By: LaurenH,
on 6/23/2015
A new film adaptation of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy was recently released, starring Carey Mulligan as the beautiful and spirited Bathsheba Everdene and Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge, and Michael Sheen as her suitors.
The post Book vs. Movie: Far From the Madding Crowd appeared first on OUPblog.
By: [email protected],
on 2/19/2015
Warning: While not overly explicit, this blog does acknowledge the existence of, and briefly discuss, sex. If you’re not keen to read a blog about such things, I suggest you temporarily avert your eyes. I couldn’t attend the Fifty Shades of Grey preview, so fronted up for the 10am session on the day of the […]
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By: [email protected],
on 11/20/2014
I turned up to watch the Mockingjay: Part 1 film today, its official day of release, without any prep. I’d like to say that’s because I deliberately withheld re-reading the book or reading advance film reviews, but the reason is much more pedestrian: I’ve been so otherwise occupied with speedbumps I’ve hit in life that […]
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By: [email protected],
on 3/4/2014
Live fast, die young
Bad girls do it well
Live fast, die young
Bad girls do it well
I’ll not deny I felt a fist pump-inducing thrill when MIA’s lyrics opened Vampire Academy’s film adaptation’s opening moments. It’s exactly the song that metes out the sass and sexiness we’ve come to know and love in the book series.
(I’ve blogged about this series a bunch of times here, so if you haven’t read the books, recommend peeling off to read those reviews and the books themselves before reading this one, because there’s some assumed knowledge in the pars that follow.)
I’ll also not deny I’d been beyond excited about the film’s impending release—relentlessly so, if you were to ask those around me upon whom I inflicted my enthusiasm. The day I got to preview the film, for instance, I bounded out of bed like the character of a Disney film and smiled at strangers on the street.
I simultaneously adopted the Madagascar ‘I like to move it, move it’ song as my motif, and sent it to around as if to say: See! This is how happy I am. It’s Vampire Academy film preview day!
All this precursor is to say I’ll not deny my hopes and expectations for the adaptation were, well, high. For that reason, I took along a friend to the preview who isn’t a Vampire Academy aficionado. Between the two of us, I figured, we’d obtain an objective review.
Sadly, though, I didn’t need my friend’s more measured take to tell the film isn’t a great interpretation of the books. And that’s even before he leant across some four or five times to ask me what the heck was going on because he found the film hard to follow.
The Hunger Games film adaptations have been stellar. Even the Twilight films are comparatively better than this one. Especially by the end, they were giving us that knowing nod and wink and we were in on the jokes. So what are the issues with Vampire Academy?
For starters, the script isn’t great. The film was brought to us by the guys responsible for Heathers back in the day and, more recently, Mean Girls, so I expected cleverness. Especially as the book itself is full of zingers (Rose is, after all, the kind of character who doesn’t have a filter and does have a lot of sass). But the lines are cheesy, in the cringe-worthy sense rather than the funny one. They attempt the nod and the wink at times, but we audience members are never really in on the joke. Which makes it downright awkward.
There are lines that do work (some of which come from the books). For example:
But when I say ‘work’, I mean ‘make you go “huh, that’s sort of clever”’ rather than actually laugh out loud or want to seek out someone to high five.
Mostly, the lines make you cringe:
The acting isn’t great. You’d expect this from the younger, less-experienced actors. But I have to say the adults weren’t much better. The strongest performance came from Zoey Deutch, who plays protagonist Rose, but Lucy Fry, who plays her counterpoint Lissa, produced a lispy, lock-jawed accent that was distracting and not entirely believable.
The fight scenes, which I’d really been looking forward to—at least in part because the official social media account had been posting images of the actors doing some hardcore training to get in shape—were inauthentic and stylised to the point of being corny.
Think the ‘kapow’ that used to accompany the Batman and Robin fights—because that word actually popped into my head. The only one that went halfway to achieving that was the final fight scene involving Dimitri and another Guardian (I won’t go into detail). And that was really a case of far too little far too late.
Also, there is a stuffed toy fox that was incomprehensibly terrible. A taxidermied fox smeared with tomato sauce would have been a more realistic rendition. I understand that there can sometimes be budget constraints, but this was something embarrassingly else.
I didn’t absolutely hate this film, although from an objective perspective, I probably should have. If you aren’t a fan of the series—and probably even if you are—you definitely will.
But there were clearly fans in the preview screening, as evidenced by the audible gasps emitted Dimitri first appears on screen (I may have been one of the gaspers). I’d been dubious about the casting of him—he’s such a central character and one who looms large in many a girl’s eyes and heart—but I warmed to him enough to give him if not the thumbs up, then at least the ok (I will say, though, that he was a bit warmer and fuzzier than the Dimitri of the early books, and I’m not sure this is ok this early in the series).
I wanted to love this film, and there were snippets I could. For instance, it was fantastic to see a series I’d found so rich suddenly realised on film; it was great to remember elements or small details I’d forgotten woven into the film’s dialogue or background.
Worth noting is the books improve as the series goes on (Rose, for instance, becomes less annoying, things heat up with her and Dimitri, and there’s less scene-setting and more story-telling, so the narrative’s gripping and fast-paced). This first lays the introductory groundwork, so the film has to do the same. If they follow the books’ improvements, future films would likely be better than this initial one.
Overall, though it pains me to write it, I have to admit this film is, as one of its characters says (or as I thought I heard them say), ‘a few corpses short of an artery’. Fans like me will see this film and any future ones that emerge because we can’t not, but we won’t be watching them because we should.
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By: Wendy Orr,
on 2/2/2013
So the script has used the book's crucial plot point of animal poachers, and underlying theme of Nim making a human friend. It's altered the story to be absolutely true to the characters I created, and the tone of the books, as well as following the first film.
By: Alice,
on 12/22/2012
How can Anna live without her lover Count Vronsky? One of the greatest novels ever written, Anna Karenina sets the impossible and destructive triangle of Anna, her husband Karenin, and her lover Vronsky against the marriage of Levin and Kitty. We’ve paired an excerpt of the novel with a scene from the film adaptation, starring Keira Knightly and directed by Joe Wright, below. How do Tolstoy and Wright bring that fateful train station to life?
A BLUSTERING storm was rushing and whistling between the wheels of the train and round the pillars and the corners of the station. The railway carriages, the pillars, the people, and everything that could be seen, were covered on one side with snow, and that covering became thicker and thicker. A momentary lull would be followed by such a terrific gust that it seemed hardly possible to stand against it. Yet people, merrily exchanging remarks, ran over the creaking boards of the platform, and the big station doors were constantly being opened and shut. The shadow of a man stooping slipped past her feet and she heard a hammer striking the carriage wheels. ‘Let me have the telegram!’ came an angry voice from the other side out of the stormy darkness. ‘Here, please, No. 28 !’ cried other voices while many people muffled up and covered with snow ran hither and thither. Two gentlemen passed her with glowing cigarettes between their lips. She took another deep breath to get her fill of fresh air and had already drawn her hand out of her muff to take hold of the handrail and get into the train, when another man wearing a military overcoat came close between her and the wavering light of the lamp. She turned round, and instantly recognized Vronsky. With his hand in salute, he bowed and asked if she wanted anything and whether he could be of any service to her. For some time she looked into his face without answering, and, though he stood in the shade she noticed, or thought she noticed, the expression of his face and eyes. It was the same expression of respectful ecstasy that had so affected her the night before. She had assured herself more than once during those last few days, and again a moment ago, that Vronsky in relation to her was only one of the hundreds of everlastingly identical young men she met everywhere, and that she would never allow herself to give him a thought; yet now, at the first moment of seeing him again, she was seized by a feeling of joyful pride. There was no need for her to ask him why he was there. She knew as well as if he had told her, that he was there in order to be where she was.
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‘I did not know that you were going too. Why are you going?’ she asked, dropping the hand with which she was about to take hold of the handrail. Her face beamed with a joy and animation she could not repress.
‘Why am I going?’ he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. ‘You know that I am going in order to be where you are,’ said he. ‘I cannot do otherwise.’
At that moment the wind, as if it had mastered all obstacles, scattered the snow from the carriage roofs, and set a loose sheet of iron clattering; and in front the deep whistle of the engine howled mournfully and dismally. The awfulness of the storm appeared still more beautiful to her now. He had said just what her soul desired but her reason dreaded. She did not reply, and he saw a struggle in her face.
‘Forgive me if my words displease you,’ he said humbly.
He spoke courteously and respectfully, but so firmly and stubbornly that she was long unable to reply.
‘What you are saying is wrong, and if you are a good man, I beg you to forget it, as I will forget it,’ she said at last.
‘Not a word, not a movement of yours will I ever forget, nor can I …’
‘Enough, enough!’ she cried, vainly trying to give a severe expression to her face, into which he was gazing eagerly. She took hold of the cold handrail, ascended the steps, and quickly entered the little lobby leading into the carriage. But in that little lobby she stopped, going over in her imagination what had just taken place. Though she could remember neither his nor her own words, she instinctively felt that that momentary conversation had drawn them terribly near to one another, and this both frightened her and made her happy. After standing still for a few seconds she went into the carriage and sat down. The overwrought condition which tormented her before not only returned again, but grew worse and reached such a degree that she feared every moment that something within her would give way under the intolerable strain. She did not sleep at all that night, but the strain and the visions which filled her imagination had nothing unpleasant or dismal about them; on the contrary they seemed joyful, glowing, and stimulating. Toward morning Anna, while still sitting up, fell into a doze; when she woke it was already light and the train was approaching Petersburg. At once thoughts of home, her husband, her son, and the cares of the coming day and of those that would follow, beset her.
When the train stopped at the Petersburg terminus and she got out, the first face she noticed was that of her husband.
‘Great heavens ! What has happened to his ears?’ she thought, gazing at his cold and commanding figure, and especially at the gristly ears which now so struck her, pressing as they did against the rim of his hat. When he saw her, he came toward her with his customary ironical smile and looked straight at her with his large tired eyes. An unpleasant feeling weighed on her heart when she felt his fixed and weary gaze, as if she had expected to find him different. She was particularly struck by the feeling of dissatisfaction with herself which she experienced when she met him. It was that ordinary well-known feeling, as if she were dissembling, which she experienced in regard to her husband; but formerly she had not noticed it, while now she was clearly and painfully conscious of it.
‘Yes, as you see. Here is a devoted husband; devoted as in the first year of married life, — consumed by desire to see you,’ said he in his slow, high-pitched voice and in the tone in which he always addressed her, a tone which ridiculed those who could use such words in earnest.
‘Is Serezha well?’ she asked.
‘And is this all the reward I get,’ he said, ‘for my ardour? He is quite well, quite well….’
A classic of Russian literature, this new edition of Anna Karenina uses the acclaimed Louise and Alymer Maude translation, and offers a new introduction and notes which provide completely up-to-date perspectives on Tolstoy’s classic work.
For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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The post You must forget me appeared first on OUPblog.
