Yeah Ewan McGregor spearheading the American Pastoral film seems... odd. And thecorny trailer featuring another fucking Mad World cover does not inspire high hopes.
― circa1916, Sunday, 14 August 2016 02:30 (seven years ago) link
I thought this adaptation of Indignation sucked. Like I said, I bought the book a couple weeks ago because the trailer was baffling. Another win for trailer companies? It was a totally lifeless take on a really bleak and nuanced book, I think Richard Brody was otm in his review: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/a-sterilized-philip-roth-adaptation
If a movie based on a good book is worth watching, it’s worth watching on its own terms. The comparison of the movie to the book is a matter of mere curiosity, except when the movie isn’t much of an experience at all—that’s when the comparison becomes a matter of diagnosis. In the writer and director James Schamus’s adaptation of “Indignation,” which opened on Friday, there’s no Beethoven; the music that Bertram blasts is Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4. The difference matters; the musical choice marks the difference between intimate expression and public display, between the terrifying and visionary novel and the cramped and simplistic movie. Schamus doesn’t just cut out the Beethoven; he cuts the heart out of the novel and delivers only its inert remains to the screen.
It was just really rote, and yeah it was faithful to the novel in terms of dialogue and basic plot, but the strange structure and the gradual reveals are gone. Wasted opportunity. It's a pretty weird and dark book, this felt like a TV movie run through. Bought American Pastoral, gonna read that before the movie in October, I guess I shouldn't get my hopes up...
― flappy bird, Monday, 15 August 2016 17:52 (seven years ago) link
amer pastoral the film was okay, way too melodramatic and a few unforgiveable changes from the novel but i expected that tbh
― johnny crunch, Friday, 4 November 2016 21:24 (seven years ago) link
******SPOILER ALERT*******
i haven't read the book in about a decade but i seem to remember that so much of the book is in the swede's head, like an important moment is the part about the swede worrying that him kissing his daughter too-fully in a possibly inappropriate manner at the beach when she was a child was the cause of her later personal problems
― harold melvin and the bluetones (jim in vancouver), Friday, 4 November 2016 22:46 (seven years ago) link
also mcgregor really isn't what you picture when you think of the swede at all.
― harold melvin and the bluetones (jim in vancouver), Friday, 4 November 2016 22:47 (seven years ago) link