This summer, it was announced that “Wool,” a dystopia about an underground city on an otherwise-uninhabitable Earth, was finally under way three years after Twentieth Century Fox nabbed the rights to Hugh Howey’s eponymous book. The project now comes with stellar credentials: “Guardians of the Galaxy” screenwriter Nicole Perman is rewriting “The Fifth Wave” director J Blakeson’s original script, and Steven Zaillian (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “Moneyball”) and Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Blade Runner”) are producing. Not bad for a book that got its start as a series of self-published novellas. But that’s the thing about all self-published book adaptations. No matter how they fare at the box office or on Rotten Tomatoes, they qualify as cinema’s Little Engines That Could. The sheer fact that these stories have defeated so many odds – that they made it to the big screen at all given that they initially could not find a niche in the literary world – is amazing. And some of the films in this category may surprise you. Continue Reading →
Archive | Book Matters
All Hail ‘The Hunger Games’
Overall, I like “In a World,” actress Lake Bell’s comedy that indicts sexism in the voice-over industry, but it contains one problematic scene. In it, a studio bigwig played by women’s rights activist Geena Davis critiques a thinly disguised version of “The Hunger Games” films. “Let me level with you,” she says. “This pseudo-feminist, fantasy-tween, chick-lit bullshit is a devolution of the female mission and a cancer to the intelligence of young women.”
As “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2,” the final (and hyper-punctuated) installment in the four-film series adapted from Suzanne Collins’s best-selling book trilogy, hits theaters this week, I thought about how much I disagreed with these words. To usurp Bell’s titular phrase, in a world in which young girls – everyone who identifies as female, really – are routinely condescended to and manipulated by popular media, the “Hunger Games” franchise stands out as a shining exception. More than that, it charismatically instructs a new generation (one for whom the activism of the 1960s is but a twinkle in their grandparents’ eyes) that hegemonies can be toppled if we behave courageously and selflessly. Continue Reading →
The Courage of Intimacy: ‘Carol’
Walking out of “Carol,” director Todd Haynes’s newest film, I had to laugh about our need to sneer at the past no matter how much we fetishize it. Progress is elliptical, not linear, though the LGBT community can be forgiven for temporarily forgetting this fact. This year alone we’ve achieved civil rights inconceivable only decades before–when AIDS patients were treated by the government as if they’d earned their fate, and simply being gay could deny us of our legal right to work, live, find shelter, and, of course, love.
Amid this unprecedented groundswell of mainstream acceptance comes Haynes’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 eponymous novel about a love affair between the titular married socialite and Therese, a shopgirl twenty years her junior. Originally published under a pseudonym and with a different title, the book not only reflects the obstacles facing a lesbian couple in the mid-twentieth century but the holistic confusion facing any woman coming of age – when the world claims her body and sexuality before she’s grown comfortable with them herself. Students of queer and feminist literature have long prized the novel’s precision and defiant optimism, and for good reason. It is a quiet tour de force that remains radical today. Continue Reading →