A to Z Challenge: Zathura

I'll admit I hadn't read the book or seen the movie of this one before this A to Z thing came along.  When I looked up Z movies that had been books, though, I remembered this movie had been on Netflix.  Fortunately it still was, so I could easily watch the movie for at least partial credit.

When this came out in 2005, it seemed pretty much like Jumanji in Space.  Not helping that is it's made by the same studio as Jumanji.  Though actually I haven't read or watched all of Jumanji either.  But this does seem like it has a very similar concept:  a boy finds an old game called Zathura and when he plays it with his brother, they find themselves in space, being attacked by robots, aliens, or whatever else is brought up when the game spits out a card.

Overall the movie is OK but a little on the long side.  Kristen Stewart of Twilight fame plays the big sister of the boys; the director and producers really sensed her acting range as most of the movie she's sleeping or frozen.  Another tidbit is it was directed by Jon Favreau, who went on to do the first two Iron Man movies.  So while it wasn't probably that successful a movie, it helped springboard a couple of careers.

I still haven't read the book, but maybe it answers just who the hell made the game and why.  Not that it's all that important; most Twilight Zone episodes work just fine without explaining too much of why things happen.

Though really, Disney probably should have paid attention to this movie's failure when they were green-lighting Tomorrowland, which similarly tries to invoke nostalgia for the bygone era of science-fiction from the 50s.  I don't think there are many people in the 21st Century actually  nostalgic for that, so maybe give up trying to make big-budget movies about it.

So there you go, there's the whole A to Z thing for the 2016.  Maybe you learned something.  Maybe not.  Monday we're back to...whatever.

A to Z Challenge: You Only Live Twice

This is a James Bond novel by Ian Fleming that was turned into a Sean Connery Bond movie in 1967.  I did read the book, along with all the other Fleming Bond ones.  I also watched the movie. The only similarities besides the title are the setting and at one point Bond gets painted up to disguise himself as a Japanese person.

In the book, Ernst Blofeld has taken refuge in a mansion and is growing a bunch of plants for some nefarious purpose.  Bond goes to a fishing village to learn more about the house, which is when he disguises himself as a Japanese person and hangs out with a local girl.  Of course later he's captured and has to save the day and so on and so forth.

In the movie, Blofeld works with a Japanese businessman to start WWIII by stealing space capsules of the US and USSR, making each side think the other is at fault.  Bond goes to Japan and sees lots of stereotypical Japanese stuff like sumo wrestling.  There's a great piece of misogyny where his host says, "In Japan, men are always first and women are second."  To which Bond says he'd like to retire there.  Eventually he goes to secret ninja school, gets dressed up to look Japanese (though I thought he looked more like Spock without the ears), and with some Japanese girl who replaced the Japanese girl who was killed by poison trickling down a rope while sleeping, they find Blofeld's lair in a volcano, where Blofeld has a pit of piranhas to feed victims to.

The movie is pretty silly, though I guess it's what people had come to expect from a James Bond movie.  I'd like to think the whole "turning Japanese" thing wouldn't work today, but then I think of Exodus: Gods & Kings, Gods of Egypt, and Johnny Depp in The Lone Ranger and I suppose things haven't changed all that much, which kind of sucks.

So really the movie and book are two completely different things.  The book, like all of Fleming's Bond novels (even Moonraker, which does not involve going into space) are pretty well grounded on Earth.  The gadgets and such are a lot less silly too.

Interestingly, there have been plenty of references to the movie.  The volcano lair has been parodied in Austin Powers, The Simpsons, and American Dad to name a few.  Actually Dr. Evil's whole look is a parody of Donald Pleasence's Blofeld.  Pleasence went on to play Dr. Loomis in six Halloween movies.  He only played the character once; the next time Blofeld appeared he was played by Telly Sevalas--and Bond was played by George Lazenby.  Blofeld had previously appeared in Thunderball and From Russia With Love though I don't think he was fully seen.  Interestingly in Diamonds are Forever, he was played by Charles Gray, who played a contact named Henderson in You Only Live Twice.  And later he was played by Max von Syndow in Never Say Never Again (an unofficial Bond movie) and of course last year by Christoph Waltz in Spectre.  So the character has changed faces about as many times as Bond himself.

There you go, lots of trivial trivia.

A to Z Challenge: X-Men Days of Future Past

I have to kind of fudge this entry because I can't find anything for X.  I checked Xanadu and a movie I liked, X (Night of Vengeance) but neither of those was based on a novel.  But Days of Future Past has sort of been published as a book, so that seems close enough.

The thing is, when the movie was coming out I bought the "book" from Amazon.  It was a ripoff because it's 184 pages but the actual Days of Future Past story is two comics that might be 50 pages.  So you have another 135 pages of filler.  Seriously, the other stuff didn't have much to do with it except taking place around the same period of time.  And they put those two issues in the middle of the book too so it's harder to just read those and put it down.

The movie is of course pretty different from those two comic books.  The biggest difference is Wolverine's involvement.  In the early 80s when the comics were written, Wolverine was not the god-like character he became by the first movie in 2000.  In the second issue he gets zapped by a Sentinel in the future and that's it for him.  Whereas by the time they were writing the movie version, Wolverine had all these powers and was most everyone's favorite character.  So while in the comics it's Kitty Pryde who travels in time, in the movie it has to be Wolverine.

The target of the assassination is different too.  In the comic book it's Senator Kelly, but he died in the first movie back in 2000 so I guess they thought that would be lame.  Instead they have to stop a delegation in Paris from being killed and then Nixon.  (Though if it was 1973 they would pretty much have been doing Nixon a favor by killing him.)  And since Jennifer Lawrence was playing Mystique, she gets a meatier role in the movie.

Anyway, as I said the comics were just two issues and that was it, though I guess the cover design of the one lingered on for a long time and has been parodied a bunch of times, even by a book Tony Laplume co-authored!  I'm not sure why they didn't use that for the movie poster, except that they were trying to minimize Kitty Pryde's involvement, especially in "the Rogue Cut" where I guess Rogue has to take her powers to finish the mission or whatever.

It should be obvious that the movie and comics are two completely different animals.  I can't really recommend buying the book unless you just get those two issues.  Otherwise it's a lot of padding.

A to Z Challenge: Wonder Boys

One of my favorite movies about writing and also a pretty good book.  Yes I've seen the movie (and own it) and also read the book--and own it too. 

Wonder Boys is about Grady, a writing professor at a Pittsburgh area college who is sleeping with a student and his dean, smokes weed, and is writing a novel that makes Infinite Jest seem like a pamphlet.  The title of the novel he's writing is the title of the book itself, but there's also a double-meaning as a long time ago Grady was a "wonder boy" (or boy wonder) with a really successful novel he has struggled to top.  He also has a talented novelist named James in his class; James is a future wonder boy Grady reluctantly tries to steer onto the right path.  To add some urgency to the setting, Grady's agent comes into town to try to get a look at the book Grady is writing.  Over a weekend Grady and James bond while getting attacked by a dog that James shoots, fleeing to Grady's in-laws for Passover, and facing their various demons.

They're both good but it's another where I'd say to watch the movie unless you really feel like spending the extra time on the book.  The movie strips out some of the bloat about the book, specifically the Passover seder that goes on much, much too long in the book.  The seder thing isn't really important to the overall story, so taking it out of the movie made sense.  Though this was a case of Hollywood whitewashing because in the book Grady's in-laws are Jewish and Asian.

I mentioned when I reviewed Ant-Man that everyone who stars in this movie has appeared in a superhero movie:  Michael Douglas in Ant-Man, Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man 1-3, Robert Downey Jr in all those Marvel movies, Frances McDormand in Darkman, and Katie Holmes in Batman Begins.  I don't know if there's anything significant about that or not.  But I do really like the movie.  The book is longer, and a little more depressing, but it's also worth a look.

A to Z Challenge: The Virgin Suicides

I read the book and watched the movie of this some time ago, back in the 2000s.  The book is from Michigan native Jeffrey Eugenides, who won the Pulitzer for his follow-up Middlesex, which to my knowledge doesn't have a movie yet.  The movie was from the late 1990s and is the debut feature of Sofia Coppola (daughter of Francis Ford) who was nominated for an Oscar for her follow-up Lost in Translation.  So everyone went on to better things.  Not to say this isn't bad.  It's actually quite good.

Both media revolve around a suburban Detroit neighborhood and a family of teenage girls everyone obsesses over.  Then bad things start happening to them.  There's one particularly rebellious one, who in the movie was played by Kirsten Dunst, who went on to better things in the Spider-Man movies.

The book features odd narration in that it's narrated by a group of boys who live in the neighborhood.  They're never identified; they're only given as "We."  So if you find that too weird it'd probably be better to watch the movie.

Here's my book review, which indicates I didn't like the book all that much; I gave it 3/5 stars.

This is the first time I've ever encountered the sort of narration used in "The Virgin Suicides." Instead of one central narrator, it is a collective of the local boys told through "we" instead of "I" or "he", which takes a little getting used to for this reader. At first I found this unique and interesting, but by the end I thought this device kept me from really experiencing the story on a personal level. Everything became so detached it was as if reading a newspaper account.

It didn't help that the Lisbon girls all seemed like clones except for Lux and Cecelia. The other three--Mary, Bonnie, and Therese--are so little-used it's hard to remember anything specific about them. Lux is certainly the best-drawn of the five girls, as her adventures on the rooftop and so forth are well-documented, but even she remains impersonal.

The boy narrators themselves are even more vague and impersonal. We know very little about any of them, except names and scant bits of information. I suppose it's ironic in a novel about how unknowable the Lisbons are that the reader knows even less about the boys telling the story, except that they loved the Lisbons.

By the end, like reading an obituary in a newspaper, I feel badly for the Lisbons, but it's that momentary, vague blip of sadness before flipping to the sports page.

I undertand that's the point of the novel. No one understands the Lisbons as much as they try. It makes for an interesting literary exercise; however, it doesn't really make for an entertaining book.

A to Z Challenge: Up in the Air

I had to really wrack my brain for a book/movie to use for U.  Fortunately when I checked on IMDB I saw the movie Up in the Air was based on a book, so there you go.  Problem solved.

Obviously I haven't read the book.  I mean, I didn't know it existed.  The movie from 2009 starred George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a guy who goes around firing people for a living--as opposed to Ryan Bingham the alt-country musician.  Basically huge companies when they need to lay people off bring him in to try to smooth things over.  Unfortunately for me no Clooney showed up to lay me off.  Too bad.

Then he takes on a young assistant to show her the ropes.  She wants to modernize the business to use virtual chats and so forth, but he's resistant because he likes flying around the country.  He has racked up so many miles on American Airlines that he nearly has elite "platinum" status, which only like 6 other people had done.  Along the way he gets involved with a woman and falls in love, though it turns out she does not share that emotion.

It's a good movie, with a lot of complex stuff going on.  Not all that quick and snappy, but a good, involving movie.  The end is kind of a bummer, though.

BONUS:  I had a really hard time finding a K entry and then of course yesterday someone mentioned The Kite Runner and I realized that would have been the perfect K entry because I've read the book and seen the movie.  Both were really good.  I'd recommend the book because it's deeper, but if you don't want to invest the time, the movie gives you most of the gist.

A to Z Challenge: The Time Traveler's Wife

I read the book for this not too long after it came out.  Then thanks to Anjelina Jolie splitting up Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston I had to wait a few years longer to watch a movie version of it.  (See, Pitt and Aniston were going to star in it as a testament to their love but then they broke up and had to determine who got custody of the movie.  Or something like that.)  But I did eventually watch the movie starring Eric Bana and Rachel MacAdams.  They're both OK but not great.

My movie review pretty well sums it all up:

Being a single man, I don't watch a lot of love stories in the theater. But I had read the novel "The Time Traveler's Wife" twice and had been looking forward to the movie version, which had faced numerous setbacks thanks to Brad Pitt. At any rate, I wasn't disappointed. In fact, I was pleased because the movie eliminates a lot of the useless ballast that made the book nearly 600 pages to fit it into 108 minutes.

As the title suggests, the movie is about a time traveler and his wife. If you want to go chronologically, when Heny DeTamble was six, his mother died in a car accident and he finds out that he has a genetic disorder that causes him to randomly skip through time. A few years later, six-year-old Clare is playing in the meadow behind her family's mansion when she meets a naked man, who turns out to be an older version of Henry who has traveled back in time. She gives him a blanket and it starts a friendship with Henry as he appears at random intervals.

When Clare is in college, she meets Henry at the Chicago Public Library, where he works. For Henry it's the first time he's met Clare while for her it's not. (If you've watched "Star Trek" then you should be able to follow this.) As you should be able to figure out, they wind up getting married and from there experience marital difficulties that are unique to their situation, like Henry disappearing for sometimes weeks at a time and babies disappearing from Clare's womb.

If you've read the book and liked it then you should like the movie, as long as one of your favorite parts wasn't one that was eliminated. If you haven't read the book, then I'm not sure how much you'll enjoy it, though the old ladies next to me in the theater seemed to like it and I don't think they'd read the book.

As I mentioned at the beginning, the movie gets rid of a lot of the bloat from the novel. Most of Clare's younger years are eliminated, which isn't a huge loss. (This eliminated the most cringe-inducing scene of the book where 41-year-old Henry screwed 18-year-old Clare.) The stereotypical Korean babysitter and black cook are cut out and definitely no big loss. As well the brief subplot of Clare and Henry's friend Gomez hitting on Clare has been removed. The one thing I wish they had kept was the ending, but overall it was a worthy adaptation.

That is all.

A to Z Challenge: The Shipping News

This is another one where I read the book and watched the movie.  Actually I own the movie and at one point I owned the book, but a DVD is far less weight than a book so I got rid of the book.  Which should tell you which one is better.

Both book and movie deal with this guy named Bob Quoyle who moves with his kid(s) to Newfoundland and this old house that has to be tied down with ropes because there's no basement or anything.  Anyway, he starts working for a little newspaper writing "the shipping news" about boats that have come and gone.  And he starts making a life in the crummy little town and with a woman.

The book kind of annoyed me because it has this quirky style where sentences were written really short.  It got to be kind of annoying.  I never understood why the author wouldn't give the character's first name either.  It seemed kind of ridiculous.  There are two kids in the book and only one in the movie.  But since there's nothing really important for two kids to do, one does just as well.

The movie from about 2001 stars Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, and Judi Dench.  Since it doesn't have any weird quirks I think it's better to watch the movie than read the book.  It's also a very well-made movie.  Incidentally it's directed by Laase Hallstrom, who directed The Cider House Rules.  Those Scandinavians really know how to make literary movies.

A to Z Challenge: Rum Punch/Jackie Brown

I hadn't read or watched these before deciding upon this challenge, but I did have Rum Punch on my Kindle, so that helped me out when I couldn't really find another R.  I'm not sure why R was another hard letter, but it kind of was.

Anyway, the book was written by Elmore Leonard, who has had plenty of other books turned into movies like Get Shorty, Out of Sight, 3:10 to Yuma (twice I think), and some others.

The plot of book and movie is there's a stewardess named Jackie who works for a crappy shuttle airline and moonlights as a mule for a guy named Ordell.  One day she's bringing in some money when she's stopped by an ATF agent and his partner, who seem to know exactly what she's up to.  She goes to jail but won't give Ordell up and she's put in jail.  Ordell goes to Max Cherry, a bail bondsman to get her out.  Jackie and Max get something going and they decide to work out a deal with the ATF first for a "dry run" to smuggle some money in and then a much larger amount, during which they'll bust Ordell.  Except Jackie and Max work out how to sneak most of the money for themselves.

The movie was adapted by Quentin Tarantino and stars Pam Grier, Samuel L Jackson, Michael Keaton, and Robert de Niro in a largely useless role that could have been played by just about any dude for much cheaper I'm sure.  The movie is OK but the problem is it's 2 1/2 hours long!  There was no need whatsoever to turn a book that's only about 300 pages into a movie as long as your average summer blockbuster.  It's a fairly ordinary crime thriller that involves a stewardess who is caught between a gunrunner and the ATF.  The whole thing could easily have been streamlined to about 90 minutes.  That was actually the point where I got up to use the can, paused it, and saw there were still 54 minutes left!  Yipes.  The runtime is more tolerable on the second watching if only because I knew to expect it.  Still, a lot of the chitchat could have been cut out.  Unfortunately I think Tarantino, like Leonard, bought into the hype that he's really good with dialogue so he crammed the movie with lots of unnecessary talking to drag things out.

And yet what's funny after I read the book is it's 2 1/2 hours and yet it barely scratches the surface on a lot of things.  Somehow there's still a bunch of stuff that gets cut out.  A lot of that stuff would have actually made Robert de Niro's character interesting and worth the money they paid him.  In the book his character works for Max Cherry and is a henchman of Ordell, which is how they get brought together.  Whereas in the movie Ordell just shows up in Max's office.  Later the de Niro character steals some guns from Max's office to use to rob a liquor store.  Max also has a wife with an art gallery in a mall, which is where the "dry run" and other smuggling run happen.  In the movie he just shows up at the mall the first time to watch a movie.  Max and Jackie also fuck a few times, whereas I think they're more like "Just friends" in the movie.  So like I said despite being much, much too long the movie still can't be as deep as the novel.

Honestly I'd recommend the book since the movie takes practically just as long to get through. Here's a fun fact:  Rum Punch is actually a sequel to the much-earlier novel The Switch.  That book was made into the 2013 movie Life of Crime starring Jennifer Aniston and Tim Robbins.  So the movies were actually made in the reverse order of the books.

As far as it goes, I still think Get Shorty is the best Elmore Leonard book/movie combo, though I haven't read some of the other books that have become movies like Out of Sight.

A to Z Challenge: The Quiet American

I watched the movie but I haven't read the book of it.  I would if given the opportunity, but I suppose it hasn't been on sale or anything yet.

Anyway, the book is by Graham Greene and it centers around the early years of American involvement in Vietnam.  There's a British reporter in Saigon who has a native girlfriend and is generally pretty comfortable hanging around in the city.  Then an American shows up who naively thinks he can change things and drive out the commies.  And he starts to compete for the British guy's girl too. 

That's what happens in the movie at least, though I'm sure there's some stuff cut out.  The CIA is supposed to represent America in general who didn't understand the country or the Vietnamese people.  The sort who thought that all the Vietnamese needed was a firm hand to point them towards the democracy.  The British guy is far more aware because of course the British by that point had lost most of their empire.  And the fact the CIA guy doesn't understand the girl (who is I think working for the Viet Cong) is also a microcosm of America's problems in Southeast Asia.

The movie stars Michael Caine as the old British guy and Brendan Fraser as the CIA guy.  Both give fine performances, so it's a really good movie.  At some point I should get around to the book.

A to Z Challenge: Patriot Games

I did read the book and watch the movie back in the 90s sometimes.  My memory about them isn't all that great.  What I remember about both is they were pretty boring.  Boom, mic drop.

The thing about the book is that it's actually a prequel to A Hunt for Red October.  It's supposed to be about Jack Ryan before he really started working for the CIA and junk.  Somehow he gets involved with a plot involving the IRA.  And mayhem ensues, though it's not that interesting.

The dumb thing about the movie is they cast Harrison Ford as Jack Ryan in this one after Alec Baldwin played the same character in A Hunt for Red October.  So even though it's supposed to be a prequel, they cast someone older to play the character!  Although this wasn't the first time Harrison Ford replaced Alec Baldwin; in Working Girl, Baldwin was Melanie Griffith's cheating boyfriend and then she ends up with Ford.  And then after another of these Jack Ryan movies they replaced Ford with Ben Affleck and then Affleck was replaced by Chris Pine years later.  Anyway, I think I watched a lot of this movie in fast forward because it wasn't all that interesting.

So really I wouldn't recommend the book or movie unless you want to be bored.

A to Z Challenge: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Last year was I guess the 40th anniversary of the movie version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  I don't think the book is too much older than that.  I did read the book and then some time later watch the movie.  And they're both good.  I'm not sure I wrote a review for the movie, but I did write one for the book.

I haven't seen more than a few minutes of the famous 1975 film version of this novel. (NOTE:  I did correct that eventually) But even for me, it's hard reading this now without imagining Jack Nicholson as Randle McMurphy. Though Nicholson looks nothing like the redheaded Irishman described in Kesey's novel.

McMurphy is a convict who tired of the work farm in Oregon and thought he'd kick back for the next four months in the insane asylum. He never counted on the asylum being run by a petty dictator like Nurse Ratched. Nor did Nurse Ratched ever imagine she'd run across someone she couldn't bend to her will.

The conflict between these two is recounted by "Chief" Bromden, a half-Indian, half-white man committed to the asylum. He pretends to be deaf and dumb so he doesn't have to communicate with anyone. At nights he thrashes about on his bed, imagining that the machines of The Combine are performing experiments on the patients. Though nearly seven feet tall, the Chief's image of himself is almost dwarf-like.

The other patients like the intellectual Harding and stuttering Billy Bibbit similarly see themselves as small, Harding likening them to rabbits, under Ratched's rule. When McMurphy appears on the scene, he immediately energizes the patients with his raucous behavior. After a successful rebellion over the airing of the World Series on television, the patients gain hope and self-confidence. But like any dictator, Nurse Ratched isn't about to go down without a fight. Over the next few months, she works at breaking McMurphy's hold on the patients until the final confrontation.

The Cliff Notes I read after finishing the book likened McMurphy to Christ. I'm not sure I'd go that far because I can't recall Christ slugging it out with any Roman guards on his way to the cross. There is certainly nothing meek and mild about McMurphy. Yet in his own way he is the way and the hope for the other patients, including Chief Bromden.

What I'd liken this to more so than the New Testament is Orwell's famous "1984." Nurse Ratched is a Big Brother figure in controlling the hearts and minds of her subjects, though in less obvious ways. The three black orderlies at her command aren't as efficient as the Thought Police, but they do their part to maintain order, at least until McMurphy's arrival.

More to the point, the conflict between freedom and tyranny is at the heart of both novels. Both show us how precious freedom is in an oppressive environment and the lengths the tyrants will go to maintain their hold on power. McMurphy's struggle with Ratched isn't as covert as Winston's against Big Brother, but they are both psychologically intense. And for McMurphy at least, his opposition has about as happy as an outcome, though Kesey allows hope for some of the other characters.

This is the kind of book people call a "page turner." I kept chugging along through the novel with nearly the same dread and hope as the patients, wanting a good outcome but fearing that McMurphy was bound to meet a bad end. For me, that kind of emotional involvement is the hallmark of a great novel. You'd have to be crazy to miss out on this one. (Thank you, I'll be here all week...)

That is all.

Anyway, I think it's another where you probably get enough of the gist from the movie to just watch that if you don't feel like reading the book.

A to Z Challenge: The Natural

As someone who grew up a baseball fan I of course had watched The Natural not long after it came out.  You might remember that's the one with Robert Redford as a baseball player named Roy Hobbs who makes a splash when he's young by striking out "The Whammer" (a thinly-veiled Babe Ruth) in a field.  A black widow takes notice of this and lures him up to a hotel room, where she shoots him.  Years later, he gets a shot at the majors and takes a struggling team to the playoffs with a homemade bat.  At the end of the movie he faces a pitcher who is sort of like a young him, who smashes his homemade bat, but fortunately a bat boy has made his own bat to loan him.  Hobbs hits a home run that smashes a light in a shower of sparks. It's been parodied I think a half-dozen times on The Simpsons.  After the game, he ends up retiring and riding off into the sunset with an old flame and her son, who is presumably his love child.

The primary difference between the book and movie is that ending.  The ending in the book is really depressing.  Instead of hitting a home run, Roy Hobbs strikes out.  And then it's found out that he took money to throw the game, so he's left as a disgrace.  He ain't having a catch with his son in a golden-lit field at the end, that's for sure.  I guess as a kid it was a lot better to have seen the movie than to have read the book.  I mean how depressing would that ending be when you're a kid?  Even more so than when you're an adult.

Of course you probably don't like baseball or anything so you don't care.  I'm just saying.

Fun Fact:  As well as The Simpsons, The Natural has also been parodied on FX's Archer, where he's shot by a black widow because of his lacrosse prowess.

Bonus Fun Fact:  In the movie, The Whammer is played by Joe Don Baker, who starred in a terrible movie called Mitchell that made for a great episode of MST3K--the one where they switched from Joel to Mike as the guy marooned in space.  Baker has been in a lot of other stuff, notably as the CIA agent in the Pierce Brosnan-era Bond movies, but that's what I remember him most for.

A to Z Challenge: Midnight's Children

Today is Tax Day, which for me is more like Doomsday.  Anyway, I'm going to talk about a book and movie starting with M:  Midnight's Children.

The book is by Salman Rushdie, before he had a death mark put on him by the Ayatollah.  It mostly has to do with the turbulent years surrounding India's independence from Britain.  There was a boy born exactly on midnight on the day of independence and he finds that he can touch minds with other children in India born at that moment. 

While he wants to use that power for good, there's another boy who has grown up in poverty and wants to use that for evil.  I compared it to Professor X and Magneto in X-Men and it is kind of the same thing, only without costumes or big set piece fights.

The book is long, about 600 pages or so.  There was a movie version a few years ago.  It's more than 3 hours long, so it's not short either.  Of course they have to cut some things out, so you don't get the full experience, but I remember it being decent.  I've tried to find my review, but I'm not sure where it is.  If you can find it, it would take less time to get through than the book while giving you most of the gist.

Here's my book review:

Salman Rushdie is the third author I've read recently that I'd put off reading for many years out of a misplaced fear I'd find his books dull and uninteresting--James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon are the other two authors. With great consternation and teeth-gnashing I finally picked "Midnight's Children" off the shelf and soon wondered what the heck had taken me so long.

To put it simply, "Midnight's Children" is a great book. It's a darkly comic odyssey through the history of India in the 20th Century told not only with touches of humor, but the supernatural as well. Reading the book can be an adventure, given the winding narrative that mixes past and present and the walls of print on each print, but it's an adventure worth the effort.

The story is told by Saleem Sinai on what he believes to be his deathbed. Padma, his caretaker and erstwhile fiance, begs to differ with this assessment, but aids Saleem by serving also as sounding board and editor. The relationship between Saleem and Padma continues to advance as he recounts the story not just of his life, but those of his parents and grandparents as well. His grandfather was a European-trained doctor in 1915 who returned to India, lost faith in God, and met Saleem's grandmother through a strategically torn sheet. His mother marries a poet on the run from assassins who hides out in their basement, but because he does not have sex with her winds up divorcing her. She then marries the businessman Ahmed Sinai and changes her name. On the stroke of India's birth, along comes Saleem. From this moment, his fate is tied with that of India. Like Saleem, the new nation of India--as well as Pakistan and Bangladesh--is finding its way and searching for its identity, though the answer is not really a happy one.

A side plot involves the "Midnight's Children," a group of children born in that first minute of India's existence. These 1001 children have supernatural abilities. Saleem can read minds while others master witchcraft, time travel, and so forth. This put me a little too in mind of the X-Men, though Saleem lacks the composure and leadership abilities of Charles Xavier and his rival Shiva is never as charismatic or evil as Magneto. (Recent TV viewers might compare this more to "Heroes" or "The 4400.") At any rate, I didn't particularly enjoy this subplot until at the end when it's used to demonstrate the madness of the Indira Gandhi regime.

Even if you're like me and have little understanding of India short of watching "Gandhi" you can still make sense of this book if you're willing to try. Make no mistake: this is not for the casual reader or the faint of heart. At the same time, the touches of humor--especially the bickering between Saleem and Padma about how to tell the story--and the supernatural make for an entertaining yarn. In the end you might also wonder what took you so long to find this wonderful book.

That is all.
(5/5 stars)

A to Z Challenge: Lord of the Rings

I read the Lord of the Rings books back in high school.  I never really got sucked into the whole Middle Earth thing like some people.  I didn't even see the first movie (Fellowship of the Ring) in the theater.  But then on Christmas I went with my sisters to see The Two Towers, the name of which was kind of bad timing in this was like a year or two after 9/11.  Anyway, I really liked that movie, especially at the end when Gandalf comes riding to the rescue with the cavalry and they're backlit by the sun and everything.  That was cool.  Return of the King was good, but maybe not as good as I was hoping it would be.  I haven't ever watched the Hobbit movies, but they're not really part of this.

Anyway, I wish I remembered the books better.  Obviously even though the director's cut versions are like 5 hours long apiece, they couldn't cram everything from the books in.  And there was stuff changed or rearranged for the movies.  Whatever.  Some years ago I bought a complete set of the books but I still have them in the shrink wrap.  I keep saying I'll get to rereading them but I never do.

You've probably seen the movies and read the books too, so which do you think is better?  I'm sure there are endless debates on this online.

A to Z Challenge: Killing Them Softly/Cogan's Trade

I said at the beginning that K was a hard one for whatever reason.  So after some research I found out that Killing Them Softly is based on the book Cogan's Trade from the 70s.  I hope the book is better than the movie, because the movie sucked ass.

The plot of the movie was a couple of bumbling idiots knock over a mob card game.  The mob is pissed and sends in Brad Pitt.  But he wusses out and brings in James Gandolfini, except Gandolfini is a drunk mess and so Pitt ends up doing it himself so easily that all I could wonder is why the fuck he didn't do it a long time ago.  Meanwhile Ray Liotta gets killed because he previously had a card game get robbed so everyone thinks he was in on it when he wasn't.

From Amazon reviews, the book I guess has a lot of dialogue in it.  It sounds like if Elmore Leonard wrote Richard Stark's Parker series.  If it wasn't $9.99 for the Kindle version maybe I'd read it.

Here's what I wrote about the movie in my April 2013 recap post:
Killing Them Softly:  I really dodged a bullet when this went out of theaters in two weeks when I might out of boredom gone to see it.  Who'd have thought a movie about an assassin hired to kill guys who robbed an underground poker game could be so boring?  It's over 20 minutes until Brad Pitt shows up in the movie and then we spend another 30 minutes on an entirely pointless subplot where he tries to recruit James Gandolfini to kill this guy he's done some work for in the past--except James Gandolfini never does it and Brad Pitt does the job so easily that why didn't he bother doing it right off the bat?  It's the same thing in the beginning where this guy grills this Australian guy about whether he's qualified for the robbery job and then a few minutes later says, "I don't care who you take; anyone could do this job."  Then why were you going on and on about how you were going to carefully screen people for the job?  It just seemed like padding to get it to 90 minutes.  Definitely one you can miss.

A to Z Challenge: Jurassic Park

Chances are you already saw the movie version of this.  I mean in 1993 this was like the biggest movie of the year.  In case you were under a rock back then, a billionaire creates a wildlife park that features cloned dinosaurs.  He invites some scientists to check out the park--and also brings in his grandkids--and of course the dinosaurs run amok.  The movie featured the T-Rex as the big baddie and the smaller Velociraptors as more mobile threats.

Like I said in my Beowulf entry, the book by Michael Crichton is probably better if you want more realism while the movie is better if you just want entertainment.  Probably the biggest difference between the two is that Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum in the movie) is killed in the book.  Which then it was awkward when Crichton wrote the sequel and had to bring him back to life by basically saying rumors of his death were exaggerated.  (Ha, yeah right.)  At the end of the book the army shows to rescue the people and destroy any remaining dinos, which was maybe alluded to in the second Jurassic Park movie, though maybe not.  The book also had the flying dinosaurs, who weren't really in the movies until the 3rd one and then had a larger role in Jurassic World.

Something interesting is that even the book wasn't the first time Crichton had written about a theme park gone wild.  In the 70s he wrote the movies Westworld (soon to be a series on Starz or Cinemax or one of those) and Futureworld.  Those featured theme parks where robots ran amok, parodied in an episode of The Simpsons.  So in large part Crichton actually updated his own story with dinosaurs and then it was updated again for the movies.

A to Z Challenge: It

This one I never read the book to.  I probably should but it's like 1000 freaking pages and the Kindle version probably costs $18.  Anyway, I think they're remaking it as a movie but back in the early 90s there was a miniseries on ABC based on the book starring Tim Curry as the creepy clown who terrorizes a group of people first as kids and then 30 years or so later as adults.

So like the first time the meddling kids stop the clown, but 30 years later he comes back starts to kill them one-by-one.  They eventually confront him in his underground lair, where he turns into a giant spider or some shit.  I haven't seen the movie since it came out, but the effects are probably kind of cheesy by modern standards.  It was definitely creepy when I saw it, though I was like 13 or 14 or something back then.  A lot of people think of Tim Curry from Rocky Horror Picture Show but I remember him more from It--and the crappy Annie movie my sister made me watch about 200 times.  I can't say it made me afraid of clowns, though it certainly didn't make me like them.

I'm not sure how a new version will stack up, if it even gets finished.  And maybe at some point I'll get around to reading the book.  Though probably not.

A to Z Challenge: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I have read both the book and movie of this as well.  The movie is somewhat the same as the book, but there are significant differences.  Which makes sense as I guess there was a radio version and a book and a computer game and they were all a little different.

But what's the same is that there's a guy named Arthur Dent who's just a normal bloke in a small town in England.  His home is about to be bulldozed when his mysterious friend Ford Prefect tells him that the whole Earth is going to be bulldozed.  Ford reveals he's an alien working for the publisher of a book called the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that's kind of a universal Frommer's travel guide.  Ford and Arthur manage to stow away on an alien ship only to be expelled into space, where they're picked up by the galactic president, who has stolen a ship called the Heart of Gold, along with a girl Arthur had a crush on.

The movie is a little more involved in that they have to go get some gun that can make people feel the same as the user.  It also plays up the relationship between Arthur and Tricia or Trillian, which I think was an improvement over the book.  But they both have a lot of great jokes about the wacky aliens in the galaxy.  The movie even manages to work in a few of the asides that made for some of the best jokes in the books.

You can watch either the book or the movie.  They're different enough that it's a different experience.  Personally I'd recommend both, though the movie takes less time.  Douglas Adams wrote the book and worked on the movie, though he didn't live long enough to see it finished.

A to Z Challenge: The Godfather

It might surprise you that I have watched the movie and read the book for this.  Then again some people might be surprised that there was a book at all.  But there was, written by Mario Puzo, who also contributed to the movie script.

The movie is of course excellent, consistently rated as one of the greatest films of all time.  There's an extraordinary cast and a sweeping story about the corruption and rise of Michael Corleone as he takes his father's position as a mob kingpin.  And in the epic finale has his henchman eliminate the heads of all the other "families" in New York to consolidate his power.

The book is OK but Puzo is not a great writer, so it reads more like a potboiler than a literary saga.  The story is mostly the same.  Actually a lot of the material about Vito Corleone (the Marlon Brando character) was featured in the second film so really the book is more of a compilation of Godfather Part 1 and Part 2.

I honestly don't think you need to read the book to watch the movie.  It doesn't add anything you don't get if you watch the first two Godfather movies.  Of course watching those movies takes like 6 hours, or almost as much as one Peter Jackson movie.  Zing!

A to Z Challenge: Feast of Love

There are two notable facts concerning me and the book this is based on.  First, the author of the book is from my home state and when frequent lurker and Amazon buddy Ethan Cooper mentioned that I decided to read the book.  And also there was once a social networking site called Gather where I won a movie adaptation version of the book.  I still have it as one of my few trophies.

Sadly I don't remember a lot about either book or movie. So this guy (Greg Kinnear in the movie) sees two young people screwing on the football field of the University of Michigan (which I think is Oregon in the movie) and then he meets up with an old guy (Morgan Freeman in the movie) who tells him these stories about love.  It's kind of like "Love Actually" or something like that with all these different people but then their lives kind of intersect.

I guess the thing to say about both book and movie is they were OK but not especially memorable.  But hey, here's my movie review!

Early in my Gather career I won a copy of the book "The Feast of Love" by Charles Baxter as part of a promotion for the movie. Yet I didn't ever watch the movie until now, when I saw that book on my shelf and wondered why I hadn't seen the film. I could have gone on waiting because this movie didn't make much of an impression on me. The best way of describing my disappointment is that this movie is too sappy to the point where I find it hard to suspend disbelief.

If you ever watched the TV show "Friends" (or did for a couple of seasons and then stopped caring like I did) you might remember the character Ross who wound up being married and divorced 3 times on the show. Bradley Smith (Greg Kinnear) gets into a similar fix, first when his wife for the last six years falls for another woman at a softball game. Later an attractive blond named Diana walks into Bradley's coffee shop in Portland, Oregon (the book incidentally was set in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is one of the reasons I read it, to support a "local" author) and Bradley gets her help on finding a new house that isn't haunted by his wife's ghost. They end up getting married, but there's just one hitch: Diane is having an affair with a married man, David--she was doing this even before she met Bradley. So you can guess how that's going to turn out.

Meanwhile, at the coffee shop a new employee named Chloe falls in love with her co-worker Oscar. Oscar is a former drug addict who lives with his abusive drunken father known as The Bat--and not because he dresses up in tights and fights crime at night. When Chloe consults a psychic, she gets some bad news about Oscar, but presses ahead anyway. You can guess how that's going to turn out too.

In the midst of it all is wise professor Harry (Morgan Freeman) who is on a leave of absence after his son's death from drug-related complications. Harry advises Bradley and Chloe with sage advice like make sure you have two kids--you know, in case the first one dies then you have a backup.

In other, better movies we might have dealt with this realistically with arguments, anger, recriminations, etc., but "Feast of Love" is hell-bent to prove to us that love conquers all to the point where we're supposed to believe that all these people who have broken up, cheated on each other, and so forth are going to get together for a merry little picnic with maybe a musical number at the end. Being somewhat cynical I have to conclude Bradley is either an idiot or the biggest doormat since Charlie Brown. Not even similarly-themed movies like "Love Actually" ask us to make that kind of leap.

I haven't read the book in a while, but I don't quite remember it being that hokey. Maybe I'm wrong. Anyway, if you're less of a cynic you might actually enjoy this movie as a good break from your Nicholas Sparks books. Though what's funny as one reviewer pointed out for a movie that takes such a saccharine view of dating there's an awful lot of nudity involved.

That is all.

My score: 2/4 stars

And even better, here's my book review too!

Let me begin by offering a word of caution. This is a literary book about love. It is not a "love story" in the traditional sense like "The Notebook". It's not particularly romantic.

It's more a disjointed narrative about Bradley Smith and the people around him--his neighbor and two of his employees--as they go through various relationships. Bradley's first two marriages go astray for different reasons. His third relationship works better. His neighbors have strained relations with their son. And his employees--Chloe and Oscar--are "Living on a Prayer" as Bon Jovi said.

I found it all sort of clinical and not thoroughly entertaining or engaging. The Chloe parts were the most interesting because of her unique voice. While the book I thought was supposed to deal with Bradley, Chloe came to dominate the story until Bradley disappears almost entirely in the last third of the book after he begins his third relationship. All I can tell you about that one is she's a black emergency room doctor from Africa. I guess she's nice, but there's no detail given to their relationship.

In the end, this book is hit-and-miss. That made it a slow read for me. While the prose is good enough and the characters are mostly interesting, it was not a compelling book for me. I hope you feel differently.

(3/5 stars)

So yeah both book and movie were kinda meh.

A to Z Challenge: Empire Falls

The movie for this is another non-theatrical movie.  It was actually a two-part miniseries on HBO some years ago.  The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, I think largely because it involves a school shooting on the heels of Columbine.  You know, before school shootings became so commonplace that no one cared anymore.  That's not to say it isn't a great book but was it the best book of that year?  I don't know.  It's like asking whether a movie like The Artist or Birdman or The Hurt Locker was really the best movie of that year.

Anyway, the book and movie take place again in Tony Laplume's backyard of Maine.  The titular town used to be a factory town but since the factory has gone belly-up the people struggle to survive.  Miles Roby runs a diner after he came back to care for his sick mother years ago.  He has a high-school age daughter and an ex-wife who's married to an older guy who calls himself the Silver Fox and like Cliff Claven seems to have a solution to everything.

The book is by Richard Russo, who previously wrote four or five other books about down-on-their-luck inhabitants in small Northeast towns, usually Maine or upstate New York.  Except for the school shooting, this pretty much is the same as most of those.  What Russo does really well is paint a picture of small town life, like a realistic version of Norman Rockwell paintings.  As someone from Michigan, it was something I could really relate to for the most part.

The miniseries pretty much covers the whole book.  I don't think it really needed to be two parts.  If they had done a theatrical version it could have been shorter and covered all the main points pretty well I think.  Mostly though I didn't like the casting.  They cast Ed Harris as Miles Roby and Philip Seymour Hoffman as his brother but they should have been the other way around.  In the book Miles is a chubby, balding, affable doormat, and Ed Harris is pretty much only one of those.  Hoffman would have been much better suited but I think this was before he won an Oscar so he didn't have enough notoriety I guess.  Plus they cast Helen Hunt as the ex-wife and she just sucks.  The saving grace was Paul Newman as Miles's irascible father.

Honestly I'd read the book first and then watch the movie if you feel like it and can find it.  (If you have HBO Go or HBO Now it should be on there.)  Though the better Russo book/movie combination is Nobody's Fool.  The story is somewhat the same in that it involves life in a northern town and a local scoundrel named Sully who tries to reconnect with his son.  The book is a little long but very well-written and the movie was actually a theatrical release starring Paul Newman (who was nominated for an Oscar) and Jessica Tandy in one of her last roles.  I'd have used that as an entry but I have a different N in mind.

A to Z Challenge: Dive From Clausen's Pier

The movie for this is a little obscure in that it's a Lifetime movie from the 2000s.  You can get it on DVD from Amazon.  I did actually watch it; pretty much the only time I watched Lifetime in the last 15 years.

The book I had picked up from the library for...reasons.  Honestly I don't remember.  I read just about the whole thing while sitting around in the room for jury duty.  I never got called to sit on a jury but I had to spend two days sitting around in that room feeling like a fucking prisoner because you couldn't even go to the bathroom without permission and an escort.  Hurm, I wonder why people try to get out of jury duty and ignore the notices?

Anyway, the titular event is this girl Carrie's boyfriend dives off the pier into a Wisconsin lake.  But he hits the bottom and breaks his neck.  The thing is, Carrie was going to break up with him before the trip but now she's forced into being the supportive girlfriend first when her boyfriend is comatose and then afterwards when he wakes up and tries to recover from being paralyzed pretty much from the neck down.

But eventually she gets sick of this and bolts to New York.  She makes some quirky new friends and starts going to fashion design school, which she seems to have a knack for.  There's a mysterious (and of course handsome) stranger named Kilroy she hooks up with.  But eventually she goes back to Wisconsin.  Will she get back together with her boyfriend?

The movie is a decent adaptation for the most part.  It's the kind that hits all the main points for the book, but it's sort of a watered-down, Cliff Notes type version.  The only black mark I give them is in the book her New York friend Simon is gay but in the movie they cut all of that out.  Because I guess a gay guy was too racy for a Lifetime movie.  HBO probably would have done a better, higher budget adaptation, but it wasn't bad.

I wouldn't have read the book as quickly as I did and might not have liked it as much if I hadn't been stuck in a cage where the only other entertainment was The Tony Danza Show.  This was before we had iPhones and tablets and stuff too  Anyway, while I guess it's "women's fiction" or maybe even the dreaded "chick lit" the book does a good job of not falling into too many romance-type cliches.  And it manages to effectively convey the moral ambiguity involved in the scenario.  This is one of the few cases where the book is probably a lot easier to obtain than the movie, so you're probably better off with that.

As a Fun Fact, the movie stars Michelle Trachtenberg, whose prior claim to fame was starring in the crappy Inspector Gadget live action movie as his niece Penny.  Her other notable credit is as the scream queen of Robot Chicken.  In one sketch she voices a Gummy bear that gets caught in a bear trap and has to eat its own leg to escape and when the bear gets caught in the trap she unleashes this ear-piercing scream that probably shattered the sound booth glass.  Really they should have gotten her to play Black Canary on "Arrow" because she could have just done that scream instead of needing a special collar.  I'm just saying.

A to Z Challenge: Cider House Rules

You should know I would not do this without a John Irving novel in the mix.  And if you're going with one, you should probably go with the one he adapted into a screenplay and won an Oscar for.  That's just common sense.

Since the author adapted it, the plot of book and movie are pretty much the same.  In the early 20th Century up in Tony Laplume's backyard of Maine there's an orphanage run by a Dr. Wilbur Larch.  Since this is long before Roe v. Wade, he gives illegal abortions to women who stop at the orphanage.  But of course some women just leave a live kid there.  One of those is Homer Wells, who is adopted a few times, but it never worked out so he became the doctor's apprentice.

Then a wealthy guy and the hot lobster farmer's daughter he knocked up show up.  The girl, named Candy, gets an abortion and Homer is smitten with her.  He goes with her and her boyfriend Wally to an apple orchard, where he works picking apples with a bunch of black migrant workers.

Where the movie and book diverge is that in the book there's a 15-year jump from World War II to the 50s.  By then Candy has given birth to Angel, a boy fathered by Homer.  Angel falls in love with a migrant worker named Rose Rose, but she has gotten knocked up by her dad and so Angel gets his dad's help performing an abortion.  Yay?

The movie doesn't have that jump, which is just as well because it would make the movie like 3 hours long and the son thing didn't really matter all that much in the scheme of things.  It's pared down so that it all happens within a year and Homer doesn't fall in love with Rose Rose but is moved by her plight enough to help her.

Of course there are a lot of people who won't read the book or watch the movie because of the abortion issue.  What I like best is instead of shouting about God or shrieking, "My body, my choice" or any other slogans you might see on picket signs, it takes the pragmatic view that outlawing abortion forces women to make impossible and desperate choices that often lead to mother and fetus dying.  The book is more graphic about this than the movie.  In the book a woman takes some potion that basically liquefies her insides.  The other side of the coin is what happens to the orphans from those fetuses who don't get aborted.  The book goes a lot more into the life of Melony, a girl who like Homer never really found a home.  She's seen a few times in the movie but in the book she's a big, bossy girl who goes to a city to work in an aircraft factory during WWII and becomes a lesbian.  There's also Fuzzy Stone, a sick kid who eventually dies.  So really you see the human cost that makes it a lot less black-and-white than bumper stickers make it sound.

The movie is not quite as effective as the book if only because a lot had to be cut out for a manageable running time.  But the movie is a lot less dense for the more casual reader who doesn't want to wade through more than 500 pages.

There you go.  I could have also done The Hotel New Hampshire, The World According to Garp, A Widow for One Year/The Door in the Floor, and A Prayer for Owen Meany/Simon Birch but I didn't.  Too bad none of them started with a K or X.

A to Z Challenge: Beowulf

I'll admit I never actually read Beowulf the 8th Century (or whenever) text.  I haven't read The Iliad, the Odyssey, or Canterbury Tales either.  But I did read Eaters of the Dead, which is based on Beowulf.  And since I had another idea for E, I figured I might as well do this.  If it makes you feel better I did watch the Robert Zemeckis movie from 2005 or so with that creepy Polar Express animation.  It was OK but really that animation is weird.  It makes it hard to lose yourself in the story.

Eaters of the Dead is a more realistic version of the story.  It starts when an Arab poet is caught banging a sultan's daughter or some such thing and gets banished on a crummy expedition.  He meets up with some "Northmen," who take him far north to a village that is beset by what people seem to think is a fire monster, but is actually a bunch of little Neanderthal-type dudes with torches and wearing bearskins.  As the title suggests, they eat their dead, which is why no bodies were recovered until the Arab and his Northmen buddies find a way to stop them.

The movie version is called the 13th Warrior because I guess the other title sounded like a zombie flick.  And also because the Arab is the 13th guy selected to go on the expedition up north.  It's kind of a Fellowship of the Ring thing going on there.  A lot of the movie is the same but there were two differences involving the Arab.

First, in the book the Arab never learns the Northman language.  Which in a movie would be really annoying because you'd have to do everything in subtitles.  So in the movie they show him watching the Northmen and picking up their language until he's more or less fluent.  Realistic?  No, but it's a good practical idea to make it easy on the audience.

Second, in the book the Arab is carrying around a huge Northman sword that he can never really wield and thus isn't all that important to the action.  In the movie, he takes one of the Northman swords and turns it into a scimitar that he can actually use.  Again, it's not as realistic but you paid for Antonio Banderas to star in the movie so you actually want him to be contributing to the fight scenes.

Basically the distinction is if you want more realism, read the book.  If you want more entertainment, watch the movie.  If you want to be creeped out, watch the Robert Zemeckis movie.  If you want to be bored, read the 8th Century epic poem.

A to Z Challenge: American Psycho

The first entry for this year's A to Z Challenge is a movie I've seen based on a book I've read, so huzzah.  There's some debate on whether you should read the book before you watch the movie.  In this case I watched the movie first.

The 2000 movie version starred Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman, a Wall Street weasel in the 80s who lives fast with plenty of sex, drugs, and terrible 80s music--and he murders people on the side.  He's basically the poster boy for "affluenza," rich people who think they can do whatever they want.  What's most memorable about the movie is how it meshes crappy 80s music with violent murders.  At one point Bateman lectures a guy about Huey Lewis & the News before chopping off his head with an ax.  Later another victim receives a lecture on Phil Collins and Genesis.  During sex he waxes poetic about Whitney Houston (while also checking himself out in the mirror--the definition of a narcissist) though the studio didn't pay for an actual Whitney Houston song, this being before she became a hopeless junkie.

In the book the music bits are just asides that really don't have much to do with anything except to help illustrate what a creepy loser he is.  Since the movie is only R-rated it's much less violent and gory than the book.  Notably there's a part in the book where he traps a sewer rat and then teases it to climb inside someone's rectum.  The thing is, I didn't really miss a lot of the violence because most of it was gratuitous.  By the rat part you really get desensitized to the violence and gore because there's just so much of it.  So really the movie's better in that it highlights only a few things, enough to give us the gist that this dude is seriously fucked up.

It's the kind of movie that I think is good enough where you don't really miss a whole lot if you don't read the book.  Unless you really want to read about a rat climbing into some dude's anus.  In which case you probably are also an American Psycho.

A couple of musical Fun Facts:  in the book he says his favorite band is Talking Heads, whose first hit song was "Psycho Killer" in 1977.  There's also a song by The National called "I'm Afraid of Everyone," a reference to a line from the book.

And as a bonus Fun Fact:  I could have done an R entry on Rules of Attraction, which is not a sequel but features Bateman's younger brother, played in the movie by the Dawson, James Vanderbeek.  But I did a different thing for R in part because I don't think I ever read the book.