61 novels turned into 70 movies. So what's the verdict? By my estimation, 15 1/2. Hmm? Ah, see, while the first adaptation of The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three surpassed the original, the second adaptation surpassed not even my lowest expectations.
That's a frankly surprising 25.4%--over ten percent higher than the titles featured in Series One.
It's still better in your head...but maybe not as often as you think.
Spoiler Alert: Special Dark is the best in the bag.
THE BOOK-Written by Judith Roessner, released 1975
THE MOVIE-Directed & written by Richard Brooks, released 1977
THE STORY- Terry Dunn lives a double life--teacher by day, cruiser by night. She insists on a carefree existence unimaginable for women even a decade prior. Loved ones long to ground her spirit, but the air up there is hot with sex, drugs, death...the stuff life is made of.
MIND THE GAP-Based on the real-life-and-death story of Roseann Quinn, Looking For Mr. Goodbar is so emotionally devastating that two decades after first experiencing book and film (in that order), fragments of the ending still pop into my head on occasion.
The truths Goodbar coaxes forth are simplistic and shattering. Every time you walk outside into the world, you take a risk. Human interaction is rife with possibility. One-night stands can result in furtive visits from unwanted guests. Death, although unlikely, cannot be ruled out, for anyone, anywhere. This sad reality is, we are told incessantly, the fault of the victim. In every man lurks a beast, and the others around them must act accordingly and keep the beast at bay.
Terry's case of "ugly duckling syndrome" is surpassed in meanness only by her Catholic guilt. The film overdoses on the latter whilst paying the former dust. Diane Keaton is pretty, outgoing, bratty even--accusations I can't level too boldly against the Terry in Judith Rossner's novel. Book Terry is driven by a self-destructive mindset undetectable onscreen. Keaton's performance is primarily faultless; her supple rhythms are so infectious, their absence acts as a portent.
Richard Gere is magnetic as hyperactive lunkhead Tony, and Tom Berenger makes the most of his time as Gary, a man shrouded in discordant shames. William Atherton and Alan Feinstein, in sharp contrast, each shit the bed before the lights go out. Ahterton apparently prepared by carving a wooden lizard, and Feinstein's professor is so far from the matter-of-fact manipulator I imagined, I can safely assume he prepared for the role by not reading the book.
Looking For Mr. Goodbar is up there with Schindler's List and Marriage Story as great films I've no desire to watch again. Judith Rossner detested the thing, citing Terry's makeover into a "happy" seductress, and the script's decision to turn the relationship between Terry and her father from one of solemn misgivings into one of clamorous animosity. Rossner deliberately avoided "pop sociology" in her work, and her work is all the stronger.
Then and now, Terry Dunn stands a fair distance from society's ideal woman. She enjoys sex, but bristles at emotional commitment. She enjoys teaching children, but bristles at motherhood. Women are typically celebrated not for their ambition and carnality, but for their passivity and compliance. So much has changed. So much resists change.
Looking For Mr. Goodbar and Annie Hall in the same year, damn Diane Keaton had the range.
I mean, Christ, can't a broad go for a walk? Can't a chick down some drinks? Can't a girl pass out? Must every situation be a perilous one? If Terry's fate--Roseann's fate--was inevitable, isn't that a more devastating indictment of men? Why villainize the prey and protect the predator?
BETTER IN YOUR HEAD- Stroke. Scream. Snarl. Snap. Stab. Shit.
Movie over book? It's happened a bit this series. So is that how we see it out? Well, the execution of the ending alone almost tipped the scales for me here. I couldn't tear my eyes away; I wanted to tear my eyes out of my head. The novel, though it ends essentially the same, didn't leave me so physically affected. What it did give me that those visceral visuals did not, was a picture of a woman. Diane Keaton plays a woman whose present is paramount. The past happened, doesn't matter; the future hasn't yet happened, might not matter. It is now or never, literally. Day after day, class after class. Night after night, man after man. She survives on a diet of wine and praise (and for a bit, white powder). The film shows us a woman alive.
The book, meanwhile, shows us a woman living. If Rossner's prose comes off exhausted by the last few pages, that's understandable. The film shows us the woman Terry's become; the book shows us the becoming, wonderfully, without a smidgen of showiness. We see the mind games and power plays that harden her heart, culminating in a break-up so bad it leaves her bed-bound. We see the dreams and nightmares that make a more convincing case for monogamy than the sternest lecture ever could. I don't wonder the author was tired by the end. So was I.
All hail the slow burn.
Spoiler Alert: bisexuals are magic.
THE BOOK-Written by Philip Roth, released 2009
THE MOVIE-Directed by Barry Levinson, written by Buck Henry & Michal Zebede (& Levinson, unc.)
THE STORY-What fate rates worst? Abrupt defeat or protracted decline? Whatever your answer, don't bother telling Simon Axler. The legendary stage actor has lost his gift for artifice, and found in its usual place a crisis of confidence.
MIND THE GAP-Depressed old guy, of course he'll be seeking validation via virility.
Roth's penultimate book was his fourth death-fixated volume in as many years. The start heaves with narrative promise: "He'd lost his magic." 140 pages later, hyper-indulgent old-man meandering heaves all over said promise, a bubbly, stinky sheet of sick that sometimes looks worse than it smells, the scrambled dregs of a slow and broken life.
Little wonder The Humbling spoke so fiercely to the artistic soul of Alfredo Pacino. Veteran of the planks, effusively praised, seldom doubted--until he can no longer cut the butter. No longer a supple exemplar of the art of pretend, and unable to quit the production, Simon Axler holes up in the green room, waiting for a restorative jolt. An extended stay in a psychiatric hospital provides a twitch, but the surprise arrival of a woman from the past is a six-pack of lightning best enjoyed over multiple sittings. Her name is Pegeen (ugh) and she's the daughter of Simon's old theatre friends. For the last sixteen years, she's slept exclusively with women, but her last girlfriend transitioned into a heterosexual male, so why can't Pegeen try being a heterosexual woman?
Great casting is dishonored by a script equal parts inventive and indecisive. Pacino digs hardily into the ribs of the role, working every wrinkle and disheveled hair masterfully as he shuffles scene to scene. He is most compelling when at his most confounded. And if anyone can monologue on lost mojo more stirringly than Al Pacino...no, they can't.
From the moment of her sudden appearance to the moment of her drawn-out departure, Greta Gerwig is a prickly refugee from a wildly popular Nineties film of tenuous influence. She's both the great redeemer and humbled recipient of absolution. Physically, both she and Pacino are wrong for their parts--he's too short, too lank; she's a decade too young, and remains recognizably feminine whatever her fashion--but an alternative universe where an adaptation of The Humbling was made without them seems impossible. Although that might be because I don't want to imagine another realm of existence where this movie was made at all.
The love affair falls apart after a threesome. The mathematics of love dictate: two plus one is not addition, it is division.
"I don't think you fucked the lesbian outta me yet." Sometimes I question my commitment to Sparkle Motion, y'all.
BETTER IN YOUR HEAD-A strange specimen, The Humbling. The story (creative guy wracked by self-doubt and betrayed by his own instincts, meets another professionally vain creature, pair travel entwined down the last slime trail towards death's toothless maw) is well-told..if not always told well. Consider the author. When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint. Consider the director. Diner, Rain Man. Consider the cast. Dog Day Afternoon, Frances Ha, Hannah and Her Sisters, Kinky Boots. Whatever the medium, there is little worth recalling here, little worth revisiting, little to endorse or condemn. The film eases up on the bleakness and smut, to no benefit. There's a couple laugh-out-loud moments in the movie, one of them intentionally so, and that convinced me Levinson messed up by not making The Humbling a full-on comedy.
Stating a preference feels like faking an orgasm.
Roth's concern--obsession?--is the intimacy of death and dying. The book's length prevents too deep a probe. A curse in 1989, a blessing in 2009. The screenplay is bloated in comparison. For the mercy of brevity, I proclaim the book less painful, and thus, "better."
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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.
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.
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.
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.
