From My Collection: Brokeback Mountain Movie Review

I read “The New Yorker” magazine with some regularity. Each issue has a short story included that I usually start, but don’t finish. They rarely grab hold of me. But I went back and took a look at E. Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” which first appeared in October 1997. It is an absolutely brilliant example of economy of story and character development. She squeezes more information into a single line of dialogue than other writers can get onto a page and fifty times the words. She won an O. Henry award for the story.

Life of Pi Movie Review

I have never agreed with the general sentiment that “the book was better than the movie.” This has always seemed a meaningless assertion to me. Books and movies might set out to accomplish a similar task – telling a story – but the ways they go about it could hardly be less similar. Books have the space to fill in details you can’t possibly bring to light in a film. A reader is privy to setting descriptions, histories, character development and inner thoughts that often can’t be represented on the screen. A movie does the imagining for the viewer. Whereas a book allows a reader to visualize images evoked by the words on the page, a film director, cinematographer, writer, etc., present their personal visualizations, which most likely don’t mesh with yours. What we need to test is whether or not the film adaptation of a book is 1) some sort of faithful adaptation and 2) good on its own terms by the standards laid out through cinema history. It doesn’t matter if the movie tells the same story in the same exact way as the book. All that matters is that the movie works. Does it draw you in? Do you learn enough about the characters to care about their fates? Is the story moving?

Modern Classic Movie Review: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

From about the mid-1990s to the first years of the twenty-first century, starting with the mainstream introduction of Jackie Chan in North America, Asian martial arts films achieved something beyond the cult status they once had. It was probably a question of time and perhaps somewhat inevitable that eventually one would go on to garner the kind of awards that indicate a certain level of popular acceptance. That it happened only five years after Jackie Chan’s first US hit, Rumble in the Bronx, is somewhat remarkable.

When Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was released it quickly became one of the most successful subtitle films of all time. It was nominated for 10 Oscars – a record for a foreign language film. There were reports of applause in movie theaters at the conclusion of the first fight and chase sequence along the rooftops. Although it continued a grand tradition of martial arts films involving mysticism, the warrior’s philosophy, and seemingly supernatural powers, this was the first time it was not only seen en masse, but with stunning production value.