The story is told through the eyes of a madman…who, like all of us, believed that he was sane.
Edgar Allan Poe was the master of horror. And occasionally, images can turn his words into something even more frightening.
Don’t believe me?
Watch this 1953 American animated short film directed by Ted Parmelee and narrated by James Mason based on Poe’s classic short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”.
Jeffrey Eugenides is one of my favourite authors. I’ve read all his books (he doesn’t have many, but still), and I consider Middlesex to be one of my all-time favourites. I went to see him speak when he came to Toronto last year. In my eyes, he’s pretty much a rock star.
So, knowing all this, you’ll forgive me for watching the poorly reviewed film The Switch. I swear I only watched it because it was based on a short story Eugenides wrote for the New Yorker entitled “Baster”. Even though I love Jason Bateman, I would never have watched this movie if Eugenides wasn’t listed as a writer on it.
But despite all the negative reviews and the super corny trailer, I didn’t think the movie was that bad. I’ve definitely seen worse, although perhaps I shouldn’t admit that. I was curious what Eugenides thought of the movie so I did a little searching and found this interview he did back in 2010. His response pretty much says it all:
“Baster,” a story you published in the magazine in 1996, has been adapted for the screen and will be released in August as “The Switch,” with Jennifer Anniston and Jason Bateman. Sofia Coppola, of course, directed an adaption of your first novel, “The Virgin Suicides,” in 1999. Have you seen “The Switch”? What’s it like, in general, to think about your work taking on another, cinematic, life?
The fact that the movie has a different title than the story might give you some idea of how close a correspondence exists between the two. The plot of my story takes up the first twenty or thirty minutes of the film. From there, the screenwriter developed an entirely different outcome. “Baster” is merely the premise of the film. But even that’s not quite true. My story is about an unattractive man who’s in love with a beautiful woman. It deals, comedically, with the Darwinist question: is it better to be good-looking or clever? Now,Jason Bateman isn’t unattractive. The casting went in the other direction, as they say out in Hollywood, and the movie followed it. You might say that “Baster” is to “The Switch” what cello is to cellophane.
You want to know if this bothers me, I think. I’m not sure. I don’t mind that they extended the storyline. I understand the need for that. “Baster” just doesn’t contain enough plot for a feature-length movie. What I mind more (though I don’t really mind, I don’t really care all that much, to be honest—it’s just a movie) is that the story was about one thing and the film is about another.
Making movies is a fragile enterprise. You might have a wonderful script but not be able to cast an appropriate actor to play the lead. Then you get another actor and you have to re-write the script for him or her. As a novelist, I pity film directors their lack of autonomy. And I’m sure film directors pity just about everything about novelists.
Yikes. I wonder if we’ll see another Eugenides adaptation anytime soon.
If you hadn’t heard of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore before last weekend, I’m sure you did after it won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.
Well deserved, I think. It reminds us all that books still matter. As the film’s website puts it, Morris Lessmore ”is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor.”
It’s worth watching. It’s worth buying. And then it’s worth watching again.
And for an interesting point of view on the film (and one I don’t happen to agree with), check out this article from the New Yorker.
The title of this post is a bit misleading since I haven’t actually seen the movie version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Yet.
There was something about the book that really moved me. I held off reading it for so long, and I had read plenty of negative reviews (Like this one. Yikes.). But when I finally got around to reading it, I couldn’t help but love it just a little.
And even trying to explain what it was that I loved about it doesn’t seem right because the reasons why I did were all so personal. That’s why I completely understand when people say that they hated the book. It demands that type of emotional reaction. No matter what you think of Foer’s book, the movie stars Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, so a few important Hollywood people obviously loved it.
Everything I know about Ed Wood I’ve learned from watching the Tim Burton film starring Johnny Depp. (Here’s the trailer if you have no idea what I’m talking about.)
I know he was a legendary film director who made incredibly bad movies and liked to dress up in women’s clothes. Perhaps you know this, too.
But something I didn’t know that I recently learned from Flavorwire is that Ed Wood was also a writer. He wrote really sleazy fiction using various pseudonyms, and today the collection of his books is extremely rare. The Boo-Hooray exhibition space in New York is hosting Ed Wood’s Sleaze Paperbacks until December 4th. The exhibit features about 70 of Ed Wood’s books.
The Boo-Hooray website says this about Mr. Wood’s writing: Ed Wood’s sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he’d write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950’s. He’d riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He’d write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity.
Sounds interesting, right?
If you make it to the exhibit, please let me know how it was. In the meantime I think I’ll pick up the Ed Wood bio Nightmare of Ecstasy. I feel like his entire life would make for an interesting read.
I’m a writer and editor with my own business, Florence In Print. I like to write about things and read what others have written (sometimes with a red pen). I also love travel, fashion, food, art, and many other things that I want to talk about.
Nice to meet you.
