Novel Adaptation

Adapted from Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller and starring Kate Winslet as a former SS officer and David Kross as her schoolboy lover, The Reader throws up difficult questions about the nature of culpability in the Holocaust.

Ralph Feinnes plays Michael Burg, an uptight German lawyer who is first seen in his sleek, minimalist apartment preparing an orderly breakfast for his bedfellow before bidding her an awkward goodbye - director Stephen Daldry does not shy away from stereotypes of standoffish Germans. The film then flashes back to the late 50s to when Michael (now played by Kross) was 15.Not yet out of school, he begins an illicit and passionate affair with a 34-year-old tram-conductor named Hanna (Kate Winslet), who first encountered him on the street when he was suffering from a painful bout of scarlet fever. She enjoys listening to him read to her, and lust soon blossoms into love, until one day Hanna disappears without trace.

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In this tale of domestic strife, Sam Mendes returns to a familiar theme: the tarnished American Dream. However, the scathing satire of his directorial debut, American Beauty, takes on a far bleaker tone in Revolutionary Road. Based on Richard Yates’ 60s novel, the film reunites Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet for the first time since James Cameron’s smash hit Titanic in 1997.

Following in the footsteps of the 1966 film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the story follows Frank Wheeler and his wife April, a young couple trapped in a marriage of conformity during the fifties. Frank works in a job he hates, yet affects an air of superiority, believing he’s destined for a better life, though clueless as to what that life might be. His wife is a typical 50’s homemaker, raising two children in the couple’s immaculate suburban home and wondering what has become of her youthful ambitions. It’s a tarnished version of the American Dream. “Look at us,” April moans to Frank. “We’re just like everyone else. We’ve bought into the same ridiculous delusion - this idea that you have to settle down and resign from life.”

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Ron Howard’s adaptation of Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code was one of the highest-grossing films of the decade, earning over US$230 million worldwide in its opening weekend. Yet you’d be hard pushed to find a critic who gave its contrived storyline and turgid script the thumbs up. Angels and Demons, which comes before The Da Vinci Code in Dan Brown’s canon but has been adapted for the big screen as a sequel, is slicker and pacier than its predecessor. Howard, along with adapters Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, stick less rigidly to Dan Brown’s clunky prose this time round, resulting in a more confident, dazzling production. Unfortunately, despite the film’s glossy exterior, it tells a story that is both convoluted and, at time, utterly ludicrous.

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Based on Louise Rennison’s popular series of teen novels, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging is a Bridget Jones-style coming-of-age comedy which follows a group of 14-year-olds as they attempt to escape the shackles of their snooping parents and move into the more exciting world of boys, bras and parties. Viewers who’ve endured teen gross-out comedies such as American Pie will find this Brit-flick from Gurinder Chadha (Bend it Like Beckham) refreshingly gentle. There’s no swearing and no mention of drugs, no-one has sex and there are no unwanted pregnancies.

Set in the seaside town of Eastbourne, the story centres around Georgia Nicholson (Georgia Groome) and her circle of giggly, gawkish friends. Her chief aims in life are to secure a fit boyfriend and persuade her parents to throw her the best 15th birthday bash EVER at the local nightclub. Her biggest gripes are her embarrassing, old fashioned parents (Alan Davies and Karen Taylor) and her freakish little sister Libby (Eva Drew), who thinks she’s a cat. When two “sex-gods” called Robbie (Aaron Johnson) and Tom (Sean Bourke) join their school, Georgia and her best friend Jas (Eleanor Tomlinson) are determined to bag them for themselves. Trouble is, the slutty and popular Lindsay (Kimberley Nixon), who wears a padded bra and unbuttons her shirt as low as school uniform rules will allow, has got there first.

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Set largely in Afghanistan before the events of 9/11 and spanning the fall of the monarchy, the Soviet invasion and the Taliban regime, The Kite Runner is a compelling story of two boys growing up during these tumultuous times. Adapted from Khaled Hosseini’s bestselling novel about guilt and redemption, the film explores the factions and friendships that exist between different Muslim groups of both moderates and extremists. Its mostly inexperienced cast speak in a mixture of Dari, Pashtu and Urdu as well as English.

The film begins in Kabul before the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, where two young boys from very different backgrounds form a close friendship. Amir (Zekeria Ebrahimi), is the son of a wealthy landowner who loves to write and is cowardly when it comes to fending off bullies; Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada) is a servant in the household of Amir’s father. Though smaller than Amir, slingshot in hand, he is ready to protect him at any moment. The two play together, read together, fly kites together - they are inseparable.

When one day Hassan is brutally attacked by older children in the neighbourhood, Amir’s cowardliness gets the better of him. He watches in horror but does nothing. Wracked with guilt, Amir persuades Hassan to leave his fathers’ service, and spends the rest of his life atoning for his misdemeanour.

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In the 1997 hit Liar Liar Jim Carrey played the role of a lawyer who suddenly finds himself unable to lie. In Yes Man he becomes a bank loan executive who cannot say “no” to anything. But where the former found comedy in the tension between wanting to lie and being compelled to tell the truth, Yes Man falls flat because there is nothing intrinsically funny about a loan officer having to approve loans and also wanting to.

When the film opens, Carrey’s character Carl is a down-in-the-dumps recluse who has shunned his friends and ignored his answer machine messages for three years, ever since the love of his life walked out on him. His negative attitude proves useful in his job, which involves consistently rejecting his customers’ loan applications. It also means he is unfriendly to everyone he meets, including his chipper boss Norm (Rhys Darby) who is desperate to win Carl’s friendship.

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The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher), from Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky, tells the true story of concentration camp Jews who escaped the gas chambers by counterfeiting for the Nazis. The film is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation and later interned at Sachsenhausen.

In 1942 the Nazi’s launched Operation Bernhard, which aimed to flood the economies of their enemies with millions of forged British pound and US dollar notes, whilst bolstering their own flagging war chest. And who better to do it than the Jews, whose payment was their life, as long as they were needed? So, in the world’s largest ever counterfeiting scam, dozens of Jewish printers, typographers and a few ex-cons in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp were set to work on the forgery of some £130 million. At the helm was Salomon “Sally” Sorowitsch (Salomon Smolianoff in real life), played by Karl Markovics, who had lived the highlife as a professional counterfeiter before his six year ordeal in the concentration camps. “Why earn money by making art?” he asks one person. “Making money by making money is so much easier.”

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The newly released double box set of Ang Lee’s enigmatic epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Stephen Chow’s slapstick farce Kung Fu Hustle (2004) couldn’t offer two more different perspectives on the Wuxia genre of filmmaking.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a great deal more than a mere kung fu film. This sweeping, majestic fable is a near masterpiece, combining beautiful cinematography, fight scenes that will take your breath away and a two touching love stories with very different outcomes.

Based on the fourth part of a 1930s pentalogy by novelist Wang Du Lu with a script by James Schamus, Crouching Tiger is concerned with the theft of a holy sword, the Green Destiny, which belongs to the legendary warrior Li Mubai (Chow Yun-Fat). Looking for a quieter life, Mubai entrusts his sword to the gifted martial artist Yu Shulien (Michelle Yeoh), with whom he shares an unspoken love. Yu takes the sword to Beijing, where she meets Jen (Zhang Ziyi), the teenage daughter of a political bigwig, whose nurse bears a striking resemblance to the murderous witch Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei). But when the sword is stolen, everyone leaps into action in a frantic search to retrieve it.

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Following on from the earlier ramble about the forthcoming Watchmen film (which may or may not happen) we rifled through our DVD collection and dragged out The Hughes Brothers 2001 adaptation of From Hell – another Alan Moore graphic novel adaptation, this one about Jack the Ripper.

Given that the book is nearly 600 pages long, it’s not surprising that the film adaptation loses several plot points, and is very liberal with the narrative; the film is more of a Victorian whodunnit, whereas Moore and artist Eddie Campbell practically reveal the identify of the Ripper within the first few pages.

Nevertheless, the film is an enjoyable romp, whether you’ve read the book or not. The violence is delivered with the same trademark Hughes Brothers style, and despite the claret (of which there is quite a lot) none of the nastiness ever feels obtuse or gratuitous – the Victorian London created in From Hell is a vision of putrescence, overflowing gutters, gin palaces and gas lamps around which the fleas and flies dance inbetween feasting on the bodies of murderees.

Killings are all too common in Whitechapel, and so it takes a particularly vicious and brutal slaying of a ‘bang-tail’, for its residents to sit up and take notice; “it was the way she was done,” which draws the attentions of Inspector Abberline (Johnny Depp), a character based on the real police Inspector who followed up the Ripper murders in 1888.

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Propelled to fame playing regal beauties in grandiose historical dramas such as Raise the Red Lantern and Farewell my Concubine, Chinese actress Gong Li takes a professional U-turn in this bittersweet romance with hints of French cinema from director Zhou Sun, recasting herself as Zhou Yu, a thoroughly modern, independent woman whose sexuality is part of her personality. Torn between two lovers, the ethereal introvert and the easygoing charmer, Gong takes comfort in somnolent train journeys through the countryside of northwest China. Zhou Yu’s Train is adapted from the novel by Cun Bei.
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