The Book Revue
WELCOME TO A NEW TYPE OF BOOK CLUB
Attention Book Revue fans. Our next event takes place on Sunday, April 15, at 3:30 p.m. Critic Geoff Pevere introduces All the President’s Men, directed by Alan Pakula, and starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the investigative journalists who uncovered the Watergate conspiracy and wrote a book about their exploits.
As always, there will be book giveaways as door prizes and free snacks during a short break after the film. Our host presents a short introduction, and a discussion follows the screening.
Tickets: $10 for members and seniors; $12 for non-members.
Coming Up:
Midnight Cowboy, Tuesday, May 22, 6:45 p.m. The 1969 film, directed by John Schlesinger, won Oscars for best picture, best director and best adapted screenplay. It stars Jon Voight (Angelina's Dad), Dustin Hoffman and that poignant harry Nilsson song Everybody's Talkin'. The book is one of three novels by American writer and actor James Leo Herilhy.
The Black Stallion: Sunday, June 17, 3:30 p.m.Directed by Caroll Ballard and released in 1979, this film is a visual treat. (Many scenes were also filmed around Toronto.) It closely follows the book, by Walter Farley, published in 1941 when he was still in college. Chances are you read and loved the book when you were younger!ok Revue screening. He'll introduce the film and lead the post-screening discussion.
Past Events
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tuesday, March 20, 6:45 p.m.
Here are some of our host Geoff Pevere's comments about our March selection, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:
"When Martin Ritt's adaptation of John le Carré’s career-making 1963 novel hit the screen, it was met with a combination of excitement and confusion: excitement because nobody had ever seen a spy movie quite like this one, and confusion for the same reason: where were the girls, the gadgets and the nuclear-armed supervillains?
"No, this was no Bond, but then le Carré was no Ian Fleming. Although the two authors shared a real-life history in the British security service, their approach to fictionalizing the experience was diametrically opposed. Where Fleming used his past as the raw material for macho, comic-book fantasy, Le Carré captured the drab and tragic workaday reality of the spy business.
"This was what The Spy Who Came in From the Cold depicted with such stark power, and what Martin Ritt's movie captured with such electrifying precision. As the spy whose heart contradicts his duty, Richard Burton was smolderingly effective."
About the Film:
Released in 1965
Directed by Martin Ritt
Starring Richard Burton, Claire Bloom,Oskar Werner.
Past Book Revue Events:
The Age of Innocence, Sunday, February 26, at 3:30 p.m.
Book Revue fans, for February we're offering our first Sunday event. We also welcome our guest host Adam Nayman, who will introduce the film and take part in a post-screening discussion.
Adam is a critic for The Grid in Toronto and a contributing editor to Cinema Scope. He also writes on film for The Globe and Mail, Cineaste and The Walrus and teaches documentary cinema at Ryerson University.
About the Book:
Edith Wharton's novel of 1920, which made her the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is a keen examination of the rules and etiquette of upper-class New York of the 1870s. Wharton constantly pits New York against European society of the same time, portraying the former at once as quintessentially modern and grotesquely primitive. The novel examines the relationship between Newland Archer and his high society wife May as well as the object of his desire, May's ostracized, European cousin Ellen. In these two women Newland finds emblems of new society and old values. Wharton, herself, was a worldly and modern woman. She, like Ellen, split her adult life between Europe and New York. And she, also, was the divorcee of a marriage that brought her to Europe. Wharton is therefore understanding of Ellen's position in this relationship, though it's really Newland's growth as a character that she has focused on.
Pulitzer Controversy: The three fiction judges in 1921 chose Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, but was overruled by the Columbia University trustees who praised the book for its “wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Wharton wondered if they had understood the book. For more on the controversy, click here.
About the Film:
This stately 1993 adaptation stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder (the latter in an Oscar-nominated performance). Joanne Woodward provides an excellent voiceover narration, tender yet demonstrating an assertive voice for women of the mid-19th century. The film appears to be a departure for Scorsese, closely following two of the roughest films of his career, Goodfellas and Cape Fear. What people often forget is that throughout his career Scorsese has interspersed his dark and gangster films with domestic dramas, sometimes through the eyes of female protagonists (New York, New York, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Kundun). What is most surprising, perhaps, is how deftly Scorsese recreates the frightening world of upper New York, where behaviour, heritage and marriage have as much control over one's life as the rules of the street and the crime organizations Scorsese has so well portrayed in his other films. This is an important film for Scorsese, fitting squarely within the director's cannon.
Oscar Info: Scorsese’s latest film, Hugo, leads the pack for Oscar nominations. Art Direction is among one of the 11nominations. Dante Ferretti, the production designer for Hugo, worked first with Scorsese on The Age of Innocence, having served his apprenticeship in Rome on films directed by Pasolini and Fellini. The Age of Innocence was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Art Direction, winning for Best Costume Design.
The Graduate (1967), directed by Mike Nichols.
Tuesday, January 24, 6:45 p.m.
The Graduate was based on Charles Webb's novel of the same name from 1963. He wrote it after graduating from Williams College, basing certain characters on people within his family's circle. The story follows the protagonist, Ben (played by Dustin Hoffman in the film), during the period after he graduates college. While trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life – his parents pressuring him to attend a top-notch Grad school – Ben becomes involved with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's colleague.
Webb has been asked repeatedly since he wrote the book about his own similarities to the characters and events depicted in the novel. Finally, he admitted the name of his real-life inspiration for Mrs. Robinson, though to this day he denies that they had a relationship. Read the article “The Real Life Parallels of The Graduate” here.
The film, adapted by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry and directed by Mike Nichols in 1967, is still considered one of the best films of all time (appearing on most canons) and one of the highest earning as well (considering inflation). It was nominated for 7 Academy Awards, winning for Best Director, including Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actress and Adapted Screenplay. Only Nichols' second film (following Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and Dustin Hoffman's first major film, The Graduate features everyone involved at the top of their game. The casting process was long – Robert Redford was Nichols' first choice for Ben, and everyone from Ava Gardner to Doris Day and Joan Crawford was considered for the role of Mrs. Robinson – and ended up with actors of considerable age discrepancies from their characters. Age plays such an important role in the film, with the “middle-aged” Anne Bancroft playing the character with the strongest libido. Though in the film Mrs. Robinson claims to be twice Ben's age – and ultimately Ben marries her daughter – Bancroft was in truth only six years older than baby-faced Hoffman at the time of shooting. The casting proved successful, for the film still garners praise 44 years later and continues to be one of the most-quoted of all time.
Join host Geoff Pevere to discuss The Graduate's adaptation from page to screen. Baked goods are provided free of charge with your admission, as always.
Adaptation
Tuesday, December 13, 6:45 p.m.
- Directed by Spike Jonze
- Starring Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swinton
- 114 mins
- Rated 14A
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman explores the difficult task of adapting a book for film in this comedy-drama, one of 2002’s most innovative films, directed by Spike Jonze. Battling writer’s block Kaufman, a character in the film played by Nicholas Cage, finally creates a dramatic adventure for an orchid thief and the book’s author, Susan Orlean, portrayed by Meryl Streep. Orlean’s 1998 non-fiction book, The Orchid Thief, tells the story of John Laroche, a group of Seminole Indians arrested for poaching rare orchids, and the extremes people go to gratify a passion.
As always, there will be free book giveaways and complimentary snacks after the screening.
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Other Past Book Revue Events:
The Sweet Hereafter
November 22, 2011
The Revue was thrilled to have director Atom Egoyan attend our November Book Revue and discuss The Sweet Hereafter in a candid wide-ranging interview. The 1997 film adapted from the fine Russell Banks novel, published in 1991, examines the fractured lives of residents in a small British Columbia village after a tragic school bus accident. Excellent performances by the cast, including Ian Holm, Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood, create a special film, which won three prizes at Cannes and was nominated for two Oscars. The film can also boast a 100% positive critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Atom Egoyan and Geoff Pevere © Mike Charbonneau
Rosemary's Baby
October 25, 2011
Roman Polanski wrote and directed this intelligent and convincing adaptation of Ira Levin’s best-selling thriller, published the previous year in 1967.
Both book and film tap into the pall settling on America that led LBJ to cancel his re-election bid for the presidency and opened the door to Richard Nixon.
As host Geoff Pevere observes:
“By the time the Polish-born boy-wonder Roman Polanski came to America to make a movie of Ira Levin's best-selling novel Rosemary's Baby in 1968, there was a creeping sense across the country of the horror coming home to roost: assassinations, race riots, atrocities perpetrated by 'our boys' in Vietnam. And no movie captured this with more chilling authority, wit and sheer subversive creepiness than this.”
The story follows Rosemary, a young woman happily married to Guy, a charismatic and ambitious actor. After they move into their dream apartment in Manhattan’s Bramford, a prestige building with a dark past, strange things begin to happen, centred around their elderly neighbours, Minnie and Ramon.
Polanski, writing his first screenplay, was unaware that he could make changes to the source material so the film is unusually faithful to the book. His script was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
The frightening tale of Satanism and vulnerability owes much of its success to the strong performances by Mia Farrow, as the pregnant wife caught up in events beyond her control and John Cassavetes as her husband who will do anything to further his career. Ruth Gordon won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as the eccentric and perhaps evil, Minnie.
The film was widely praised and the American Film Institute ranked it 9th in their 100 Years…100 Thrills list. The critics website, Rotten Tomatoes, gave Rosemary’s Baby a 98% positive rating.
Roger Ebert called it “a brooding, macabre film, filled with a sense of unthinkable danger….Polanski has taken a most difficult situation and made it believable. In this sense he even outdoes Hitchcock.”
About the Author:
Ira Levin, also a playwright, wrote only seven novels over 40 years, but among them were other high-profile film adaptations: The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil.
Here’s how the New York Times described his work in its Nov. 14, 2007 obituary: “Combining elements of several genres — mystery, Gothic horror, science fiction and the techno-thriller — Mr. Levin’s novels conjured up a world full of quietly looming menace, in which anything could happen to anyone at any time. In short, the Ira Levin universe was a great deal like the real one, only more so: more starkly terrifying, more exquisitely mundane.”
Levin was disturbed by the interest in Satanism unleashed by Rosemary’s Baby, according to a comment he made to The Los Angeles Times in 2002: “I feel guilty that Rosemary’s Baby led to The Exorcist, The Omen. A whole generation has been exposed, has more belief in Satan. I don’t believe in Satan. And I feel that the strong fundamentalism we have would not be as strong if there hadn’t been so many of these books.
“Of course,” Mr. Levin added, “I didn’t send back any of the royalty checks.”
Persepolis
September 27, 2011
Persepolis, a French Oscar-nominated animated film, is the coming-of-age story of a bright, outspoken Iranian girl during the Islamic Revolution.
The Book
Created by Marjane Satrapi, this unusual graphic novel is a compelling coming-of-age story, chronicles her childhood and adolescence in Iran and Vienna.
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images Persepolis covers the years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the Islamic Revolution and the devastating effects of the war with Iraq. “Persepolis paints an unforgettable portrait of daily life in Iran, of the bewildering contradictions between home life and public life and the enormous toll repressive regimes exact on the individual spirit.” (Pantheon Graphic Novels website)
Satrapi, intelligent and rebellious, must struggle to find her place in the world, dealing with issues of growing up, freedom and religion. She is surprisingly candid in describing her life and her failings, including a shocking betrayal.
Because of her outspokenness, Satrapi ultimately goes into exile in France, promising her parents that she will never return to Iran.
Persepolis, originally published in two parts, is also available in one volume, The Complete Persepolis.
The Film
Satrapi co-wrote and co-directed the animated French film released in 2007. It closely followed the book, using the same bold style as the graphic novel, creating a universal feel to the story. The film was a great success, winning several awards including the Jury Prize at Cannes and Most Popular Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival, as well as garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.
The critics on the Rotten Tomatoes website gave Persepolis a 97% positive rating, praising the adaptation.
Peter Bradshaw, of the Guardian, wrote: “Here is an adaptation so simple and so frictionless in its transformation of the source material that it’s almost a miracle.”
Persepolis, as both a book and a film, is an original and moving story – wise, funny and heartbreaking.
THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY
Tuesday, August 23 at 6:45 p.m.
Geoff Pevere returns with Patricia Highsmith's novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, brought to the screen in 1999 by director Anthony Mingella. It has a strong cast, including Matt Damon, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Philip Seymour Hoffman, among others.
Highsmith introduces us to the compelling Tom Ripley, her most famous character, in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the first of five Ripley novels. This tale of identity and intrigue, set along the beautiful coast of 1950s Italy, traces Tom’s climb up the social ladder with the help of murder.
Minghella’s adaptation, starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, draws on various cinematic influences, including Hitchcock, to portray Ripley, a sexually ambiguous sociopath, who both desires his conquest, Dickie Greenleaf, and wants to be Dickie. The fascinating results deserve repeated viewings.
The Quiet American, July 26, 2011
This book, by Graham Greene, should have been required reading for any American going into the foreign service or the CIA. If ever anyone could say “I told you so,” it was Greene in his assessment and predictions for American foreign policy in Southeast Asia and just about everywhere else in the world. It’s interesting to look back at the reviews, when the book was first published, and more recently.
Reviews circa 1956:
In 1956, an English professor from Ivy League women’s school Smith College wrote a critical and dismissive review in the New York Times in which he challenged what he saw as a flawed view of the United States. Robert Gorham Davis wrote:
“If much of the description of Indochina at war is written with Greene's great technical skill and imagination, his caricatures of American types are often as crude and trite as those of Jean Paul Sartre.”
The review concludes: “When Graham Greene grants primary justice to the Communist cause in Asia, and finds insupportable its resistance under the leadership of America, he raises inevitably this question: Has he reconciled himself to the thesis that history or God now demands of the church and of Western civilization a more terrible surrender than any required of the tormented characters in his fiction?”
One can’t help but think Joe McCarthy, who fell out of favour in 1954 and died in 1957, was looking over Davis’s shoulder. To read the whole review, click here:
Fast Forward, 2002:
The release of 2002 movie adaptation, directed by Australian Phillip Noyce, was postponed because of the 9/11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City.
Reviewer C.P. Farley on Powells.com acknowledges how right on the mark Greene was in his perspective on America’s role abroad.
“There's little doubt that Greene harbored negative feelings toward America. In a number of his novels, the American characters are naïve, or corrupt, or both. But it's also hard to deny that this subtle, moving depiction of one American innocent causing unwitting harm in Vietnam proved prophetic.”
As the United States teetered on the brink of the Iraq war, this reviewer asks in 2002:
“But it will be even more interesting to see if Greene's uncannily accurate assessment of the American character was limited to a specific time and place. Considering what happened in Vietnam as a result of American good intentions, let's hope so. Given current American posturing on the world stage, I would hate to think that Fowler's assessment of Pyle was still relevant: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
Is there any question as to the answer?
Read the whole review: http://www.powells.com/review/2002_10_26.htm
The Film’s Reception:
It was well reviewed, earning an 87 per cent on the Rotten Tomatoes site. The critics are also full of praise for the book and the sensitivity of the adaptation.
Says Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com “Greene's novel was amazingly prescient about the increasingly aggressive role the United States would take in Vietnam. Noyce's movie, even though it was made with the benefit of hindsight, manages to capture the wonder and awe of Greene's perceptiveness.”
About the adaptation:
“Greene's prose is so distilled that you realize a filmmaker could soak up the better part of 15 minutes dramatizing the emotional resonance Greene packs into just a sentence or two. But Noyce treads softly and cautiously, especially when the temptation to overdramatize is greatest.”
The Remains of the Day
Tuesday, June 21 at 6:45 p.m.
Time for some more British period drama. As Roger Ebert says, "The Remains of the Day is based on the Booker Prize novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, which I would have thought almost unfilmable, until I saw this film.” Starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, it was brought to the screen in 1993 by director James Ivory and producer Ismail Merchant (Room with a View, Howards End).
And for July:
Geoff Pevere is taking a well deserved vacation during July (after 12 Book Revues!), but we are pleased to announce that book and film critic and author Phil Marchand will step in for the month. Phil, like Geoff, lives in the neighbourhood. We are preparing a list of books and films from which you'll be able to pick your July title. Keep checking The Revue's Facebook page (link here) for your chance to vote.
Admission Prices for 2011:
$10 for seniors and members; $12 for non-members. Purchase a pass to 5 Book Revue screening/discussions for only $40 ($8 each). Share your pass among friends.
The Revue continues to offer the perfect forum for film-loving bookworms and book-loving cinephiles: The Book Revue, a monthly program that examines how an author’s printed words are translated by screenwriters and directors into images on a screen.
As always, there will be complimentary baked goods and cookies following the screening, as well as a ticket-stub draw for free books.
Book Revue discussions are intriguing. Says Pevere: “Movies and literature have always performed a complicated and fascinating dance: sometimes in harmony, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes by completely ignoring the other partner. But the process of adaptation remains one of the most illuminating ways to understand both the similarities and the differences between these two storytelling forms. By studying how one becomes the other — or tries to, or fails to, or becomes something else completely — we can only increase the pleasure we take in both."
Gomorrah, Tuesday, May 31, 6:45 p.m. This powerful, sobering 2008 film strips away any romanticism that Hollywood may have bestowed on organized crime and its practitioners. Gomorrah is set in an ugly environment of underground garages and concrete apartment buildings where the foot soldiers of the Neapolitan crime syndicate Camorra live and routinely get shot. It’s based on the best-selling book by Roberto Saviano, who went undercover to get his story about how the Camorra operated.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Tuesday, April 26, at 6:45 p.m. Directed by New York artist Julian Schnabel and based on the true story of Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who was paralyzed by a stroke.
Out Of Sight, Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at 6:45 p.m.
Says Pevere: "For years, there's been something of an Elmore Leonard paradox: How can somebody who writes such effortlessly entertaining, smart and plot-driven crime novels be so difficult to adapt to the screen? What is it about Elmore Leonard's books that somehow defy most attempts to translate the pleasure of the prose to the medium of movies? And why, of them all, did Steven Soderbergh's 1998 adaptation of Out of Sight, seem to get it so right? Because it did: Soderbergh's movie is a joy to watch and a true tribute to the man who wrote the novel. At the next Book Revue, we'll try to find out why. "
Critic Roger Ebert also has praise for the film, saying that it "plays like a string quartet written with words instead of music, performed by sleazeballs instead of musicians."
Apologies to those of you who may have started reading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, but we’ve had to postpone that screening. It will be rescheduled later in the year. Instead, we’ll be reading and watching Out of Sight. The book was published by American crime writer Elmore Leonard in 1995. The 1998 film was directed by Steven Soderbergh and stars George Clooney and Jeniffer Lopez.
Here's what the film critics say:
- “Like Get Shorty, Out of Sight has been adapted with deftness and fidelity by Scott Frank, who knows exactly how to translate Leonard's narrative voice to the screen.” – Janet Maslin, New York Times.
- “As always with the best of Leonard, it's the journey, not the destination, that counts, and director Soderbergh has let it unfold with dry wit and great skill. “ – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
- “Steven Soderbergh’s most ambitious and most accomplished work to date.” – Emanuel Levy, Variety
- "For once in a mainstream production, the narrative machinery works on all cylinders without any wasted motion or fatuous rhetoric. They don't make movies like this anymore, in this overcalculated and overtested era." – Andrew Sarris, New York Observer
About Elmore Leonard:
Born in 1925, Elmore Leonard has published 48 novels, starting in 1953, as well as screenplays and short stories. He began writing in the western genre but is now described as a crime writer. About half of his novels have been adapted to both the large screen and small screens, as has his short stories, including two versions of 3:10 to Yuma. Also well known: Get Shorty,Hombre and Mr. Majestyk.
His page turners have earned critical acclaim and praise from other writers such as Martin Amis, Saul Bellow and Stephen King. “Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy,” Amis reportedly told him.
Leonard has offered his 10 rules for writing. The most important: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
His rules appeared to have worked.