When I had heard that The Book Thief was being made into a movie, I pitied the director who would be faced with the challenge of adapting such a lovely book to the big screen. Markus Zusak’s novel, about a German girl in Nazi Germany is easily one of my top five books of the …
In my head, Sam Shepard and I would be friends. Unlikely friends, perhaps, but, you know, simpatico. I like his sense of humor, I love the way he writes, and I love that he seems to care about nothing and everything at the same time. He’s a laid back badass who lives life on his …
The work of Beatrix Potter is so ubiquitous that you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know about Peter Rabbit, Squirrel Nutkin, or Jemimah Puddleduck, but how many of us have stopped to think about the woman who brought these iconic characters to life? As much as I loved her books, I never really …
Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) is a young graduate student writing her thesis on Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella), an acclaimed novelist in his twilight years. When she visits him in person to request a series of personal interviews, Schiller politely turns her away. Later, however, Schiller comes across one of Heather’s pieces in a literary journal. …
In a very interesting and striking promotional stunt for a movie, The Book Thief’s marketers from Fox paid for a two-page ad campaign of no words, no images… nothing. In fact, it must have been alarming for readers of the The New York Times to open their morning paper and see pages 9 and 10 …
Back in the day, as Hollywood is wont to do (over and over), there were two movies about the exact same thing that came out almost at the same time. In this case, the subject was the summer of decadence, drugs, and storytelling that spawned Mary Shelley’s classic tale of horror, Frankenstein; or, The Modern …
Salinger is a fascinating, frustrating, and more than a little creepy film that digs and digs and digs to find the dark secrets behind the persona of a famously reclusive modern writer who happened to write an iconic 20th century American novel. For two hours, the film stalks its subject with obsession, piecing together a …
It is hard not to imagine Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as the characters they played in Love Actually. In that film, Emma has a devastating scene where she truly figures out that he is having an affair. The Song of Lunch almost feels like a sequel where, 15 years later, Emma has triumphed and …
If I can say one thing about The Words: It’s off the charts when it comes to having an attractive movie poster. It’s tough to be so pretty as Bradley Cooper and Zoë Saldana lying together on a moodily lit bed. Even though they are fully clothed: Wow. As for the movie, it is trying …