scott smith Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Warning: Some spoilers ahead. Though if you've either read the book or seen the movie, you're cool.

Order matters. It's not true what they say: that as between a book and a movie, you inevitably prefer whichever one you read or watch first. But the order you take them in nonetheless profoundly affects the experience. You can try to be objective – claim that each work has to stand or fall on its own merits, other incarnations be damned – but it won't work. You've been tainted.

I liked The Ruins – the movie. It was tight, brutal, ruthlessly effective; along with The Strangers, one of the year's few R-rated breaths of fresh air. Though it hewed pretty closely to genre conventions, it also recombined them to come up with its own interesting take on survival horror. I appreciated the movie's simplicity (the vines are a pure, almost elemental villain); its gruesomeness that never turned into sadism or needless cruelty; its grim, harsh relentlessness. It was a gripping roller coaster of a movie; a fun ride I enjoyed, praised, and pretty much put out of my mind.

Now that I've read the book, I ask myself: Would I still have liked the movie had I gone to the book first? The answer, I think, is no. It's not that I now think I was wrong about the film; to the contrary. But Scott Smith's novel is so extraordinary a genre achievement that the movie – adapted by Smith himself – can, in retrospect, feel only like a hapless abridgement, a wispy simulacrum of the novel's all-encompassing sense of doom and spiraling psychological terror. Taking the two in reverse order would have made the film feel cheap, impotent, lame; The Ruins for Dummies.

The Ruins opened on Friday like most horror films, with a single, late Thursday night "promo" screening, to which the press was gamely invited in full knowledge that it would be too late for review, even for any reasonable web deadline. What's different about The Ruins is that it's not a remake or even a copy of any horror film of recent years. We're talking first-class material, adapted from a novel by Scott B. Smith, who wrote both the mesmerizing 1993 book A Simple Plan as well as Sam Raimi's masterful 1998 film of the same name. It's a terrific airplane novel, surprising and gripping, and Dreamworks could have made an outstanding film of it. But they threw it away, perhaps deliberately, hoping for some of that fast opening weekend green, and little caring about making something worthwhile or lasting (like A Simple Plan).

At least four different people had asked me "Hey, did you read The Ruins?" before I finally got off my ass and bought a copy of the Scott Smith novel. (He also wrote the fantastic A Simple Plan, both the book and the film.) The Ruins is about five young travelers who venture deep into an unforgiving rain forest in an effort to track down a missing guy, only to find themselves trapped by natives atop a creepy hill. And that's not even remotely the worst part. Turns out there's a new breed of foliage out there -- and it does very terrible things.

Once I finished the book I was pleased to realize that the movie version was already well into production. First-timer Carter Smith is in the director's chair; Smith is on adaptation duty; and the cast includes names like Shawn Ashmore, Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone and Laura Ramsey. Release date for the DreamWorks / Paramount project is April 11, and while we don't have a trailer just yet, Bloody-Disgusting.com does have a trio of brand-new stills from the pic. (The first pic looks a LOT like how the book "looked" in my brain, so that's a good thing.) Once that trailer pops up, we'll be sure to let you know.

Oh, and the book? Good stuff. Here's hoping the studio lets Smith keep his finale intact.

I once thought that Matt Damon was the only actor suitable to portray Dan White. But that was a whole month ago, before I saw Josh Brolin in American Gangster and No Country for Old Men. Now I'm satisfied that he too would be great as the bad guy in Gus Van Sant's Milk, and fortunately enough, he's close to being cast in the role. According to Variety, Brolin is in negotiations to replace the never-quite-locked-in Damon as the man who assassinated two prominent city officials in 1978. For those of you not living in the Bay Area in the late '70s and who haven't seen the Oscar-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and who haven't been reading my coverage of this movie, Milk dramatizes the story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician, who served as a San Francisco county supervisor before being shot by his former co-worker Dan White. Also killed by White at the same time was S.F. Mayor George Moscone.

While I still kinda wish Damon was attached, I have an easier time picturing Brolin under that little boy haircut of White's. Of course, just as Damon would have, Brolin will need a prosthetic dimple chin in order to get the look just right. Then again, it might be bad if he looks too much like the real White, who was eventually convicted of manslaughter and who later took his own life after serving five years in prison. The actor portraying the title character is Sean Penn, and he hardly looks anything like Milk. Anyway, it sure wouldn't be the first time an actor didn't look much like the famous person he or she is playing.

Additionally, The Hollywood Reporter tells us that Emile Hirsch and James Franco are also in negotiations to star, with Hirsch playing gay rights activist Cleve Jones and Franco playing Milk's lover and campaign manager, Scott Smith.