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.