Better In Your Head?--THE TAKING OF PELHAM ONE TWO THREE

 

Spoiler Alert: weight counts.

THE BOOK-Written by John Godey, released 1973

THE MOVIE(S)-Directed by Joseph Sargent, written by Peter Stone, released 1974

(as "The Taking Of Pelham 123") Directed by Tony Scott, written by Brian Helgeland, released 2009

THE STORY-A nutbars notion: four acquaintances hijack a subway car and demand a million dollars. If said demand is disrespected, the shooting will start. Crumblier still, doing so in cash-strapped, crime-choked New York City. Hardly a sure shot caper. And that's just the way these guys want it. Legends are made by hands keen on sifting through the debris of hubris.

MIND THE GAP-Oh how rapidly a seed, once watered, can grow. One man's harebrained scheme becomes another man's ultimate challenge becomes an entire city's wide-awake nightmare. 

While the heart of the plot is too banger to change, both films applied unique modifications. Instead of nylon stockings, Stone's script calls for the hijackers to conceal their mugs with fake facial fuzz. Furthermore, each man responds to a color-coded alias. Helgeland's script dispenses with the caution of disguise altogether. Understandably, the 21st-century Pelham integrates contemporary technology and ups the ransom (sometimes I think I'm the only person alive who'd still be hog-happy with a million-dollar payday). It also alters the main characters in unnecessary ways, and frankly the whole thing reeks of a petulant need to be different from its predecessors. 

Sargent's film just rules. The script's adherence to essence is key. Ryder/"Mr. Blue" is a phlegmatic, pragmatic former mercenary, a fatalist whose emotional shortcomings permit him access onto miry roads closed off to most other men. Dude's pure C.C.C.--cool, collected, calm--and Robert Shaw embodies him superbly. In contrast, John Travolta's Ryder is a tattooed loose cannon weighed down by a vendetta against the crooked government. He dresses like a C-tier comic book villain and speaks like a callow Tarantino acolyte. (Shaw serenely informing command center he's taken over the train is immeasurably cooler, infinitely more bad-ass, than fitting "fuck" into every sentence.)

The disparity in casts is hilarious. Besides Shaw outshining Travolta....

*Luis Guzman suffering in comparison to Martin Balsam, who was born to play Longman/Mr. Green, the disgruntled former motorman who dreamed up the whole dang shebang. (He's renamed "Ramos" in the 2009 version, 'cause ethnicity.)

*Brutish, mute-ish Steever/Mr. Brown becomes "Enri"; failed mobster Joey Welcome/Mr. Gray becomes "Bashkin." Both men are played by indistinguishable meat slabs, whereas the 1974 film had the good fortune of men with personalities, specifically Hector Elizondo and Earl Hindman.

*Denzel as Lt. Garber was a win, but no shit, it's Denzel. Ah yes, what great actor doesn't have a filmography easily split into "For All Time," "For A Good Time," and "For The Love Of God, Why?!" And that includes Walter Matthau, who originated Garber as a grouchy negotiator fighting the good fight with merely a microphone and a working man's wit in his arsenal. (There's a reason Denzel's character is named Walter Garber, and it's not because the screenwriter was a huge Steely Dan fan.)

Apple doesn't want movie baddies using iPhones, but Breitling understands the Golden Rule of Exposure.

The fates of Ryder and Longman are changed across all three tellings. The book gives the most realistic conclusions. Sargent's film provides the most memorable. Scott's film, the most contrived.

It'd be funny to say The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three did for subways what Psycho did for showers, but how in hell else are New Yorkers gonna get around?

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-Forget 2009, take me back to 1999, when Tony Scott's penultimate film would've blown my mind. When the empty calories--quick edits, guitar stabs, sterile lighting--would've sent a dopamine surge through my brain powerful enough to hallucinate a new galaxy. Take me back to 1974, and let me sully my shoes on Manhattan sidewalks, smear my face with grease from a Brooklyn slice, flee the Bronx seconds from suffocation, completely avoid Queens, spew on the ferry to and from Staten Island. 

For the first time in the BIYH? series, multiple adaptations split the difference. Pelham 1974 improves on the book by comprehending what works, what doesn't work, and what will work. Without a chaotic glut of POVs, the suspense is unbroken and thus heightened. The passengers are no longer caricatures--they act, and react, as a singular freaked-out organism. Beyond what is excised, what is added also distinguishes the film as a lean, mean, real-time good time. Oh, and it features one of cinema's greatest-ever final shots. And that soundtrack! Sweet funky Jesus.

The 2009 Pelham is better than two hours spent playing hide and seek at a dumpster during mid-August, sure.

Better In Your Head?--RAPE: A LOVE STORY

 

Spoiler Alert: love wins.

THE BOOK-Written by Joyce Carol Oates, released 2003

THE MOVIE (as "Vengeance: A Love Story")-Directed by Johnny Martin, written by John Mankiewicz, released 2017

THE STORY-Take the long way home, get the short end of the stick. Take the shore most strolled, feel reason recede under ceaseless waves of rage. If you dance too close, drink too much, flirt too long, well that's too bad. 

MIND THE GAP-Begins with brutality and doesn't let up. The POV switches between third and second person, the latter of which puts the reader in the position of a pre-teen girl forced to hear her mother's dehumanization. 

One bad decision subjects Teena Maguire to scornful eyes, disdainful ears and spiteful tongues, turning a fun-loving single mom into a self-loathing recluse. She is forced to process her trauma amid rancid gossip and perverted legal gamesmanship.

Fearlessness makes the difference. Joyce Carol Oates, for all her rampaging flaws, is a fearless scribe. Rape: A Love Story shines harsh light into corners others might cut. Vengeance: A Love Story is a formulaic excuse to pay Nic Cage so he could pay whoever he owed. I know "Nic Cage as a vigilante cop" may sound awesome, and I'm sure in some other movie it is, but this ain't the one. Don Johnson gives the movie's stand-out performance as a defense attorney who deserves to drown in his own gravy--and that fact is depressing.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-One of the most baffling adaptations ever. A painfully human, compellingly ugly work from an author of mind-blowing prolificacy, 150 pages of zero filler/hero killer, became a TV movie masquerading as a theatrical release. The book swept me along on a lava wave. The movie, conversely, is as engrossing as a dying lava lamp.

Look, I get the title change. But the change in focus is maddening. Vengeance is not Teena's. She's the victim, barely holding on in the wake of a vicious gang-rape that left her on death's welcome mat, in a town that's ostracized her and her young daughter for the sins of every woman. Vengeance is Officer John Dromoor's, the one-man army whose love can only be expressed through control.

Whatever you say about Rape: A Love Story, you cannot say it is shameless sensationalism. You cannot say it is a jaw-droppingly insipid, nose-to-toes failure. But when it comes to Vengeance: A Love Story, that's all you can say.

Better In Your Head?--THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP

 

Spoiler Alert: life is a battlefield.

THE BOOK-Written by John Irving, released 1978

THE MOVIE-Directed by George Roy Hill, written by Steve Tesich, released 1982

THE STORY-The world according to TS Garp is a world of omnipresent perversity. Mutilation, dismemberment, assassination, rape, dead children. In this world, consequences matter--explanations do not. 

MIND THE GAP-When not obsessing over his libido or stressing over his kids, Garp is tackling the classic writer's dilemma: pure imagination or impure memory, which lamp best lights the path? John Irving inserts selections of Garp's atrociously-titled prose, and in doing so not only proves the fallibility of the "show, don't tell" argument as it pertains to fiction, but also allows readers a glimpse of even more explicit, gratuitous tales written by a dude working through daddy issues.

Despite Irving's most strident efforts (incessant digressions, the implication that sexless=worthless) I wound up quite moved by the end. Characters not only survive a bombardment of shitballs, they evolve. Garp, especially, overcomes his self-destructive impulses and reassesses the channels through which he receives and bestows valuation.

Obsessing over a sex life not your own blows my mind. Are you? Who? When? Where? How frequently? Is it good? Is it your business, shithead?

Another book wasted on a circumspect American filmmaker. The cast does its best, so whenever the script does its worst (that fucking ending gahhhugughhhaahgua), legacies emerge unscathed. In a rare straight performance, Robin Williams shows why he's best remembered for his comedic roles. He's fine, but he doesn't come close to matching my vision of TS Garp. Too short, no beard. Mary Beth Hurt misses the mark even more aggressively. Again, the actress herself is competent, but movie Helen is a bookish pushover, softer all over than her book counterpart--barely a suitable Garp wife. 

Making her feature film debut, as Garp mom/feminist icon Jenny Fields, is the one the only the Glenn Close. Beloved butler-face John Lithgow earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Roberta Muldoon, a transsexual former NFL star who becomes Garp's best friend. Lithgow not only plays the part with heart, soul and humor, he also looks passable in drag (a feat Robin Williams never pulled off).

There's lots to like 'bout Jenny Fields. Diligent nurse, supportive mother, loyal friend. Rapist, also. Huh, what? Indeed, Garp's mom became a feminist fave after the publication of a caustically candid autobiography wherein she confessed to rape. Desirous of a baby but not of a husband, Nurse Fields used a brain-damaged ball turret gunner as a sperm donor. A reprehensible act reframed and hung alongside other activist sketches, overlooked amid countless charitable gestures. Part of me couldn't help but feel Jenny deserved every bit of her premature end. 

Did Garp deserve his? He certainly deserved better than to entangle himself with "The Ellen Jamesians," a radical feminist group whose members excise their tongues in misguided solidarity with a young, similarly disfigured rape victim. They self-diagnose the emptiness between their ears and in the center of their chests, then self-medicate with misinformation, selective reasoning, and bottles of rage. Such unreasonables are best scorned in private, and shunned in public. Garp, among other functions, exists as an example of how failure to exercise restraint can result in tragedy.

Women should never report sexual assault. Is that too extreme? Okay, how's this: women should never report sexual assault with any expectation of justice. 

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-The happy tone of the film throws me. For all the book's tedium, Irving's picaresque is superior for its bold scope, bizarre situations and brazen storytelling. Garp grows, from insufferable philanderer to empathetic father and friend who understands that not only is the dynamic between men and women changing, the dynamic must change. The film, though not bad, is de-wrinkled to its detriment. It serves best as a preview for the novel which despite its defects (three paragraphs of drivel re: condoms) is unforgettable.

Better In Your Head?--PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

 

Spoiler Alert: you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

THE BOOK-Written by Jane Austen, released 1813

THE MOVIE(S)-Directed by Robert Z. Leonard, written by Aldous Huxley* & Jane Murfin, released 1940

Directed by Joe Wright, written by Deborah Moggach, released 2005

THE STORY-Happiness is born in the head, but lives in the heart. 

MIND THE GAP-Without fear of reprisal, I declare: I'm just here for Elizabeth Bennet. Mary's too relatable for safe sustained exposure, Jane's too rosy and cozy, Catherine goes by "Kitty" (if that don't say all) and Lydia is her mother's favorite, and thus too non-relatable for safe sustained exposure.

But Elizabeth! Line-toer extraordinaire, call-out queen supreme. None of her positive qualities (wit, intelligence, vivacity) define her personality, and none of her negative qualities (pride, youthful assumption of omniscience, haste to treat rumor as fact) signal a terminal condition. The cake is well and truly hers. One chapter she's striking feminist blows, next chapter she's swooning over a man for whom she'd previously felt an unprecedented amount of distaste. And she's a daddy's girl. A sucker I am for such stuff. 

A film of Pride and Prejudice can only be as successful as its Elizabeth. The 1940 try is, in virtually every aspect, a failure. The actors are too old, the script too fluffy, and the direction too stiff. A classic example of Hollywood pillaging bookshelves for a popular story it can snatch up and water down. Laurence Olivier thought Greer Garson a poor choice for Elizabeth, and he was right, she's as exciting as a pine cone, but he was wrong for letting his frustrations spill over into his performance. No better actor has ever played Mr. Darcy, but no actor has so underwhelmed in the role. 

Oh hey, Heather Angel is in the 1940 film, blah blah, Sonic Youth reference.

The studio behind such moon-faced punter pleasers as Love, Actually and Bridget Jones's Diary presented their version of P&P ten years after a celebrated BBC miniseries gave the world wet, shirtless Colin Firth. These Bennets are bumpkins, basically. Jane isn't especially handsome, Elizabeth isn't preternaturally mature, and the parents appear fond of one another. Younger audiences responded enthusiastically, even if literary critics and Austen stans weren't so warm. Kiera Knightley became an overnight star, and her chemistry with Matthew MacFadyen excuses some iffy dialogue choices. 

Let's get back to calling women "handsome."

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-The novel's most outstanding aspect--Austen's use of "free indirect speech," wherein the voices of narrator and character essentially blend--is irrelevant in the visual medium. Both screenplays endeavored to capture the slice and shine of the original text while selling palatable product. The 2005 film does the better job, but so far as feats go, that's a fairly flat one. Perhaps no movie can offer up such grandiloquence as is found in Austen's gem and realistically expect viewers to stick around. Definitely, no movie has done justice to Mr. Darcy's ravishing synthesis of gall and gallantry, or Mr. Collins's odious obsequiousness. Safer to shoot the works on costumes.

*Yes, the author of Brave New World. Times wuz tight.

Better In Your Head?--OTHER VOICES, OTHER ROOMS

 

Spoiler Alert: what in the illegitimate fuck?

THE BOOK-Written by Truman Capote, released 1948

THE MOVIE-Directed by David Rocksavage, written by Rocksavage & Sara Flanigan, released 1997

THE STORY-A dirty dry summer. A lonely boy. A link in a chain that must break. A ball of yarn that must be caught. By seeking a man, he becomes a man.

MIND THE GAP-Capote's first novel is a semi-autobiographical Southern Gothic magic trick. Fringe dwellers, fueled by repression and the aggression which springs forth like delirious bullfrogs at the scantiest stimulus. Golden.

The debut flick of director Rocksavage is as dismaying as his last name is awesome. I was unfamiliar with the entirety of the cast, and I yearn to return to that paradisaical time. David Speck plays pretty boy Joel Knox as well as I play ice hockey. Aubrey Dollar plays rough-hewn tomboy Idabel, a role which might've registered were it not dreadfully underdeveloped. The most pivotal character, Rudolph, is an unmitigated disaster thanks to Lothaire Blueteau, a man whose name casts everything he does and says in a dubious light. Per Capote: "Randolph speaks without any accent...his weary voice was free of regional dialects...." Bluteau, problem is, speaks in several accents here, sometimes within a single sentence. (I heard French-Canadian, Irish and Creole, a combination as palatable to the ear as a bowl of corned beef, crawfish and cheese curds is to the tongue.)

"Swamp honey" was the name of the first lesbian porno I ever watched. Hah, nah, just kidding. It wasn't the first. 

Capote's ending isn't easily absorbed. It may defy evaluation, at trail's end. Can a thirteen-year-old boy truly make such a critical decision of his own volition? Shouldn't Randolph--an adult--discourage him? Or is reaching out to a lonely soul so plainly desperate for connection the most moral move?

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-Dud backwards is dud. Watching Other Voices, Other Rooms backwards is preferable, probably. What a drastic waste of my time! A movie made to collect a bet, or settle a debt. Why adapt an essentially plotless book that's 98% atmosphere created by the author's evocative gifts, anyway? And why cast actors who appear unable to comprehend the words they say and/or why they're saying those words? Why alter the ending? Wait, lemme reword: Why betray Capote's story? 

If not for obligation, I woulda shut this sophomoric claptrap off ten minutes in. Meanwhile, it took me an hour longer to read OV,OR than it shoulda 'cause I re-read particular paragraphs just to marvel over Capote's brilliance--and to hammer home the hard fact I will never, ever write so well.

Better In Your Head?--FRIED GREEN TOMATOES AT THE WHISTLE STOP CAFE

 

Spoiler Alert: never have tried. Too scared. And I've eaten raw habanero peppers.

THE BOOK-Written by Fannie Flagg, released 1987

THE MOVIE (as "Fried Green Tomatoes")-Directed by Jon Avnet, written by Fannie Flagg & Carol Sobieski, released 1991

THE STORY-Bored with her husband, scared of her children, and deprived of anyone or anything that might point her in a healthier direction, Evelyn Couch is about to go crazy. Then she meets an old lady whose memories and philosophies are every bit as edifying as they are endless.

MIND THE GAP-When in doubt...listen. Evelyn was on a one-way sugar-coated trip to the boneyard when she met Ninny Threadgoode. A motormouth nostalgia factory, Ninny longs for the old days. She waxes ecstatic about a wild-hearted, wind-spirited tomboy called "Idgie," and a clock-stopper named Ruth, who owned and operated the best damn chow joint in Alabama. And that's all it takes for Evelyn's life to change.

Entrusted with dazzling moviegoers were a first-time director and a cast headed by two recent Academy Award winners. Jessica Tandy, winding down the sterling silver phase of her life/career, is charm personified as Ninny, a sweet old lady whose refusal to relinquish the past actually bettered her present. Kathy Bates plays Evelyn, the portly pushover led out of the doldrums and into the daydreams by someone else's memories. Save for Gary Basaraba (who was born to play a cop, just not a southern one), the cast is damn flawless. Mary Stuart Masterson's Idgie is one of the few blondes (fictional or otherwise) I've ever given an "F" grade. Another Mary, -Louise Parker, hits the static target as Ruth, sugar-free tea accent aside. (I'll drink it, but I'm cracking jokes on it the whole time.) Coulda done with an entire movie of just Idgie and Ruth, livin' and lovin' in a world where cancer doesn't exist, hoppin' on trains, tossin' hams, bakin' pies and chuckin' rocks at sheet-covered cretins.

The script turns Evelyn's husband Ed from a misogynist sleaze into an oblivious, loving lump. What a great change. Bates and Gailard Sartain together are biscuits and gravy. 

Calling Fried Green Tomatoes "women's fiction" or a "chick flick" is foolishly reductive. Does a story where an abusive husband gets brained, barbecued and served up to the cop investigating his disappearance sound girly to you?

The comings, goings, and doings of a time and region where women ask for death before divorce, and men answer to "Smokey," "Inky" and "Chattanooga Red," hold limited appeal. Furthermore, stories set in the Jim Crow South are a tricky sell to modern audiences, whose distance from said bygone era, combined with a hyper-focus on identity politics, potentially mars their impartiality. Fannie Flagg is still better known for her work as an actress than as an author, and her most famous written work is uninterested in probes and ponders of society's problems. FGT is a celebration of resilience and repasts. There are no overt reckonings for the numerous racists we meet throughout...so, reader, be aware.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-I can't beat the drum too loudly for either book or movie. The script is a wisely-condensed document. Time constraints aside, the discarded vignettes weren't terribly interesting anyway. Although I prefer the book's ending by a country mile, the film more adeptly plays cat's cradle with the heartstrings. 

Evelyn Cook is easy to root for on the page; on screen, however, she becomes someone I'd die for. Enough cannot be said about Kathy Bates. By itself, the scene where Evelyn outlines her game plan as feminist crusader "Towanda" to a non-plussed Ninny as they walk down the nursing home hallway catapults the adaptation over the original.

Better In Your Head?--THE BEST OF EVERYTHING

 

Spoiler Alert: women die from illegal abortions. Don't whisper it.

THE BOOK-Written by Rona Jaffe, released 1958

THE MOVIE-Directed by Jean Negulesco, written by Edith Sommer & Mann Rubin, released 1959

THE STORY-Toughing it out in the secretary pool of Fabian Publishing Company are five ladies young and restless: Caroline, fresh off a broken engagement; country girl/city chameleon April; aspiring actress Gregg, whose tumble cries out for a dryer sheet; single mom Barbara; and painfully prim wife-to-be Mary Agnes. Don't worry about a one of them, though. See, this story takes place in the 1950s, and women in the 1950s had it easy--just bide time till Mr. Right (a gent in a gray flannel suit, most likely) saved them from a lifetime of unfulfilled ambitions and unpleasant surprises.

MIND THE GAP-In The Best of Everything, respectability is paramount. The men think too highly of themselves; the women, too lowly. Assumptions combine and create mutant misunderstandings. Now there's some social science! 

The movie rights sold before Jaffe's work hit shelves, allowing 20th-Century Fox to participate in the novel's marketing. And what of the movie? Competent cast, if not bursting with star power. Hope Lange is a winning Caroline; Martha Hyer and Diane Baker occupy opposite ends of the seesaw as Barbara and April, respectively; Suzy Parker does the most as Gregg, but that character herself does the most, so it's all well and good.*

The men fare the same--lotsa slam, no dunk. The sole outlier is Louis Jourdan, elevating the farcically-named David Wilder Savage with the charm and panache his ink-and-paper counterpart lacked. 

Oh, Joan Crawford's in this too. Bette Davis would ne--no, actually she probably would've.

No coincidence the novel experienced a rediscovery in the 2000s after Don Draper was shown flipping through a copy in an early episode of Mad Men. From slavish secretary to dynamic editor, Caroline Bender is the proto-Peggy Olsen.

Rona Jaffe wrote without an agenda. The Best Of Everything isn't about women in New York during a particular time period, it's about a few women in New York during a particular time period. Nor is it explicitly a cautionary tale, but damned if I read it as anything else. The happiest women are validated by a man's love. "Career for crib" is the shrewdest exchange. The single ladies are horny, hostile and hopeless. The holy trifecta of connection-affection-protection eludes them as a chipmunk eludes a giraffe.

BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-The Best Of Everything is a by-the-numbers adaptation, a soap opera with a budget. Nothing feels spontaneous, or vital. Rona Jaffe's no virtuoso, but her story vibrates with the mania of shrouded torment. Funny, how a writer on book number one outdid a director on movie number thirty-two. The sole improvement on the source--demoting average-ass Mary Agnes--is counteracted by the botching of two key storylines and the ending. The book's conclusion surprised me, yet made total sense. The movie's last frames are non-committal and dull. 

The novel holds artifact appeal. The film holds a purse in both hands and waits for a rickshaw.

 

*Everything about Gregg suggests a woman who mixes Scotch in her oatmeal and coordinates her footwear with her underwear. Who wears high heels to stalk somebody? Yeesh.