start there, since that’s the most important news about The Fault in Our Stars for the multitudes already in love with John Green’s book. For those unfamiliar with this best-selling young adult novel about a romance between two teens with cancer, there’s also good news: To dig this movie, we don’t need to be in love with the book.

But let’s pull back, shall we?

Sixteen-year-old Hazel (Shailene Woodley) is depressed. The Stage IV thyroid cancer that has “colonized her lungs” may have stabilized but she could relapse at any moment. Not to mention that it’s hard to lead a typical adolescent existence when she has to lug an oxygen tank everywhere and has been staring down death since the age of thirteen. So Hazel holes up in her bedroom rereading An Imperial Affliction, a story (within this story) about a child with cancer, while her parents (Laura Dern and Sam Trammell) worry.

Things change when Hazel’s mom forces her to attend a support group for kids with cancer (led by a Jesus freak played by comedian Mike Birbiglia). There, she meets the irrepressible Gus (Ansel Elgort), a seventeen-year-old former basketball star who’s lost a leg to a sarcoma now in remission. Gus announces he “fears oblivion,” which sparks sharp words from the pragmatically philosophical Hazel. (There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.) “Sparks” being the relevant word, the two commence a courtship and travel together to Amsterdam to track down Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe), the author of Affliction. Then the Big C makes a rude reentry. Continue Reading →

My Day With the (Fault in Our) Stars

June 4, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters, Listing

The following is a report I originally published in Word and Film.

Ordinarily I avoid any occasion at which people are likely to shriek but I caught myself requesting – nay, begging – to attend a recent The Fault in Our Stars event. This, despite the fact that it promised to be a veritable shriekfest. Like so many others, I am absolutely in love with the book from which it’s adapted.

The good news: The movie does justice to the book. Without disclosing any spoilers, it’s safe to say Shailene Woodley is an ideal Hazel and Ansel Elgort an ideal Gus. Also on point: Nat Wolff as Isaac, Gus’s best friend, and Laura Dern and Sam Trammell as Hazel’s parents. Along with director Josh Boone and author Green, they were all in attendance for a post-screening Q&A as well as a press conference the next day. Here are six things to know about this event. Continue Reading →

Why ‘Hannibal’ Is an Acquired Taste

May 23, 2014 in Book Matters, Film Matters, TV Matters

The following is a review I originally published in Word and Film.

The season two finale of “Hannibal” airs May 23, and most of us have no clue how it will end even if we’ve read Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, upon which the series is loosely based. That’s if we’ve been watching at all: The NBC show’s ratings have dipped perilously low though it’s been renewed it for another season.

Yet, aside from Sherlock Holmes, there may be no crime-novel figure who looms as large in our collective imagination as Hannibal Lecter does, and this show goes a long way toward explaining why. Like all of our most terrifying dreams, “Hannibal” seduces us before grabbing us by the throat. Ironically, that seduction relies mightily upon a moral and narrative ambiguity that also may be alienating audiences.

In the movies adapted from Harris’ books about the serial killer, Hannibal Lecter is larger-than-life – so much so that a little of him goes a long way. In 1986’s “Manhunter,” actor Brian Cox bases his portrayal less on the character’s literary antecedent than on the Scottish serial killer Peter Manuel. The effect is plenty chilling but more brutish than we might expect of an aesthete whose declared foe is bad taste. In “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Red Dragon,” and the unfortunate “Hannibal,” Anthony Hopkins’ iconic take is more refined but also so hammy that it’s only palatable in small doses (cannibalism metaphors apparently being irresistible in this context). It’s hard to, ahem, swallow that the doctor wouldn’t eat someone else alive for such showboating, quid pro quo. And let’s not discuss Gaspard Ulliel’s turn as the young Lecter in 2007’s unspeakably bad “Hannibal Rising”; Thomas Harris was reportedly bullied into writing this film and book by those who held the cinematic rights to the character.

Then there’s Mads Mikkelsen’s Hannibal in the eponymously titled NBC show, which swoops in and out of a fidelity to Harris’ books with a discombobulating, off-kilter elegance that is this series’ trademark. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy