Machinesworking wrote:oblique strategies wrote:
Crash by David Cronenberg (1996) was neck & neck with the novel by J.G. Ballard.
Completely utterly disagree. Cronenberg is an amazing director, but the differences are major between the book and movie, to the
point where the main thing about the book that's so amazing is pretty much missing from the movie. Thing about the book is you read it and you understand the fetish, you get into the obsession that the people have, and it's unnerving. The movie is simply unnerving, you only halfway sympathize with the protagonists; you never get that feeling like you've stepped over an edge into their world, you're merely an observer. Croneberg seemed like the right man, but I'm not sure that book could ever really be captured on film, since film isn't as good as books at first person accounts and deeper character insights.
Interesting points, and yes that's exactly where I was going with No Country. The film reduced these characters to rather one dimensional figures that bordered on parody. There was a lot of intricate subtlety (a Cormac McCarthy specialty; where in just one or two sentences he manages to speak whole volumes about a character) that the Coen Brothers just couldn't capture.
I too love Cronenberg, but Crash was my least favorite of his films. Ballard was, in many ways, like McCarthy. There were enormous subtleties in motivation that gave his characters a richness that's fucking hard to capture correctly on film.
I read Empire of the Sun about 3 years ago. It's excellent, and I thought that Spielberg did an amazing job with it. Oh, and while it's quite fashionable to open the can of haterade on Spielberg (just like Stephen King), Ive always enjoyed most of his flicks.