If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
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Posts Tagged: film adaptation
The Promise of Werfel’s Musa Dagh: Portraying Genocide in Fiction
How does a fictional account come to stand in for history?
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #146: Andrew Solomon
“I can tell my story with precautions; others strip away my armor and expose a beating heart.”
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The Rumpus Review of Bridget Jones’s Baby
Perhaps Bridget fans who watched the movies but never read the books might not find this movie to be such a hard blow… But those who read the books—and those who loved the pilgrim soul in Bridget—will feel the loss more keenly.
...moreThe Mystical Dick
What neither Scott nor most audiences of Blade Runner knew was that Dick’s mind really was every bit as far out as what was on the screen, if not more so. Philip K. Dick barely lived to see one movie made of his books. Here is how it went down.
...moreBelles of the Box Office
The multifaceted Kirsten Dunst is going to direct a new film version of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, and the lovely Dakota Fanning is set to star in it, the Guardian reports. “Dunst has co-written the film with Nellie Kim, while Fanning is a co-producer; shooting is scheduled to begin in early 2017,” the article […]
...moreExtremely Sentimental and Incredibly Useful
At Electric Literature, Manuel Betancourt argues that there is value to the “cheap sentimentality” in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and its film adaptation: What cheap sentimentality can do is to short-circuit our connection to the depths of our emotions, precisely by making us feel that they are closer to the surface than we’re perhaps […]
...moreBut for Man’s Absence
Released this May, director Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1975 sci-fi novel High-Rise converts the dystopian work into a tableau of striking visuals made all the more seductive by the presence of elegant Internet boyfriend du jour Tom Hiddleston. At Electric Literature, Michael Betancourt analyzes the contrasting versions of masculinity presented in the book and […]
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The Great Film Festival Swindle
“Never pay an entry fee. If they won’t give you a waiver they aren’t interested in the film.”—Programmer for a major film festival
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner on his new book Gone with the Mind, pressuring the novel form, being a purist Dionysian, and artisanal pap smears.
...moreA Place That She Herself Has Imagined
Brooklyn is a place of layers both personal and historical, one that, as Colm Tóibín puts it, is “full of ghosts.” Reflecting on the recent film adaptation of his novel, the Brooklyn author observes one of the borough’s more visible specters: You could invent yourself here, even if the term self-invention was not yet understood […]
...moreThe Comparative Value of Books and their Adaptations
As adapting book series for lucrative movie deals becomes an all-too-common sight these days, it might be easy to simply fall back on the bookworm’s argument that the books are better than their film counterparts. But how do the reviews from the readers, viewers, and critics actually compare? Electric Literature has a handy infographic compiling […]
...moreIn Defense of the Book-to-Movie Adaptation
Why do we keep going to movie adaptations of old classic novels we love? Over at Lit Hub, Sky Friedlander defends the book-to-movie adaptation as bringing new lessons to light for a new set of viewers, writing, “We need to re-tell these stories over and over because each generation sees them in a different way, […]
...moreHonesty, Truth, and the Facts
At Vulture, Rumpus founder Stephen Elliott writes about seeing “himself” on screen in the film adaptation of The Adderall Diaries.
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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Davis
Joshua Davis talks about his new book, Spare Parts (now a movie playing all across the United States), backwards running, journalism, and entering the US National Arm Wrestling Championship.
...moreLighten Up
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice is a light neo-noir comedy, just like the Pynchon novel that inspired it. Despite our eagerness to overanalyze film adaptations of complicated books, Katie Kilkenny warns us not to take this one too seriously: Inherent Vice inherently rewards only half-serious analysis… Semiotics nerds, who so love Pynchon, might call the […]
...moreBetter than the Book
Film adaptations can take their source novels in a million different directions, some innovative, others painfully off the mark. John Colapinto evaluates the movie versions of different Nabokov stories for the New Yorker, exploring their various formal challenges and triumphs.
...moreLearning about Short Stories through Films
Birdman, the new film starring Michael Keaton, is centered around a theatrical adaptation of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” At Electric Literature, Halimah Marcus discusses what the film can teach writers about writing short stories.
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The Rumpus Interview with Alysia Abbott
Alysia Abbott discusses craft and love in her new memoir, Fairyland, set in the ’70s and ’80s during the AIDS crisis in San Francisco.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Remember Elizabeth Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer-prize winning novel in stories Olive Kitteridge? What if Olive could come to life in a film adaptation? Man. In a perfect world, probably Frances McDormand would play Olive, right? In fact, maybe we could just give McDormand creative control of the whole project, yeah? Probably if that happened, McDormand would […]
...moreA Wrinkle in Time…the Movie
For those who fondly recall reading Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel A Wrinkle in Time, you may be taking a trip to the movies. The Los Angeles Times reports the Newberry Award winning book will be adapted for film by the director of Disney’s Frozen, who was a fan of the novel as a child.
...moreCharlie Kaufman to Write Film Adaptation of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five
Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth and the upcoming movie Pacific Rim) has recently announced that he has selected Charlie Kaufman as the writer of the screenplay for del Toro’s film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Kaufman, famous for writing the screenplays behind such mind-bending and unsettlingly funny works as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless […]
...morePatti Smith’s Movie Deal
After winning the National Book Award for her memoir, Just Kids, Patti Smith is venturing into new artistic territory. She is set to work with Tony award-winning playwright, John Logan, to adapt her memoir into a film. As per her successful accomplishments as a musician, writer and visual artist, her cinematic undertaking will most certainly […]
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A Rabid Fan of the Novel Revolutionary Road Compares It to the Film
It has come to my attention that you keep adapting my favorite novels [see Atonement, Revolutionary Road, et. al.], and turning them into mediocre movies. Cease and desist! Get your own ideas!
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