Page to screen

Maud Newton of the IFC admits that "adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor." Hollywood wants the glitter of literature and transform it into box office gold, but there are missteps all the way. Newton says: "For every "Apocalypse Now," "The Big Sleep" or "Rebecca," there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds." She cites the recent foray of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen. But even Javier Bardem's energy can't save it. Instead, Newton points us to another film that has Bardem in it--"No Country For Old Men," a Cormac McCarthy novel which the Coen brothers adapted for the screen. So an actor, no matter how great and gifted, can't make the jump from page to screen work. The material may be a literary classic, but it's not an assurance it'll be great movie material. Newton thinks that "No Country for Old Men" worked well for the screen because it's probably not as lush as the Marquez novel. McCarthy's prose was "so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions."

So if you follow that line of thought, the sort of prose that will also work for the screen is something that is stripped down and with room enough for improvisation and development. A short story really is a good candidate, and surely editor Stephanie Harrison will agree. She put together the book Adaptations, which contains 35 short stories which were the basis for Hollywood movies. The book is divided into sections, with parts for independent movies and comic books and the "difficult" ones to adapt, like Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers." All the writers who tried to adapt Hemingway for the movies said one thing: The guy writes on water. Lots of style, but all the action is suggested. But your mind is working overtime to fill in what was left unsaid. And that is where you put in all those other scenes not in the story.

The Old Blue

“Girl Meets Boy,” Ali Smith’s modern retelling of Ovid’s Iphis myth, appears in The Guardian. An excerpt:

“I had simply never found anyone so right. Sometimes this shocked me so much that I was unable to speak. Sometimes when I looked at her, I had to look away. Already she was like no one else to me. Already I was fearful she would go. I was used to people being snatched away. I was used to the changes that came out of the blue. The old blue, that is. The blue that belonged to the old spectrum.”

Birthday Stories

Here's a weird one: I first saw and browsed Murakami's Birthday Stories in a bookstore in a strange city on my first trip abroad on my birthday a couple of years ago. That day, I think I only read Murakami's contribution to this feast, "Birthday Girl." It's only now that I read the rest of the stories in the collection. Again, after a weird coincidence: I was cleaning out my shelves in the office and this book dropped on my lap, as though from heaven. I don't remember buying it. But after some asking around, the riddle has been solved. Although I suspect I would have been happier if the book really was mine, a sign of the universe's weird sense of humor.

It's difficult to pick which story is my favorite, because there are several. Russell Banks' "The Moor" has a middle aged man walks inside a bar for a drink with the guys and sees an old lady who looked quite familiar. The woman was celebrating her eightieth. On the way out, one of his chaps joke, "An old girlfriend?" The truth isn't that far.

Old ladies seem to be recurring characters in this collection. There's the woman i n Daniel Lyon's "The Birthday Cake," who didn't want to give out her weekly supply of cake to a young mother who was too busy to buy her little girl a cake. The old mother in Ethan Canin's "Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath" called her son in another city to tell him that some birds got in her apartment. She never reminded him, and yet waited for him to remember that it was her birthday. Then there's the three old ladies who attended a little boy's birthday party; one of them told the story of "The Emperor Who Had No Skin."

There were at least two stories which hinted at gayness. In William Trevor's "Timothy's Birthday," a young man sends out the sully youth he now lives with in his place for a birthday lunch with this parents. In Claire Keegan's "Close to the Water's Edge," a nineteen year old Harvard student goes to the fancy Florida digs of her mother's millionaire second husband.

Then there's Raymond Carver's heartwrenching "The Bath" (otherwise known as "A Small, Good Thing" in other editions), where a little boy gets hit by a car and goes on coma on his birthday. And while his parents stand guard over him, a furious baker calls and calls their house for the uncollected birthday cake.

Taken together, the stories almost prove that there's no such thing as a "happy birthday." Although they're not entirely pessimistic either. The world may be a bit bleak, and happiness is fleeting and hard to come by, but it does, and when it does make an appearance, you want to hold on to it as hard as you can.

Got to read Birthday Stories (Book #17) for free: Thanks goes to (1) Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok, and (2) to Booboochichang who apparently left this book in my cluttered shelf some time ago.

First Love, Last Rites

If you're after a fun, enjoyable and light long weekend reading, then this book is not for you. Then again, this depends on how you define "fun" and "enjoyable." But definitely, First Love, Last Rites, the first collection of short stories by Ian McEwan, is not light weekend reading, however you look at it. This book succeeded in disturbing me, but in a good way.

I couldn't finish the stories in one go. It was too painful to read. The same with the other stories. There's a man who was raised as an eternal two year old by his mother, and then she meets a man and decides her little boy has to grow up, now. There's the man who supposedly saw a little girl before she fell off the ridge. Butterflies were never so disturbing.

The last story in the collection, "Disguises," is the source of my unease. A stage actress retires to take care of her nephew when her sister dies. Away from the stage, she brings her penchant for dressing up to the everyday routine she shares with ten year old Henry, who suspects that not all kids have to wear little soldier's uniforms to dinner with their parents. But he wears whatever it is he finds on his bed every afternoon, for he does like the stage--they have this tiny theater made from a fruit boxes and peopled with cardboard cutouts. It wasn't until he makes a friend out of new seatmate Linda that dressing up disturbs him. Or it could be that he got disturbed after he got drunk on his first taste of wine while dressed in a wig and girl's clothes. If that can't make you doubt your aunt's parenting techniques, then what will?

Here's some unsolicited McEwan trivia, according to The Guardian: He wrote the "unsuccessful" film The Good Son (Joseph Ruben, 1993), "about a sociopathic child, intended to reverse Macaulay Culkin's goody-goody image." As for "unsuccessful," again that's arguable. It's the most interesting Mac film in my book, as it departs from his painfully cute roles. It's right up McEwan's alley, I must say, at least based on this early collection of stories.

Still a tangentially related trivia: According to the Wikipedia page, there were previous attempts to film The Good Son had been shelved for various reasons. At one point, the role of Henry had even been awarded to Jesse Bradford, who now stars in the Hollywood remakes of My Sassy Girl and The Echo. Iza Calzado reprises the same role she had in Sigaw.

Anyway, got my copy of First Love, Last Rites (Book #15) in that book stall along AS Walk for Php180. Took me over a month to finish it, considering that it's a very slim volume (125 pages) and contains eight stories. But again, as I've said, this isn't light weekend reading.