HeavenlyCreatures Tagged Articles at Cinematical

First things first: "From Page to Screen" is a new column I'm trying here at Cinematical. Each week I'll discuss in detail a book that serves as the source material for either an upcoming or a past film adaptation. In the case of forthcoming films, I'll talk about the prospects for the adaptation: the challenges of bringing the particular book to the screen, the casting, the plot, the literary intangibles that so often wind up missing from the resulting movies. In the case of past films, I'll discuss the adaptation's approach to its source: what changed, what stayed the same, what worked and what didn't. Oh, and I'll actually have read the books.

I never tire of repeating my simple philosophy when it comes to adaptations: books are not movies. What works on the page won't always work on the screen. To demand total faithfulness to the book is folly, and will usually lead to a crappy movie. (This is also the case, by the way, for "true stories" and biopics -- people's lives, no matter how interesting, don't always, or even often, make for good films.) But that, I think, makes my task here more interesting rather than less. What does it take for an adaptation to work -- as a film in its own right, or as a translation of the source material?

The idea for this came from a number of discussions I've had here on the site. People are passionate about the books they love, and protective of them. The adaptation process is fun to talk about -- and even more fun when you've read the book and can have an informed conversation. I hope you'll join me, and I plan to be active in the comment threads.

Production began last month on Peter Jackson's adaptation of Alice Sebold's ultra-popular novel, The Lovely Bones -- just as Ryan Gosling left his role as dad, and Mark Wahlberg jumped in. The film focuses on a young girl who is raped and murdered, and then watches her loved ones and killer from heaven as her family falls apart and they try to find her body. It's pretty dark, but with word finally coming from the set, we're finally getting hints to just how Jackson will present it -- Susan Sarandon recently talked to MTV about her role as Grandma Lynn, and just what sort of adaptation Jackson has been cooking up.

She says: "I play kind of the comic relief. She's [a] drinking, hard shooting, smoking [old lady] cutting across all of the pain, pain, pain. Whenever I possible can blow smoke in someone's face, I'm doing it!" But it seems that this levity is not just present in her role. As she says of the film on a whole: "I haven't figured out the tone of the movie, I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is. It's going to be a strange jumble of things. But Peter Jackson did Heavenly Creatures. It's like that." So the director is turning to his roots, but that doesn't mean he's completely left the world of special effects. The actress also says his treatment of the heaven sequences "will work better in the film than they did, for me, in the book." Why that is, I don't know, but considering all he did with Lord of the Rings, it must be good.

Of the two main actresses in My Summer of Love, I was more impressed by Nathalie Press. But it was Emily Blunt who garnered more notice, and it was Blunt who co-starred in a major release like The Devil Wears Prada, and it is Blunt who is now the bigger star. The whole situation reminds me of Heavenly Creatures; the performance I favored in that film was Melanie Lynskey's, yet it was Kate Winslet who rose to stardom. Anyway, like Lynskey, Press has not gone away. Unlike Lynskey, though, Price is continuing to get significant roles in smaller films rather than small roles in more mainstream films. Her latest announced part is the lead in a psychological thriller titled Knife Edge.

Knife Edge was co-written and is being directed by Anthony Hickox, who last gave us the direct-to-video Steven Seagal vehicle Submerged. Considering that the average rating for his films on the IMDb is about 4.5, Knife Edge probably won't be very good. However, it does co-star Oscar nominee Joan Plowright and Hugh Bonneville, both of whom are a far cry from Hickox's usual actor type (Dolph Lundgren, Julian Sands, Armand Assante), and it is being produced by the makers of Mira Nair's Vanity Fair, so maybe this could be the first step in the right direction for the filmmaker.

The plot of Knife Edge is about a Wall Street trader (Press) who moves to the British countryside with her young son. While there, the woman experiences nightmarish visions and involvement with her family lawyer (Bonneville). Although this movie may not do much for Price's career, she should still be remembered well for My Summer of Love and last year's Red Road. She will also soon be appearing in Telepathy, alongside Cillian Murphy, Sam Neill and Miranda Richardson, and in Peter Greenaway's Nightwatching. Unfortunately, she seems to have been dropped from the Brontë sisters movie and I highly, highly doubt -- much to the disappointment of one of our commenters -- that she would ever be cast in the Barbarella remake.