Category: Film

As I wrote back in 2009, Michel Faber’s first novel Under The Skin will probably get under your skin, and provoke a severe reaction. I see that the novel has now been made into a film. While it sounds as though liberties have been taken with the plot, I hope that Isserly’s odyssey remains as strange and as haunting as in the original story.

The Dreams of Space blog has an entry that shows a children’s comic produced in 1968 that ties-in to the release that year of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It depicts two children, Debbie and Robin, being taken to see the premiere of the film by their parents.

It’s an interesting piece of ephemera, but it does lie about the story. It states that the “repairman” (actually Dr. Frank Poole), sent out to repair the communications unit on the spaceship Discovery, slips and floats away into space. Er, no he didn’t – he was murdered.

There’s also the obligatory cringeworthy ending in the final panel when Debbie announces that she wants to be a space stewardess when she grows up, while Robin says he wants to be a space pilot. Gah!

“Cloud Atlas” is the name of a remarkable book by David Mitchell. A Russian Doll of a book, it contains stories within stories that link and arc to form a narrative that spans centuries and civilizations.

I thought it was amazing.

And now, it appears that a film of the book has been made. Even the trailer is almost six minutes long – it will be interesting to see how the film stacks up to the book. There are, at least, some good actors involved, so one can but hope.

Update 4 September 2012: there’s a very good article on the making of the film in the current New Yorker. Definitely worth reading. I still fear for how the film will turn out. The Wachowskis are known for their bravura visual style over depth of characterisation (e.g. The Matrix), while the book is almost the complete opposite. Still, fingers crossed, the film may yet stand on its own feet as a work of art.

What books get up to at night.

I sometimes wonder what happens in my library deep in the night as well.

(hat tip to Matthew Cobb over at Why Evolution is True)

A few years back, I bought The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick. Although it’s ostensibly a children’s book, I was attracted to it because the book is a work of art in its own right. Even when the book is closed and sitting on the bookshelf, Hugo’s eye stares out at you and you feel yourself drawn to reach out and discover what lies within.

The only bit of colour is the book’s cover, everything else is black or white or shades of grey.

Selznick mixes pages of black and white drawings into his text, and, as befits a story that concerns Georges Méliès, the sequences of drawings, on pages edged with black, flow like an unfolding film, with pans, zooms, and cuts. Indeed, the very first page invites the reader to imagine sitting in a darkened room waiting for a film to start:

And now, a film has been made of the book. Because this is a children’s film, the director, somewhat surprisingly, turns out to be Martin Scorsese. But it makes sense when you realise that he has a great knowledge of, and affection for, the history of film. The trailer looks good (although I detest, with a passion, the sound of the trailer narrator’s voice), and the film is garnering good reviews.

It doesn’t open here in The Netherlands until next February, but, when it does, I’ll definitely make one of my rare trips to the cinema to see it.