Cinematical’s Eugene Novikov latest edition of his excellent “From Page to Screen” column highlights an author and a novel very near and dear to my heart. Bear with me, I’m about to venture into theLiteraryaddict territory for this post, but it’ll come back to film, I promise. Sort of.
Richard Yates is one of the best authors of the twentieth century, and you’ve probably never heard of him. In many ways he’s become something of an inside thing, known and cherished by any number of famous authors whom he has influenced and also those with an obsessive love for fine literature. Though he wrote many successful novels, his most accomplished one was “Revolutionary Road” which many (including myself) consider to be one of the great American novels. It remains one of my favorite literary works ever (as are Yates breathtaking collection of short stories), and again you’ve probably never heard of it.
Except maybe you have now that Justin Haythe has adapted the novel into a screenplay to be directed by Sam Mendes, and starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. If not, do please head on over to Cinematical to check out Nokikov’s excellent article which does a great job of highlighting why “Revolutionary Road” is such a phenomenal novel and why you should be buying/reading it right now. Hopefully the film (and Novikov’s article for that matter) will get Richard Yates some of the attention he so righteously deserved, but never got as was poignantly and heart-breakingly documented in Blake Bailey’s excellent biography, “A Tragic History: The Life and Works of Richard Yates.”
If not, well then if you made the effort to read any of Yates work at least you will be part of the inside thing I mentioned above. And who doesn’t like to be an insider?
Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, THE ROAD, was a profoundly literate and moving work that remains one of the better examples of fiction I’ve read in my lifetime. That makes me somewhat fiercely protective of it in lieu of a film translation, and also incredibly skeptical that it can even be done well. Then again, as accomplished as the language is in the book, at its heart it’s really just a poignant story about the perseverance of love between father and son as they try to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape. That can be done quite easily in film. It doesn’t hurt that they’ve got a director, John Hillcoat, whose made an excellent film that wrangled with this sort of landscape before (THE PROPOSITION), and actors like Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Guy Pearce involved. Anyway, that’s a long way of saying: here’s the very first image to appear from the film expected to be released this fall.
Christopher Orr over at The New Republic has gotten sick and tired of movie trailers giving away the entire plot of the film, so in response to that he has crafted an interesting experiment. Instead of seeing this week’s new release, 21, he’s reviewing the trailer itself, using it to infer the entire plot because, well it’s basically all there. He reviews the trailer here, and then reviews the movie itself afterwards here to see how accurate he was.
It’s an interesting experiment because it cheekily acknowledges an annoying Hollywood trend that seems to only get worse. It also rightfully suggests that if a studio wants to show us the entire plot of a film in a trailer, then why bother to see it, and not just settle for the trailer? I’m fully on board with this, because it’s gotten so bad that I rarely watch anything after a teaser trailer comes out. I remember a few years back I saw the trailer for TAKING LIVES and was pretty sure I had figured out who the killer was. When I saw the movie, I turned out to be right. That’s the reason that - as much as I want to - when a longer INDIANA JONES trailer comes out, I’m going to avoid it like the plague.
What do you guys think? Do you feel trailers give away too much of the film’s plot these days? Do you still go to see those films, or feel your interest suddenly killed on the spot? Any trailers in particular that actually ruined a movie for you or that let you guess a critical plot element?
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