Archive for September, 2007
PKD Update I
Thursday, September 27th, 2007I am making my way through the first volume of Philip K. Dick’s collected short stories… I’m nearly halfway through. I’ve read at least one a day during the week… sometimes as much as three a day, depending on how long the stories are. I read them on the train heading to work… the morning commute is ideal for reading short stories.
While I’ve enjoyed all the stories I’ve read so far, a few that stick out as my favorites are The Gun, The Skull, The Defenders, and Piper In The Woods.
Revolutionary Road
Sunday, September 23rd, 2007Back in June, I set upon starting Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates. It actually took me a while to get started, and it eventually became my morning reading on the train during my commute to work. I finished it this weekend while flying to Santa Barbara, California.
The novel tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, Connecticut suburbanites in the 1950s who both want more out of life than what they got. Frank has a mundane, pointless job and feels like a failure. April wants to restart their life and move them and their two young kids to Paris, France, where she would support the family so he can focus his time and energy trying to fulfill his life’s dreams. Things don’t work out as either of them hoped.
I really enjoyed the novel — perhaps not as much as a the character J.J. in Nick Hornby’s novel A Long Way Down did, but enjoyed it all the same. He certainly was right in saying the ending “is a real downer.”
Kurt Vonnegut is quoted on the back, saying calling the novel. “The Great Gatsby of [his] time,” and I can see the connection.
Filming for the movie Revolutionary Road finished last month, and the movie is set for a 2008 release. I look forward to seeing that and comparing it with the novel.
On my return flight(s) from Santa Barbara, California, I started Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen. I’m already about half-way through it, and will post a short review when I finish.
Discovering Philip K. Dick’s Science Fiction
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007A recent sale on audiobooks at Apple’s iTunes store resulted in my purchasing Minority Report and Other Stories by Philip K. Dick. The audiobook contains a number of short stories, two of which I had seen the movie adaptations for: Minority Report and We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, (which Total Recall was based on.)
I have to say, I loved the stories. All of them. Aside from the aforementioned stories, Paycheck was perhaps my personal favorite. It’s the story of a mechanic who wakes up with two years of his memory gone as part of the conditions of a job he took, and learns he decided to forgo his salary in exchange for a bag of seemingly worthless objects that he had left for himself before his memory was erased. Second Variety was another great story worth mentioning.
Anyways, after finishing the audiobook, and being totally taken by Philip K. Dick’s extraordinary talent for science fiction, I decide to buy five volumes of his collected short stories. It will take some time to get through these volumes, and I’m excited to get started.
Big Fish: The Novel vs. The Film
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007I have always believed that when novels are adapted for film, the film version would always be the inferior version. I have recently finished Big Fish by Daniel Wallace and found myself not liking it nearly as much as I like the movie.
Some things do carry over from the novel to the book, but they are largely different. In the novel, Edward Bloom, the main character who’s life is retold in his wild tales and stories, has a good relationship with his son William, who narrates the book. In the movie, the Ed and William were estranged as a result of William being fed up with his father’s constant storytelling. William comes home after three years of not speaking to his father when his father’s death is imminent, and hopes to learn “the truth” about his father before he dies, and the movie goes through the romanticized life of Edward Bloom, regularly returning to the present as William struggles to get anything resembling the truth from his dying father.
The movie has a good rhythm to it. The stories of Edward’s life flow together in the movie, but feel a bit disjointed in the book. And, while in the novel, William does have similar frustrations with his father’s tale-telling, the decision of the screenwriter to change the nature of the father-son relationship strengthened the purpose of the overall story as William’s attempt to learn the truth about his father ultimately leads him to appreciate stories that have become who his father is.
Since the movie ranks as one of my favorites, I was hoping/expecting the novel would be counted as one of my favorite novels. While I still enjoyed the book, it didn’t quite achieve what I had hoped.
Hornby’s Update On Film Adaptation of ‘A Long Way Down’
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007A Long Way Down is easily my favorite Nick Hornby novel, and perhaps my all time favorite. Because of this, I am equally excited and worried about the upcoming film adaptation of the book, currently in development. It is encouraging that D.V. Devincentis (who adapted High Fidelity) is writing the script for the movie version of A Long Way Down.
Nick Hornby has given us an update on the movie project on his blog, and explains some of the issue with adapting the novel to a movie script — issues that were actually the same that made me worried about the film version.
I have been told several times that ‘A Long Way Down’ would make a good film. It’s true that in the opening chapters there are four people standing on a roof, and that could be made to look pretty cool on screen. But after that, there are plenty of problems for DV to solve. There are four points of view in the novel, four different voices; you can’t film that. About big chunk of the book is back-story, the characters explaining how they arrived at their current predicament; you can’t film that, either, not without resorting to an excessive, clunky use of flashback. Most of the action takes place in rooms – one climactic scene takes place in a Starbucks basement. (Note to budding novelists: if you really want to make some money out of Hollywood, set all climactic scenes up a mountain, or at the bottom of the sea, or even on the ground floor of Starbucks, somewhere with windows.)
You can read the whole thing here.