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Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl Strayed in Wild. |
A number of the potential titles for the Summer ‘Movie Reads’
post already appeared in the “Most Anticipated Films of 2014” list, so readers
looking for recommendations/quick thoughts on Inherent Vice and such may head that way. There are several titles
from that same post, though, that made my reading list over the past few
months, so they’re here under a somewhat different angle. I could even add
stragglers from last year’s feature, namely Serena
(what on Earth is going on with that film?) and The Believers (when will we get this?!). There should be even more
options on this list, but my summer reading was derailed by the brutally
overlong and inexcusably slow Pulitzer Prize winner The Goldfinch. Blech! Let’s hope they never adapt that for the
screen!
If you’re looking to hit the beach, commandeer a coffee shop
patio, or prepare for festival/Oscar season with a cat on your lap, here are
ten titles worth reading:
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Wild had me with
its opening scene. As I pictured Reese Witherspoon frazzled and fatigued,
holding Cheryl’s one lone boot and then hurtling it into the wilderness of the
Pacific Coast Trail, Wild instantly
hooked me. Strayed’s account of her journey across over one-thousand miles of
trail is a frank and intimate tale of cleansing and healing. The passages along
the trail offer some of the expected metaphors for personal growth using the
progress of the journey, but Strayed reveals a surprising amount of her
motivation for undertaking this expedition using some candid flashbacks that
detail some dark chapters of substance abuse, loneliness, and despair. The loss
of Strayed’s mother underlies the journey as Cheryl looks back on her mother’s
rugged upbringing of her kids and uses her mother’s as inspiration to forge
ahead.
The energetic flashbacks seem perfectly catered to the
kaleidoscopic style of director Jean-Marc Vallée (Café de flore, Dallas Buyers
Club), as does a character-driven tale of a rugged outlaw going rogue. This
inspiring and empowering book might be the most promising film on the horizon. Early
word on Wild is strong, especially
regarding Witherspoon’s performance. Strayed herself praises Witherspoon for
giving “the performance of her life,” which is pretty impressive coming from
the subject of the performance itself. Strayed gives her perspective on the
adaptation process in an interview with Q’s Jian Ghomeshi, and her take is a
refreshing extension of the beautifully personable prose of Wild. As Strayed talks of sharing the
story with others and of seeing how Wild
touches others and brings about emotional transformation, it sounds as if
Vallée, Witherspoon, and company really bring Wild to life.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
I finished reading Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken just days before the passing of its subject, Louis
Zamperini. Unbroken is truly an
inspiring story of hope and indefatigable spirit. It’s a pleasure for any
reader to learn of the story that Zamperini shared with many soldiers during
his tumultuous life as an Olympic runner, war hero, and born-again speaker.
Hillenbrand deftly frames Louis’s route to forgiveness by chronicling his
harrowing experience as a prisoner of war that begins with a 47-day odyssey on
a life raft following a plane crash and becomes more gruelling when he’s taken
into a Japanese internment camp and relentlessly tormented by a sadistic guard.
(Japanese actor Miyavi should be on more radars in the Best Supporting Actor
race if he plays Watanabe aka “The Bird” with the same ferocity of Hillenbrand’s
prose.)
The film presents a physically and emotionally epic
challenge for Jack O’Connell in the role of Zamperini, as well as for the
filmmakers and for the audience as they follow Zamperini’s journey. Adapting a
story with as large a scope as Unbroken
looks to be no easy task, for Louis’s Olympic legacy invariably comes into play
in the latter act, and the accounts of his survival at sea and at the camp are
so thrilling and so moving that one almost wishes Unbroken could be a mini-series and include every word of
Hillenbrand’s book. However Jolie and an impressive quartet of screenwriters—Joel
Coen and Ethan Coen, re-writing drafts by William Nicholson and Richard
LaGravenese—adapt Zamperini’s story, though, Unbroken almost seems tailor-made to touch audiences if its
anywhere as powerful on screen as it is in print. (Opens December 25th.)
Cockroach by Rawi Hage
Here’s a curious one. Rawi Hage’s acclaimed novel Cockroach, a recent finalist in CBC’s
Canada Reads contest, serves as the inspiration for Michelle Latimer’s next
short, The Underground. Cockroach portrays the experience of an
outsider struggling to fit in to western culture as a self-confessed thief
toils through the dank Canadian winter and realizes that life over here is not
as great as he hoped it would be. Hage takes the thief into a darkly
metaphorical underworld as the thief imagines himself as a cockroach that
scuttles through cracks and dark places to emerge from the shadows.
If it's a daunting task to condense Unbroken into a feature, then it's doubly intriguing to see how The Underground adapts Cockroach into a fifteen minute short. (But the film has ample wiggle room since since it's 'inspired' by the book.) Details about the adaptation are scant, as tends to be the case with shorts, but The Underground reportedly mixes live action and animation to further the fantastical realism of Hage’s text. The film screened at the Canada Pavilion in the Cannes Market, so expect the film to get its public debut on the festival circuit this fall. (Fingers crossed.)
If it's a daunting task to condense Unbroken into a feature, then it's doubly intriguing to see how The Underground adapts Cockroach into a fifteen minute short. (But the film has ample wiggle room since since it's 'inspired' by the book.) Details about the adaptation are scant, as tends to be the case with shorts, but The Underground reportedly mixes live action and animation to further the fantastical realism of Hage’s text. The film screened at the Canada Pavilion in the Cannes Market, so expect the film to get its public debut on the festival circuit this fall. (Fingers crossed.)
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
If you told me I’d be looking forward to the latest film
from the director of The Internship,
I’d have told you that you are completely nuts. After seeing the trailer for
the upcoming dramedy This is Where I
Leave You, though, I moseyed on over to the local bookstore and grabbed a
copy of the book by Jonathan Tropper. I loved it!
This is Where I Leave
You is the story of the dysfunctional Foxman family seen through the eyes of middle son Judd as
he returns home to fulfill his late father’s request that the family gather and
sit Shiva together for seven days. It’s warm, funny, and often surprisingly
moving as Judd reflects upon the mess of his life—divorced, unemployed, etc.—as
he revisits old cornerstones of his youth. Tackling issues of masculinity seems
to have gone out of fashion lately, but the book (and, hopefully, the film) is
especially smart with how it confronts Judd’s old-fangled outlook on women,
sex, and his own self-worth. As the Foxmans reunite in mourning and dig up old
ghosts of the past in wacky ways, This is
Where I Leave You reads like cross between August: Osage County and Silver
Linings Playbook. It could be just as strong an ensemble piece with a cast
that includes Jason Bateman, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Corey Stoll,
and Tina Fey in an especially funny role. This
is Where I Leave You opens September 19th from Warner Bros. so
expect the star-studded film to be a big player on the first weekend of TIFF.
Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky
Suite Française is
a great book, but one almost wishes to see a film not of the book, but a film about
it. Irène Némirovsky wrote the two books that form Suite Française during the outbreak of the Second World War when the
Nazis invaded France. Némirovsky tragically died in 1942 following her
deportation to Auschwitz, and Suite Française
was not published until 2004. This found work carries an ineffably poignant
note of loss as Némirovsky weaves stories of Parisians fleeing the citing in a
nervous exodus. False alarms bring false hope that the war is over, and the
relief of the characters is especially tragic when one realizes that the author
herself never saw the end of it.
Adapting such a rich text could therefore be quite daring. Suite Française lends itself to a film
in the vein of The Hours or, more
aptly in terms of adaptation, The French
Lieutenant’s Woman where the process of creating a work of art becomes a
meta-thread of the narrative. Imagine a parallel storyline in which the fate of
the author becomes linked to those of her characters!
A quick glance at the film, however, suggests a more straightforward
period piece, which is fine given the director (The Duchess’s Saul Dibb)
and ensemble. Suite Française, the
movie, sounds to favour the latter half of the book, though, given the heavy
star power of Michelle Williams and Kristin Scott Thomas as the Angellier
family, versus a range of lesser-known actors as the Péricands and Michauds who
populate the first half, “Storm in June.” Suite
Française sounds promising either way. Read the book soon, since this
page-to-screen affair is also a high-profile international co-production for
Canada and seems like an inevitable contender for a plum premiere slot at TIFF.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Also on the TIFF horizon is David Fincher’s adaptation of
Gillian Flynn’s best-selling page-turner Gone
Girl. Gone Girl is perfect summer reading. It’s a doozy of a book with two
deliciously rich characters in Nick and Amy Dunne. Add a devious and
masterfully executed twist, and Gone Girl
is a wickedly absorbing read. What I really like about Gone Girl, though, is how much one’s allegiance to either Nick or
Amy says about oneself. There’s something at the heart of the suburban malaise
in the Dunnes’ lives that demands readers to debate how far they would go to
escape a life of insufferable routine and unhappiness. (The recounts of CostCo
pickles are motive enough for murder.)
Gone Girl also
seems destined to percolate ample discussions since Flynn herself has scripted
a new ending for the film. Gone Girl
flies off the rails in its final act in one of those love it or hate it (but
mostly hate) deeds that strains credibility. It’s always exciting when improvement
seems inevitable. Under the sturdy hand of director David Fincher, who did a
bang-up job on upgrading The Girl with
the Dragon Tattoo, the adaptation of Gone
Girl looks like a full-throttle realization of this thrilling book, especialy with the casting of Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as Nick and Amy. The compelling and incredibly cocky (enjoyably so) new trailer suggests that Fincher and 20th Century Fox know they have a big hit on their hands.
Trash by Andy Mulligan
Speaking of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, here's a question to introduce the next book: remember when Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close edged out Dragon Tattoo for a Best Picture nomination? I haven’t yet read Andy Mulligan’s Trash, but here’s why it should be on the radar for upcoming
page-to-screen reads: every film by director Stephen Daldry has been a major
player at the Oscars—even Extremely Loud &
Incredibly Close. One hopes that Trash
is more on the level of The Hours, The Reader, or Billy Elliot than of Extremely
Loud (which also happens to be a pretty bad book), but it’s the kind of
inspirational material that Daldry handles well. The acclaimed book, which
whisks readers to garbage dump in an unnamed Third World country, sounds a bit
like Slumdog meets Saramago, but Trash has enough fans and pedigree to warrant
a read. The cast of Rooney Mara, Martin Sheen, and notable Brazilian actors
Wagner Moura and Selton Mello doesn’t hurt prospects for the film, either, although one can expect a chorus of [insert title here] puns if tis bombs.
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
I still begrudge Christopher Nolan for failing to cast
Marion Cotillard as Selina Kyle in The
Dark Knight Rises. A French Catwoman would have been sexy. A French Lady
Macbeth, though, is even better. (Shakespeare trumps Nolan any day.) Add to La
Marion the endlessly intimidating Michael Fassbender as Macbeth and it sounds
as if we finally have a full-blooded rendering of Macbeth. It’s a relief to see a major undertaking of Macbeth, for adaptations of this
Shakespeare classic are surprisingly rare. There are only three notable big
screen adaptations of Macbeth amidst
an unending field of Hamlets and Romeo and Juliets—Roman Polanski’s 1971
Playboy production, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 Throne
of Blood, and Orson Welles’s spectacular 1948 mess—so this return to
Shakespeare’s tragedy is most anticipated.
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Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender in Macbeth |
The Giver by Lois Lowry

The Giver, at a
quick 170 pages, is something that one can read in an afternoon at the beach. It’s
a refreshingly powerful read, not to mention an essential one since the book is
a precursor to a wave of science fiction aimed at young readers. It’s a
necessary reminder that dystopian writing need not be synonymous with bad
writing, for none of the books that have followed in The Giver’s footsteps has surpassed it. The book, sparse in its
description and prose, is essentially filmable as written since it manly
consists of conversations between Jonas and The Giver, so the original material
indicated in the trailer is undeniably intriguing. The adaptation looks more
thrilling than Lowry’s strong book, but every bit as profound. The film even
has Lowry’s stamp of approval, as noted by an updated poster blurb, and her endorsement is strangely—and appropriately—vague.
(The Giver opens in theatres August
15 from eOne Films.)
The Homesman by Glendon Swarthout
The from-page-to-Streep recommendations continue with
Glendon Swartout’s exceptional novel The
Homesman. Streep plays a minor character whom Tommy Lee Jones’s rascally
claims jumper Briggs encounters after a long and arduous journey transporting
three insane women (four in the book) from Nebraska to Iowa along with spunky
pioneer spinster Mary Bee Cuddy. Don’t expect Streep to win any prizes for The Homesman since Altha Carter’s brief
appearance essentially plays as a scene in which the homesman takes in the
gravity of not only his task, but the plight of the women he’s transported
east.
The Homesman is a surreal talking-point for both genre and gender. The direction of the book is particularly striking in that
Swarthout charts the pioneer trail from east to west as opposed to the westward
narrative of manifest destiny. There’s nothing in the barren American Dream of westward
expansion except the kind of misery that’s liable to drive someone nuts.
Swarthout makes the hardship of the pioneer life and ideology especially provocative
with some strange tonal shifts and a twist that blindsides the reader with a
punch.
Swarthout’s novel is equally notable for the roles it
fashions for women outside of the usual frame of the western narrative. Mary
Bee Cuddy is an odd duck, a rugged outsider with more grit than the piggish Briggs
has, and the backstories that drive the four women to madness detail the
hardship of surviving in isolation without resources or support. Cannes reviews
praise Swank’s performance as the plucky Mary Bee, who could be a dark horse
contender for Best Supporting Actress if upstart distributor Saban Films and
Roadside Attractions handle the campaign smartly, while Jones himself has ample
praise as both actor and director. IMDb dates cite a North American premiere at
TIFF this fall, although the listed date doesn’t even fall during the festival,
but one can assume The Homesman aims
to travel.