Thursday Movie Picks #457: Book Adaptation

Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your movie picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five movies and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Book Adaptation

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Another quick one. I haven’t seen much this year so I’m just going to go for the last 3 book adaptations I saw and can’t say I like any of them very much.

The Pale Blue Eye (2022)

Picked this a few weeks ago for the Period Drama TMP. As was said then, found the mystery in the movie a little thin. However, the movie had great visuals. The wintry landscape was perfect for a gothic horror.

 

Bullet Train (2022)

It was interesting, but a little too loud (visually), theatrical and manic for me.

Where the Crawdads (2022)

This book is like super popular. It’s a mystery but seem to be going for more of the literary fiction side which is just not my thing. I prefer fun mysteries or dark gritty mysteries, this looks like neither, so I never read the book. Anyway the movie is so so…the story is quite bland…kinda feels like you know one of those “inspirational” TV movies.

 

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Participating Blogs/Bloggers

 

Thursday Movie Picks #384: Book Adaptations

Hello there and welcome to Thursday Movie Picks a weekly series where you share your movie picks each Thursday. The rules are simple: based on the theme of the week pick three to five movies and tell us why you picked them. For further details and the schedule visit the series main page here.

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This week's Thursday Movie Picks is Book Adaptations

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This is one of those themes that I have almost every year, so I'm picking movies that I like that I've seen the past year since the same theme last year.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

Based off the memoir of a literary forger. This movie is soo good. It basically follows these unlikeable characters going about their sad lives and their little enterprise of forging letters of famous people and selling them as the real thing and it is such a sharply funny movie. Also good performance by the two leads.

The Invisible Man (2020)

This is a loose adaptation of H.G. Wells novel and I like the movie a lot. I though it was pretty clever of them to make the "invisible man" the main character's abusive ex-husband and the premise is on this whole thing of if the ex-husband really had the ability to become invisible and was stalking his ex-wife or is she so traumatized by his abuse that she is in constant paranoid fear and "seeing" him everywhere even when he isn't there, which is what the people around her believes.

 

Fear Street: Part One - 1994 (2021), Fear Street: Part Two - 1978 (2021), Fear Street: Part Three - 1666 (2021)

I grew up reading the Fear Street series of books (there were a  lot of them) and have always wanted to see an adaptation of the books. This is not a straight adaptation of any one of the books (at least I don't think so). It's more of they took the world building of the books and created a new story for these trilogy of movies. Anyway I still enjoyed these movies, I'm actually very surprised by how well they turned out...10 year old me is happy...that's not to say this a movie for kids, it definitely isn't...what I mean is that it manages to capture the spirit, style of the books.

 

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In With the New Blogathon

Finally...here it is my entry to Wendell@Dell on Movies In With the New blogathon. A little late but just in time for Wendell's new deadline. The gist of the blogathon is to pick a remake/reimagining that is better than the original. One caveat is that no sequels are allowed. Since I love watching adaptations of books and tend to watch different adaptations of them I immediately went for an adaptation and it is:

Jane Eyre

The thing that book readers have to get used to is that any adaptation of a book will most likely fall short of what you want it to be. Firstly nothing is going to be able to be that perfect little movie that plays out in your head as you read. Secondly they're never going to fit in hundreds of pages in a two hour movie, something will be left out, but most of all the adaptation is going to be someone else interpretation of the book, not yours. Now Jane Eyre is one of those books that is old enough and popular enough to have been adapted countless times. So if you're a fan of Jane Eyre, like me, you're bound to find something you'd like in one of the many adaptations, which I have. Since this is a movie blogathon, I'm only sticking to the movie adaptations.

  
The earliest of the three Jane Eyre movies I've seen is the 1943 version. I was actually really looking forward to this because Joan Fontaine who plays Jane was brilliant in Rebecca (as Rebecca) just 3 years earlier and that story is pretty much a modern day version of the Jane Eyre story, but unfortunately the movie is unremarkable so much so that I have forgotten I have ever seen it. The next Jane Eyre adaptation is the 1996 version which I thought had a good Jane in Charlotte Gainsbourg. However, the childhood part of Jane Eyre was a little length and incredibly overacted and the thing that probably hurt this movie the most was that William Hurt was terribly miscast as Rochester. So with this blogathon being about the new being better, it is pretty clear that the 2011 adaptation is the one I think is better and here's a few reasons why (beware of some spoilers).

The non linear narrative. It tells a well known story differently and that is refreshing, beginning at the 2/3 point of the novel where Jane flees Thornfield and the story goes back and forth before finally catching up. 

A gothic tale will not do without beautiful sweeping shots of the moors. 

Seriously this movie is visually stunning.

And I have to add sometimes we forget that there was no electricity in the 19th century with the amount of light in the night scenes of some period movies, so I thought it was great that this Jane Eyre had a lot of night scenes lit only by the warm glow of a few candles.

The music. There were some beautiful string music used to heighten the tense scenes.

I like Jane for her independent spirit, her quiet strength, restraint and resoluteness, but the book is told in first person and with Jane being such a quiet internal character it can be quite a difficult story and character to put on screen. With a lesser screenplay and actress, Jane Eyre may appear dense and passive, but Mia Wasikowska plays it so well. She is so expressive, saying so much with so little. 

"I'm not fond of children. Nor do I particularly enjoy simple minded old ladies. But you might suit me, if you would."

"Ah, there you are! Just like one of your tricks to steal in along with the twilight. If I dared to touch you, see if you were real."

Rochester we all know is the older man, master of the house, a brooder, surly and abrupt. What I find missing in some of the other adaptations is the mean cutting remarks Rochester make to the people he doesn't care for and also the playful and teasing side of Rochester especially when he is with Jane, so it's great to see that all of these sides of Rochester made it to this adaptation and Michael Fassbender has just the right mix of darkness and charm as Rochester.

Lastly the chemistry between the leads is electric and came through especially well in their parting scene.


So that's my pick of a new adaptation that I think is better than the earlier ones I've seen. Have you seen this Jane Eyre? How do you think it fare against the other adaptations?