Tag Archives: Movie

Cassandra Clare: City of Bones (2007) Mortal Instruments I Book and Movie

Posted in Books, Fantasy, Movie, Novel by

City of Bones

A couple of weeks ago I watched the movie City of Bones and liked the imagery and the story so much, I had to pick up the book. The movie got dreadful reviews; it seems I’m the only one who really liked it. The book was said to be much better. It’s tricky to read a book after having watched a film with such stunning visuals. For the first 200 pages I didn’t really see the descriptions of the book but the movie images. After that I got a better feel for the book because it contained some major plot elements which had been left out in the film.

The story might be familiar to you by now. Clary and her best friend Simon live in New York City. One night they go to the Pandemonium Club and Clary witnesses a murder. Funny enough Simon can’t see anything. Neither the murder, nor the people who commit it. When Clary’s mum is abducted a little while later, and Clary is attacked by a demon, it dawns on her that the life she has been living might have been a lie.

Together with her friend Simon, Jace, one of the guys who committed the murder, and his friends, she embarks on a big adventure. Clary like Jace is no real human. She is a shadow hunter. Shadow hunters kill demons, but they co-exist with downworlders like werewolves and vampires. I’m not going to write much more about the plot as it’s one of those that is easily spoilt.

I thought the movie did a good job at tightening the plot. Maybe if I had read the book first, I would have missed the scenes and episodes that were cut but I thought they were not that gripping. Clary’s interior monologue in the book is often silly, like when she wonders why there are only good-looking vampires. I’m going to spare you her reasoning. It’s NOT clever. Interestingly though, the greatest appeal of the book are the dialogue sections. Jace, Clary and Simon and not only witty but very sarcastic, which made me chuckle quite a few times.

Overall I would say, book and movie both have their strengths, but I prefered the movie because I absolutely loved the imagery and the interiors they created – the club, Clary’s house, the church in which the shadowhunters live.  I also liked that they made the plot so much tighter. And I thought the cast was perfect.

What I didn’t like so much in both lies in the nature of this specific type of story. There are numerous ways to tell (urban/dark) fantasy stories. I tend to prefer those in which magic/fantasy are part of the world the characters live in, and their existence are known by everyone, or when the main character is part of the paranormal world. Normal humans who are thrown into a paranormal situation or who discover at the beginning of a book that they aren’t entirely human are just not as appealing to me. I find that these stories stretch believability too much. At the beginning of City of Bones, for example, Clary is a normal teenager and after only one day, she’s immersed in a paranormal world she never knew existed, her mother’s abducted, she’s attacked by demons, werewolves and vampires, but she accepts this without questioning it too much. This premise can work sometimes. Neil Gaiman made it work in Neverwhere, but often it feels unrealistic.

Anyway, it’s an entertaining book and I might even read part two, if only for the dialogue. If there is another movie, I’ll certainly watch it.

This is my first contribution to Carl’s Once Upon a Time Challenge. Don’t miss the review site, which can be found here.

Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Blade Runner (1968)

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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The movie Blade Runner is one of my favourite movies. I liked it so much that I never re-watched it but the mood and the atmosphere and some of the pictures stayed with me. I always meant to read the book it was based on but always forgot about it. After reading Danielle’s review a while back (here) and Brian’s insightful commentary a few weeks ago (here) I thought I really need to do it now. I also did a much more daring thing, I re-watched the movie. Luckily my courage wasn’t punished. It’s still one of my favourite movies of all time. Maybe I even like it more than before.

Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  is set in San Francisco, in a bleak post-war society. Only those who cannot afford to leave Earth and emigrate to Mars, stay on. These are people who have either been too damaged by the fallout, the so-called specials or chickenheads, or those who lack money. Plants and animals have been badly damaged and there are hardly any living animals on Earth anymore. It’s a sign of prosperity if you can buy yourself an animal, any animal, a toad, a sheep, a goat.

Rick Deckard is a cop, or rather a bounty hunter assigned to hunt and “retire” androids who have escaped and turned against humans, starting to kill them. A new generation of androids, the Nexus 6, look and act exactly like humans but they don’t feel like humans that’s why a test which measures the emotional response can detect whether someone is an android or not. What complicates matters is that some androids have received false memories and don’t know that they are androids.

Deckard’s salary isn’t high but he receives a bonus for every retired android. 6 of these Nexus androids have escaped and need to be hunted. Some of them are quite dangerous. He hopes retiring them will allow him to finally buy a real animal and not just an electric sheep.

I thought it was extremely interesting to read this book and I didn’t expect it to be the way it was. To some extent it’s an almost straightforward noir novel, of course with a sci-fi twist, but it still works like many other bounty hunter or PI novels. But that is only one part, the part that was kept for the movie. The other part is more philosophical and at times a bit confusing. The people in the novel can use an empathy box and also use mood altering devices. The empathy box lets them experience what Mercer, a god-like figure, experiences. Empathy is the key word in this novel. What differentiates the humans from the androids is empathy but even the humans lack it and need to be reconnected to the empathy box. At least that’s how I understood it. What makes a human human is another important question. While the humans call destroying androids “retiring”, the androids see it as getting killed. They feel a real horror of death. It is Deckard’s dilemma that he can no longer pretend that he feels as if they were just machines.

Ridley Scott used the noir elements and turned them into something that has been called cyberpunk. His movie is set in a LA that looks like Hong Kong in which it is constantly night and raining. It’s quite a melancholic movie. The hunter and the hunted are both losers, the characters are much more complex than in the book.

I didn’t expect book and movie to be alike but I didn’t expect them to be this different. I absolutely love the movie but I didn’t love the book. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it but it’s pale in comparison. I found it much colder, and it lacked the mood and atmosphere of the film. The androids in the movie seem more human while some of their acts in the book made me despise them.

Brian has written an in-depth analysis in which he focusses on the philosophical aspects of the novel. I’ve read the book for the first time and certainly didn’t get all of it. So if you’d like to know more about those aspects here is the reviw. And here another review from Anna.

Natalie Babbitt: Tuck Everlasting (1975) Exploring Books for Children and Young Adults

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Tuck Everlasting

Doomed to – or blessed with – eternal life after drinking from a magic spring, the Tuck family wanders about trying to live as inconspicuously and comfortably as they can. When ten-year old Winnie Foster stumbles on their secret, the Tucks kidnap her and explain why living forever at one age is less than a blessing that it might seem.

Ever since I’ve read Tom’s Midnight Garden a few years ago, I felt like reading more children’s books. The beautiful novels of Meg Rosoff reminded me of this again and so I’ve decided to embark on a more systematic exploration of the genre. That doesn’t mean I’ll be reading only books for children but you might see the occasional review in the future.

Natalie Babbitt’s famous novel Tuck Everlasting was an ideal book to get re-aquainted with the genre.  The question that Tuck Everlasting explores is “What if you could choose to live forever?” This type of question is what I like about childrens’ books. They don’t shy away from exploring big themes: life, death, meaning of life, illness, friendship, moral choices.  Much more than many books for grownups do.

Winnie is a ten-year old girl who is growing up in a very strict family. Her mother and her grandmother monitor her every move, tell her constantly what is right and what is wrong. She is not allowed to leave the garden, let alone to go into the forest but one afternoon, tired of all those rules, she leaves and ventures into the forest. In the forest she meets a beautiful young man and sees him drink from a spring. Shocked that somebody finds out about the secret fountain of youth, he brings Winnie to his family and they kidnap her.

Unbeknownst to all of them, a man in a yellow suit is following them. He has been looking for the secret fountain since years and wants to make money with its water.

Winnie is confused and anxious at first but she likes the Tuck family. Unlike her own family they are warmhearted and affectionate. The father tells her how they discovered the spring and that whoever drinks from its water will live forever. While Winnie thinks at first that it would be wonderful not to die, she slowly comes to understand that it would mean she wouldn’t change anymore. She would stay the same young girl forever. One of the consequences if people found out and would drink from the water would be that soon there would be too many people in the world and they would all stagnate. She realizes that the beauty of life is linked to change and that she shouldn’t be afraid of death but of the unlived life.

It was interesting to watch the movie right after having finished the book and for once I must say, I preferred the film. I even liked it a great deal. It’s beautifully filmed and the cast was great. Alexis Bledel plays Winnie, William Hurt and Sissy Spacek are father and mother Tuck and the man in the yellow coat is played by Ben Kingsley. The Winnie in the film is a bit older, maybe 14 and a main part of the movie centers on the love story between her and the younger Tuck brother which is really lovely.

I liked the ideas, characters and the ending which was bitter-sweet but overall I found the tone of the book a bit annoying. I think it’s a great book for younger children but not exactly for older ones and grownups. The movie however is really charming. Ideal for a rainy Sunday afternoon. My DVD had an interview with the author in which she tells how she became a writer. She started to write together with her husband, or rather to illustrate his books. When he didn’t have enough time anymore, she had to do the writing as well and she became very famous. She has written and illustrated far over 15 books for children.

I’m not sure which will be my next children’s book. Maybe David Almond’s Skellig or Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.

A Christmas Carol (2009) The Kitty Scare Version

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Of all the possible movies based on A Christmas Carol I had to pick one of the more recent ones, the animated Disney version from 2009. I had already seen the one with Alistair Sims which is absolutely great and wanted to watch a modern one this time.

I suppose this intro has already  told you what you wanted to know, namely whether I liked it or not. Obviously I didn’t and that’s actually quite sad because it had such a lot of potential. The beginning of this movie is stunning. It really gets you into a white Christmas mood, is atmospherical and appealing. I liked the way they showed the streets of London, up close and from above. The first half is equally good but as soon as the second spirit appears it wasn’t good anymore but extremely annoying. The second spirit is a jovial, bulky man, sitting on the top of a Christmas tree and laughing the most annoying laugh in movie history. It even made the cat run. I tell you, nothing makes that cat run once she is installed on my lap, on top of that, nothing usually scares her. Not even the Hoover. But that mad laugh did it. She fled to her basket behind the TV, far away from the speakers and half an hour later, when there was wild screaming and drama in the final moments of the movie, I had to go see what was happening as the poor little thing was having the mother of all nightmares and squeaking like a piglet.

The cat, I’m happy to report, has recovered but she is a bit grumpy. 

Don't mess with me

I hope others were luckier in their choices or found a more kitty friendly version of A Christmas Carol. I would have watched Great Expectations but I have still 250 pages left to read and will not watch it before I finished the book.

Melancholia (2011) World Cinema Series – Denmark

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Melancholia is such a beautiful movie from the first moments on. It starts with a series of pictures accompanied by the music of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The pictures look in many cases like taken from DeviantART. Others are either inspired by or show actual paintings. I spotted one by Breughel and the poster shows Kirsten Dunst as Ophelia which could have been inspired by Millais.

Kirsten Dunst’s character Justine is an Ophelia type woman in many regards. She is highly depressed. Smiling takes more energy than walking up a mountain. She has just gotten married to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård). They arrive two hours too late to their own wedding party which has been organized by Justine’s sister Claire (Charlotte Gaisnbourg). It is taking place in the grand estate of Claire’s husband (Kiefer Sutherland). It’s one of those stiff wedding parties in which everything is strictly organized in order to try to overshadow that nobody knows anyone and nobody is interested in anyone. But the perfect surface cracks very soon. Justine and Claire’s mother (Charlotte Rampling) isn’t one for pretending and her brutal honesty destroys what little festive spirit there is. From that moment on Justine is in free fall and not even the dreams of a lovely future that her husband tries to share with her can mend the damage. The only person who would have been able to help her is her unavailable father, a childish drunk (John Hurt).

The first part of the movie, Justine’s part, shows how she struggles, fails and finally destroys what little is left intact at the end. A more accurate depiction of severe depression and of a dysfunctional family I’ve rarely seen.

The second part is dedicated to Justine’s sister and her fear that the earth is going to be hit by the planet Melancholia. The blue planet has started to loom over the earth during the wedding party and sheds an eerie light on the garden and the surrounding forest. While the hard-headed Claire, who dreads nothing more than extinction, starts to unravel slowly when the planet comes closer, depressed Justine, who ultimately thinks that humanity would deserve destruction, becomes the strong one.

I know this isn’t a movie for everyone but I absolutely loved it. I think it’s one of Lars von Trier‘s best. It works as a whole and as a series of amazing pictures and scenes and ends in a stunning finale. The cast is great as well. I already liked Kirsten Dunst a lot in The Virgin Suicides, another of my favourite movies,  but here she is simply amazing. The other actors do a great job as well, especially Charlotte Gainsbourg. I thought it was also interesting to see Stellan Skarsgård together with his son Alexander in the same movie.

Some of the scenes will haunt me for a long time. I particularly liked all the scenes that show Justine on her own when she leaves the party to look for some quiet and peace or when hardly any one is left in the early morning and those who remain seem to be in a tired floating and melancholy after-the-party mood.

Melancholia is a contribution to Richard’s Foreign Film Festival and my World Cinema Series.

William Trevor: My House in Umbria (1991) Novella and Movie

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My House in Umbria is one of two longer novellas contained in the book Two Lives. The other one is called Reading Turgenev. I’ve had the book for a while and since Mel u’s Irish Short Story Week has been prolonged, I decided to read it now. William Trevor is one of those authors I always wanted to read more of.

My House in Umbria is a surprisingly somber and complex novella. As lovely as the setting is, a villa located near Siena, there are some dark undercurrents, nasty secrets and a back story unlike any other to discover.

The story is told in the very unique voice of Mrs. Emily Delahunty. Delahunty is one of a few names she has chosen for herself. She is a romance novelist with a more than troubled past. Sold by her parents as a child, abused by her step-father and later abandoned by a lover and stranded in a hotel in Africa where she meets Quinty. Quinty isn’t any less mysterious or adventurous than Emily and this strange couple forms an interesting alliance. At the beginning of the story they live in the afore-mentioned villa in Umbria. Surprisingly Emily’s novels have brought money and fame and she lives a comfortable life. She is haunted by the past but her incredible imagination helps her to flee to nicer places whenever the clouds get to dark. And there is always alcohol as well, to help circumnavigate the roughest cliffs.

At the beginning of the story she boards a train to Milano. The wagon she is sitting in is blown up and most of the passengers die. Only Emily, a young German man who loses his girlfriend, an old general who loses his daughter and Aimée a little American  girl whose whole family dies, survive.

After a stay at a hospital, Emily invites the three people to stay with her in her house in Umbria. The calm and peacefulness of the country-side, the beauty of the house, will help them recover, she hopes.

These four highly traumatized and maimed people share some moments of great intimacy, – reminiscent of the group in Enchanted April – until the day Aimee’s uncle announces that he will come and fetch the girl.

What follows is equally sad and dramatic and what little peace these wounded  people  have acquired is shattered for good. The idea that a man she has never seen before and who seems distant and unlikable, comes to get the girl who still suffers from amnesia is particularly painful for the three other victims.

Mrs Delahunty sounds like an unreliable narrator for most of the book but she isn’t. Some of the things she tells sound unbelievable but they turn out to be true, only, she mixes things she imagines with things that happened. She has a a habit of inventing back stories for each and every person she meets. It’s not surprising she has become a novelist. Hearing her we think she would have had what it takes to write great literature, yet she chose to write romances as a means to escape the memory of her past. Not only was she abused but it seems that before discovering that she is a writer, she was an escort girl in Africa.

It’s not often that I watch a movie based on a book right after having finished the book but I watched My House in Umbria the day after finishing Trevor’s novella.

I really enjoyed how the movie brings to life the great character of Mrs Delahunty. Maggie Smith is amazing in this role. They way she plays this very kind, vulnerable and sad woman is touching and funny at the same time. The movie changed the ending completely but stayed true to the rest of the story. It underlines and enhances the characters and episodes in the novella and I would say I liked it even better. Others may prefer the darker novella; I liked the way the movie interpreted some facts and changed a few others. In any case they work extremely well together. What the movie offers, apart from great acting, is enchanting pictures of a beautiful landscape and some truly comical moments when the worlds of Mrs Delahunty and Aimée’s uncle clash. It’s one of my favourite movies so far this year. But don’t get me wrong, the book is excellent as well.

It’s rare that a main character in a book is so memorable but I’m beginning to think that creating great characters is one of William Trevor’s strengths.

 

Lemon Tree – Etz Limon (2008) World Cinema Series – Israel

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The Palestinian widow Salma Zidane lives alone in a humble concrete house. Her son lives in the US, her daughter lives with her family in another village. She hardly sees anyone apart from an old man who already helped her father tend the lemon trees behind the house. The lemon grove she has inherited from her father is her only possession, her only possibility to make a living. The grove is 5o years old, the trees are lush and green, very healthy and produce an abundance of intense yellow fruit. Salma enjoys walking through the rows of trees, to tend to them, water them, pick the fruit, make lemonade or pickle them. For 50 years the lemon grove has been the pride and joy of her family.

 

But Eran Rikli’s movie Lemon Tree is not about joy, it’s about conflict, a conflict that breaks out when the Israeli Minister of Defense moves into the villa next to Salma’s grove. Salma lives on the West Bank, the grove is located directly on the Israeli border. And what is life-enhancing for one person, becomes a threat for another. Fences are erected, control posts installed, security cameras attached everywhere, military patrols scheduled. Still, that doesn’t seem enough. Terrorists could hide under the trees. Bombs could be thrown.

 

When the Secret Service decides to have the grove torn down, Salma seeks help. She finds a young, idealistic lawyer who wants to help her. It takes months and months, to fight for the trees. Meanwhile the Israelis have erected a huge fence all around the grove and Salma isn’t allowed to enter it anymore. She has to watch helplessly how the healthy trees are dying.

 

The movie doesn’t only focus on the conflict but looks into the different relationships of the people involved. The minister’s wife and Salma often look at each other through the fence, each wondering how the other woman lives. The grove and the decision to have it destroyed lead to a lot of tension in the marriage of the minister and his wife. On the other side of the fence, Salma and Ziad the lawyer develop a friendship that could become more, if there weren’t the watchful eyes of the ever-present Palestinian elders.

 

Lemon Tree is a very subtle movie that sheds light on one of the hot spots in the Middle East. It doesn’t give any easy answers nor blame excessively. Both parties are trapped, trapped in their cultures, their languages, their fears. The fences and walls that are erected are symbols of this imprisonment as much as the lemon trees are a symbol of freedom and beauty. In the end there is no win-win but a loss-loss situation.

 

I was very moved by this movie and to a large extent this is also thanks to the great actors. Hiam Abbass as Salma and Ali Suliman as Ziad are outstanding. It’s certainly not a cheerful movie but an important one.

 

Lemon Tree is part of my World Cinema Series and a contribution to Richard’s Foreign Film Festival.